Episode #008 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Try to imagine yourself living in China during the Warring States period. Try to imagine, you’re born into poverty. You have no real family to speak of. I mean, your mom is a teenager. Your dad is 70 years old. And on top of it all, you’re horrendously ugly. As soon as Confucius was able to perceive the world around him, this is the world he found himself in.

Now, just to recap, the Zhou Dynasty was coasting to a stop. War broke out everywhere between regional dictator warlords. It was the Warring States period. Crime skyrocketed, and living your day-to-day life as a citizen must have been extremely scary. Now instead of just being a subject of some distant ruler, now you had to worry about the imminent threat of being caught in the collateral damage of a couple feuding local dictators.

The golden age of Chinese philosophy came during this time. Remember, it was the Hundred Schools of Thought. We talked about it last time. A new class of government officials were trying desperately to find out what went wrong with the Zhou Dynasty and how to fix it. Laozi was one of these officials. Confucius was another. If the Dao is the way of nature, then Confucianism is the way of man. What is the best way for a man to live his life, and what is the best way for a man to govern? This was the essence of Confucianism.

And it really couldn’t have come from a more unlikely source. If you saw Confucius when he was just a child and someone told you he would one day be the wisest man in China and impact the lives of billions of people in the subsequent years, they would probably take your drink out of your hand and pour it in the nearest potted plant and ask you for your keys, because friends don’t let friends drive drunk, people. Remember that. But no one could have seen the massive impact coming, not even Confucius. He actually died a lonely man who felt greatly misunderstood. And most importantly, he had no reason to think, not even the most narrow of inklings, that he had succeeded. He died believing that he was a failure and that his teachings would never go on to affect anyone. But if you look at the sheer numbers, it’s actually quite the contrary. He’s probably the most influential person in the history of the world.

There’s a famous quote by Confucius where he sums up his life. It goes like this, “At 15 I set my heart upon learning; at 30 I had planted my feet firmly upon the ground; at 40 I no longer suffered from complexities; at 50 I knew what were the biddings of heaven; at 60 I heard them with docile ear; at 70 I could follow the dictates of my own heart, for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.” Now, this quote may be a lot of things, but I think most of all it’s the most underwhelming autobiography in the history of the world. So, let me try to tell Confucius’ story a little bit better than he did.

Confucius was born in 551 BC in the northeastern region of China, right in the thick of the dissolution of the feudal society that helped keep things in order in the prior years. His father was a 70-year-old, decorated ex-warrior. There’s a few different names sources use depending on what biography you read. But it’s Chuyong Ho or Shuliang He depending on what source you trust. But the important part is that he spent his entire life just spreading his seed, trying to yield a healthy son, as was common back then. He had several daughters over the years, and the only son he managed to have was severely disabled. He came out handicapped. So, in a panic when his life was coming to an end, desperately wanting a son, he impregnated a 16-year-old girl.

Confucius was the spawn of a 16-year-old girl and a 70-year-old man. And not surprisingly, he didn’t look very cute when he was born. He was misshapen and deformed. I mean, when you have an elderly, overdeveloped body making a baby with a body that isn’t fully developed, you’re not really within ideal baby-making parameters there. They named him Kong Qiu. The Qiu part actually directly translates to the word “mound,” because one of his physical characteristics when he was born was a mound-shaped deformity on his forehead. And apparently his parents thought it would be thoughtful to remind him of that for the rest of his life. Solid parenting, guys.

But yeah, it’s actually an interesting fact. He wasn’t named Confucius at birth. Throughout his life he became known as Kongfuzi and remained known as that until thousands of years later when a Christian missionary decided his name was Confucius. It’s like a Latin variant of that.

But anyway, he never knew his father. His dad died when he was three. And once he was buried, his father’s side of the family saw Confucius and his mom as just his dad’s dirty little secret. Maybe they didn’t even believe them at all. But regardless, his family rejected both of them. So, from a very young age, Confucius had to help his mom make ends meet. Some biographies talk about him sweeping floors around something that we in modern times would probably know as, like, the city center or the marketplace. Some biographies talk about him just doing odd jobs for other people, trying to work and earn a living at the time. But the most important part of this is that he had a first-person experience when it came to living the life of the average citizen in early China—a perspective that most government officials at the time would have never been privy to.

The rest of the kids that grew up around Confucius didn’t like him that much. He reportedly didn’t have many friends, and a lot of it was due to the fact he was ugly from all of his birth defects. So, rejection was something he experienced on a very regular basis. But Confucius was given a gift that all the other kids could only dream of having. It’s a gift that still is infinitely valuable today and one that most people don’t even see as a gift. It was the gift of a genuine interest in learning.

