Mencius
The people come first
Where the ground under power actually is
Mencius, Jin Xin II and Li Lou I
Read for two thousand years as ancient humanism. It reads better as a technical claim about where a government's power comes from.
What actually happened?
The people are the most important; the altars of grain and land come next; the ruler counts least. He ranked all three, and put the ruler at the bottom. This is not a plea for kindness, it is his judgement about what keeps a regime standing. Elsewhere he is blunter. There is a way to gain the empire: gain the people. There is a way to gain the people: gain their hearts. So benevolent government, in Mencius, is not the ruler's private virtue. It is the condition of his continuing to be the ruler.
Consent is a thing that gets withdrawn
The heart of the people is not affection, it is consent. People rarely revolt at the moment they turn; they stop cooperating first. The tax gets harder to collect, the levy comes up short, the order goes down and nobody carries it out with care. The power is already hollow while the name is intact.
Nobody objects in the meeting, nothing moves afterwards, the reports start being padded, and the people leaving give a reason that is not the reason.
The order cannot be inverted
Put the institution, or the man at the top, in front of the people who carry the cost, and you get one specific family of bad decisions: the ones that protect a reputation or an earlier judgement by charging somebody else for it. Authority holds. The ground under it goes.
Rather than admit the last decision was wrong, the team spends another month filling the hole. The authority survives; half the people worth keeping do not.
Tax, service and punishment are three measurable lines
He never leaves benevolence at the level of a concept. The items are specific: do not take men away in the farming season, keep the taxes light, keep the punishments few. All three are countable, and all three are set by the person in charge, alone.
Judge any new policy with two questions. What did it give the people doing the work, and what did it take? Run the ratio over a year, not a week.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a decision that is easy to justify upwards and hard on the people who have to carry it.
Ask first: will the side paying for this still cooperate with the next thing you ask? That, not the objection, is the reading you want.
Where it goes wrong: reading silence as agreement; or defending a judgement you have already made by having other people keep paying for it.
Lines to keep
The people come first, the altars of the state next, the ruler last.
Gather for them what they want; do not impose what they hate.
Treat them as your hands and feet and they treat you as their heart.
Same situation, other people are asking
I've tried rewards and I've tried consequences. Neither moved anything.How do I push them without breaking them?I keep restating the standard and nothing changes.Nobody argues with me any more and nothing gets done.The team has gone flat · all 10 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.