Reduce the size and population of the
state. Ensure that even though the
people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and
also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on
death as no light matter.
Even when they have ships and carts they will
have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have
no occasion to make a show of them.
Bring it about that the people will return to
the use of the knotted rope,
Will find relish in their food
And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode
And happy in the way they live.
Though adjoining states are within sight of one
another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be
heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without
having had any dealings with those of another.
Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing
their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that
these potencies will not harm the people.
The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a
mutual accord.
So, here, we also have forces; instead of
spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons,
power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions. So, here, we have a gap, infinite in
practice, between the capacity of the force and its use. Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but
instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to
humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from
usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and
trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a
redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation
of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death,
and contentment.
How do we reduce the size and population of the
state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs? Or, in other words, how do we bring about
return without catastrophe? Isn’t this
the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?