From a very early age, perhaps finding something to fill the time he would have usually spent playing with other kids if he was a more typical kid, he began studying history. Now, this is the first sentence on that makeshift autobiography that we talked about at the beginning: “At 15 I set my heart on learning.” And if you had to sum up the early years of Confucius’ life, you would say that he studied history and constantly tried to improve himself.

See, he was a huge advocate of education. He lived in a country that had a class system where some people are seen as worse than others. But he thought the more you educate people, the more these classes begin to fade until they’re virtually indistinguishable. This was an unbelievably progressive idea at the time and the complete polar opposite of someone like Laozi.

Later in life, one of his disciples would ask him about learning, and he said this. “Study as if you have not reached your goal, as if you were afraid of losing what you have.” I mean, try to imagine the sense of urgency you’d feel about studying on a particular topic if you were told that sometime in the very near future some weird Rumpelstiltskin-looking guy was going to come and take all of your books and you’d never have access to anything ever again. You’d be pretty amped up about getting in there and learning about something.

So, Confucius is studying hard. He’s learning all about history. And then, all of a sudden, his mom dies. Which, I mean, if you remember, she was 16 when she had him. It was actually a really early death, incredibly tragic, and it made Confucius incredibly sad. It no doubt was a time of extreme personal growth for him, but things weren’t all bad for Confucius. He lived in a sector of China known as Lu. And one of the warlords that controlled and ruled over Lu saw Confucius. He saw great potential in him and gave him a job overseeing granaries.

Now, at first glance to modern eyes, this may seem like a terrible job. Like, oh yeah, Confucius, you’re going to oversee this grain going into that wheelbarrow over there, and you’re going to oversee the wheelbarrow going into that ditch over there. You know, it’s like being the dishwashing manager at Taco Bell. But back in China during Confucius’ life, grain was used as money. He was in charge of one of the most important functions the warlord had. And for all intents and purposes, he could have just settled down right here. He could have just called it a life. I mean, think about it from his perspective. Just with the job of overseeing the granary, he had already transcended any realistic expectation he could have had for himself with his particular birth and social standing.

But it just wasn’t enough for Confucius. He saw China collapsing all around him. I mean, he was working for a warlord after all, not the emperor. He saw all kinds of suffering in the people he used to work around. He wanted to find a way of governing that would save China. So, he started doubling down on his studying of history. He went through every library in his town of Qufu and looked to the past to try to find things that worked well and try to find out where things went wrong along the way. All the death and volatility in the Warring States period must have made anything that came before it seem like absolute paradise. It’s no wonder he turned to a conservative approach like Laozi, looking to the past for answers.

Now, as we’ll expand on later, he had an obsession with traditions and rituals and was ultra-conservative. And for this reason, in my twisted brain when I think of Confucius, if I try to remember him, I think of him as an OCD Rush Limbaugh, because he’s all into the rituals and he’s super conservative. A lot of people may not get anything from these bizarre ways of categorizing things like I do. But if they help at least a few people recall the information later, my embarrassment was well worth it to me.

So, this quest for answers by Confucius really is the beginning of Confucianism. He started formulating all of his thoughts. He didn’t have any interest in metaphysics or anything abstract, for that matter. Leave that to the Greeks to agonize over with no possibility of ever knowing the truth. He was much more interested in practical matters, things that were useful on his quest to save China. And because of this, his philosophy is split into two distinct categories that actually have a lot of similarities: Li and Jen; Li being his theories on the proper decorum required to govern a populous, although it’s sometimes used referred to specific political rituals; and Jen being his theories on the proper way to govern yourself, or humaneness.

His ideas seemed novel at the time, but he actually pulled everything from the history books he was reading, things that had worked well in the past. The way he saw it, he wasn’t innovative at all. He was just reminding people of what already worked. I mean, he says in the Analects, “I transmit but do not innovate.” In this weird way, Confucianism can be thought of as an embodiment of successful Chinese culture, which may explain why it was so successful.

Now, another factor that obviously contributed to its success was the fact that it wasn’t written as philosophy is typically written. He didn’t have detailed arguments or treatises. He spoke in a very cryptic style, kind of like Nostradamus or the Bible. He said things in an ambiguous way that allowed a lot of room for interpretation. Now, as far as the longevity and success of a philosophy is concerned, this is a huge strength. I mean, how can anyone completely dismantle your arguments if they’re so slippery? It’s very hard for someone to completely disagree with you because they don’t know exactly what it is you’re trying to say.

Regardless, there’s a lot of wisdom in the words of Confucius. And he truly had a gift for saying things that referenced specific elements of human nature that still exist to this day. He’s one of the most quoted people ever. And it would be impossible for me to cover all the little sayings his disciples wrote down that can apply to a modern context. But personally, to me, it’s incredible that I can apply some words a guy said two millennia ago to my life today in Seattle, Washington, in 2013. So, I’m just going to go over a few of these sayings and try to give an example of how we can think about them in modern times to tie it together.

So, here we go. Here’s one. “If I’m walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.” I mean, this one is really easy for modern people to relate to. It kind of echoes the old saying, “Wise men learn from the mistakes of others; fools learn only from their own.”

So many people in today’s world, and obviously not anyone listening to this podcast, walk around as victims of circumstance. They just go through their life waiting for adversity, dealing with it, gleaning a little bit of life experience from the whole ordeal, and then moving on to the next one. At the end of 80 years, they’ve probably accumulated a bit of wisdom but not nearly as much as they could have if they used that lovely little prefrontal cortex we were given by Richard Dawkins when he made humans on the seventh day. Confucius seems to be railing against the “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there” mentality of today’s world.

Here's another saying by Confucius: “The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.” This one sounds an awful lot like Aristotle’s idea of, “We are what we repeatedly do,” like we talked about a few episodes ago. We are creatures of habit. It’s surprisingly easy to slowly succumb to madness if you walk around poised to be offended by things or poised to be negative. The filter that we see the world through creates our reality, and especially in modern times when the process of evolution has become a personal choice; and you have so many options, you can comfortably wrap yourself in a little cocoon of people that never disagree with you. Confucius is saying that if you remain positive and try to find the silver lining in things, the happier you will be, and the better off everyone else will be.

Here's another famous quote. “It is easy to hate, and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.” In today’s world of instant gratification and seemingly overnight success for doing absolutely nothing, this quote is particularly apt. This has to be a situation people find themselves in all the time.

You want to be great at something. Let’s say it’s basketball. You practice hard for a while. And then you play a game of HORSE against Barack Obama, and he just mops the floor with you. You get discouraged. Look, if being LeBron James was easy, you wouldn’t be impressed when you saw him walking down the street. It would just be normal. Confucius seems to be reinforcing this. If something is worth having, it’s worth working for. And would you really appreciate it much if it wasn’t?

Alright, let’s do one more. The last one is one I’m pretty sure everyone has heard before in some form or another. “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.” So, it’s basically the golden rule. The one obvious difference is, it’s not, “Do not unto others as you would like done unto yourself,” so why did Confucius word it this way? Well, if you think about it, it’s actually a better rule.

You might be trying to quit smoking. And you might really like it if a guy dresses up in a dinosaur outfit, follows you around, and beats you with a stick every time you think about having a cigarette. But that doesn’t mean you should go around doing that to other people who are smoking just to follow the golden rule to a T. I’m sure you guys can think of tons of examples of weird things some people want that would be wrong to impose upon other people. So, the do-unto-others rule is solid, but Confucius’ take is a little bit better.

Like I said, there are tons of these sayings we can apply to our modern lives. Once Confucius started really ironing out his views, he started collecting followers. Just like in modern times, those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Yeah, you guys have heard that before. Confucius knew that sometimes things are out of your control. He had to accept the fact that he may never get the opportunity to rule in any real sense and put his ideas into practice. So, by gathering followers, he was kind of hedging his bets. I mean, maybe even if he himself couldn’t be a ruler, one of his followers would take political office and be able to carry out his ideas by proxy.

So, he would hold these really conversational, informal, small classes with these followers, usually just sitting in a circle somewhere. And he would try to mold them into the best government officials possible. Now, it’s important to note another glaring progressive element to a highly conservative man—his complete disregard for the class of an individual when deciding whether to accept them as a follower. It seems logical to try to train people who were from noble families because they were the most likely to go on to serve in government. But he didn’t care what class you came from. If you were willing to work hard and learn and reflect on your own actions to try to become the best person you can be, he would gladly teach you. It actually ended up that most of his students were from the lower classes.

The whole goal of these classes was to earn the title of junzi. Although, anyone could earn this title in their personal life too, which we’re going to talk about later. But junzi was the carrot tied to the stick that Confucius waved out in front of them to keep them going, kind of like a black belt in martial arts. Junzi translates to a couple different things. Some say it means “gentleman,” like ladies and gentlemen, but the one that best exhibits its meaning is “superior man.”

So, what did it mean to become a superior man? The main underlying point behind all of his views on government, and probably the most noteworthy, is his idea that first and foremost, if you were a government official and you were going to try to successfully lead a population and increase prosperity, the most important thing is that you lead by example. See, Confucius thought that if rulers were ethical, naturally the populous would follow suit.

There’s a common story where one of his disciples asked him about what the best way to govern people is. And he said, “Encourage the people to work hard by setting an example yourself.” Then the disciple obviously thought there was more to it than this and immediately followed up and said, “Okay, what else should I do?” And Confucius responded, “Do not allow your efforts to slacken.” Basically, keep doing what I just said. I mean, if you simplify it, Confucius taught morality. He was trying to cultivate great leaders. He thought if you wanted to lead others well, you first have to learn to lead yourself well.

He puts it really well here talking about the importance of integrity in a ruler. “If a ruler himself is upright, all will go well even though he does not give orders. But if he himself is not upright, even though he gives orders, they will not be obeyed.” This really points out the synergy between his ostensibly different views about being the best individual you can be and being the best political official you can be. Confucius thought it’s impossible to effectively rule over a population if you yourself are not practicing both Li and Jen. And just real quick, I’ve heard Jen also pronounced Ren, so I’m sorry if I’m butchering that at all.

You can easily see several crossovers between them. For example, the life of self-reflection and virtue and constantly improving yourself on a personal level—that actually translates really well into a pragmatic political theory. Confucius talked about the difference in outcome between controlling people by rules and laws and controlling people by leading by example. “Guide the common people by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in accordance with the rights, restrain them with ritual, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Here he’s saying that people will live up to the moral standards of their leader if he walks the walk himself. Confucius thinks this would be much more effective because it not only keeps control and order of the common people, but it makes it so that the government is essentially unnecessary because, in his example, people aren’t living a virtuous life because they’re scared of retribution by a powerful dictator. They’re doing it for selfish reasons that happen to align with the wants of the state.

I mean, this is actually a pretty brilliant concept that had never been explored before. It actually reminds me a lot of a brilliant quote by Socrates about morality. In fact, we talked in previous episodes about the glaring similarities between the East and West. Confucius, in so many ways, resembles Socrates. He was notoriously non-religious. He believed that humans had an inherent obligation to live a moral life. There’s several examples of quotes where he says Socrates-esque things like, “How can you understand death when you don’t even understand life?” and “How can you govern an entire population when you can’t even govern yourself?”

This quote that it reminds me of, it’s a slight alteration of the original quote, but someone asked Socrates the equivalent of the modern-day question, “How can you be moral without a belief in God?” And Socrates asks—and I’m paraphrasing here, so give me a break—he says something like, well, does God determine what is moral or immoral? Like, could God make killing babies a moral act, or are there just behaviors that are moral behaviors that God chooses to endorse? Because if that’s true, morality is exterior to a God and, therefore, a God is not necessary to be a moral person. Whereas, if God determines what is moral, then you’re really just a slave to a doctrine. I mean, if the only reason you aren’t killing someone is because you’re afraid of fire and brimstone or retribution by some powerful God, are you really a good person?

This is incredibly similar to what Confucius is talking about, except replace God with an oppressive government. Instill in the people a sense of shame for acting immorally, and you turn virtuous behavior into a self-serving venture, not just something they’re doing because they’re scared of the punishment that they get if they don’t.

As brilliant as this idea may be, during the Warring States period this seemed like a completely ridiculous idea. During a time of a king ruling with an iron fist, suggesting that masses of people can be controlled by simply setting a good example of virtuous behavior and declaring a status quo of virtue, it was completely unheard of at the time. And it seemed crazy. Not to mention, it was completely foreign to the warlords in charge at the time. I mean, try to think about it from their perspective. You’re a warlord that controls a certain segment of China. You got that segment because of your military strength, nothing else. These men sought prestige or honor or riches or massive harems of women.

In short, it was all about them. I mean, they didn’t have some distant vision of how the population could function well together and be happy if they just used their own psychology against them. They honestly didn’t care. The population to them were essentially drones. The population were just subjects they controlled that they syphoned resources out of to live a more lavish lifestyle—you know, amass more riches, wage more wars, gain more prestige. So, in other words, they saw governing people as a way to make themselves stronger, not a way to make society stronger or the most people happy, which is how Confucius was thinking about things.

Now, as I said before, these rulers were doomed from the start in Confucius’ eyes. They didn’t possess Jen or Ren. Let’s talk about what Jen is. It’s typically broken down into six different qualities that are all interwoven and affect each other. And if you manage to put these six things together, then you possess Jen. These six are respectfulness, tolerance, trustworthiness, quick-witted diligence, and generosity. Confucius talks a great deal about how all six of these directly affect each other and, by doing one correctly, it makes doing the other ones a lot easier.

A common example is, if you are respectful, you will not be treated with insolence and, therefore, it will be much easier for you to be tolerant, etc. Personally, I just think of it as a Rubik’s Cube—six sides, six attributes, and as you solve one side it makes the other sides easier to achieve. But there was a common detraction from this idea because everyone’s definitions of these words differ a little bit and, in some circumstances, the qualities themselves seem to contradict each other.

Confucius responded to this by accepting that there may be a variance in how virtuous individuals act, but the most important part was being the best person you can be. The thing he was trying to avoid with the idea of Jen is just being content with doing nothing, being satisfied with not constantly trying to improve yourself. And it makes sense and all comes together when you realize that his idea of Li and Jen is all based on the way he thinks about the purpose of human life. Let’s talk about that for a little bit.

Confucius was most likely an atheist. I mean, he never gives any definitive statement saying that he believes in a God or gods. He talks about the will of heaven, but it probably refers to something completely different. But if you think about a belief in God or a belief in a particular religion and the purposes those two things serve, on a society-wide level, religion is a genius anthropological construct designed for social control. It works really, really well. But on the other hand, there’s no question it serves as a great personal motivator for some people. I mean, it gives them something greater than themselves to attach their actions to and work on behalf of. And that can be extremely empowering, even if it is based on magical thinking or something that isn’t entirely substantive.

And religion isn’t the only one of these that we have. People work hard and accomplish things on behalf of a lot of other things too, right? Like nationalism, for example. I’m doing this for Mother Russia. I’m doing this for ‘Merica. What I’m saying is, it’s very common for people, even if they’re atheists, to find some transcendent cause that’s much greater in significance than a single person that they work on behalf of. And for Confucius it was the moral purpose of humanity. He believed humans have a duty to become better human beings. He thought that was the only meaningful way to live life. And there are no rewards or punishments associated with it. Morality was to be pursued strictly for its own sake.

See, before Confucius, China was ruled by a ruling class of people that had a self-imposed Mandate of Heaven. Moral authority was something that heaven or the gods gave to a select few men. They determined what was good or bad. They determined what was ethical. Confucius kind of agreed with them. He did think heaven, or whatever force assigned humans to have a moral destiny, chose humans to embody its will and spread the moral order. He just thought that it wasn’t in a select few ruling elites that heaven had chosen. It was everyone.

Morality could be learned, developed, strengthened and cultivated no matter who you were. He thought that when society as a whole acted virtuously, it would lead to a just and stable society, which is the end game of any true government. No matter what class you were a part of, it was your duty to live by four principles: loyalty, filial piety, ritual propriety, and reciprocity. If you could master all these things, you are junzi, which we talked about earlier.

The way Confucius saw it, we all have a place in society. He championed the idea of knowing one’s station. It’s a very important phrase in Confucianism. Now, from here, he claims there are five constant relationships that someone might find themselves in in the context of any relationship and that, to know how to act virtuously and become a superior man, the first step was realizing which one of these five relationships you were in.

Now, let me talk about each one of them, and you try to think of a relationship in your life, and see if you’re acting accordingly in the eyes of Confucius. The first one of these five is ruler versus subject; this could also be boss versus employee. The ruler should be benevolent and lead by example, and the subjects should be loyal and serve the ruler. Okay. That goes pretty well in coalition with his views on government that we’ve already talked about. So, moving on.

The next of the five constant relationships that you might find yourself in is father versus son. Now, in this case, the parent is obligated to be loving to the child, and the child is obligated to be obedient to the parent. Again, not much of a shocker. But it definitely lays out a common type of relationship.

The next one is husband versus wife. Now, this one is just crazy. I’d just like to know—the last thing I need is brownie points from all the girls listening to this podcast, but it’s just—it’s really sad to see how much women were subjugated throughout history. And I feel like every now and then you run across something that really encapsulates it. Just listen to the proper ways to fulfill these roles. Husbands are to be good and fair, and wives are to be understanding.

I mean, it’s just hilarious to me. Good and fair are completely subjective terms. Good and fair for one person could be feeding your wife and kids Top Ramen and only beating them once a week. And the wives are just supposed to be understanding of whatever the guy’s interpretation of good and fair is? It’s just so ridiculous. But it’s still one of the five constant relationships.

The fourth of the five is elder brother versus younger brother. And in this one the elder brother is supposed to be gentle, and the younger brother is supposed to be respectful. And the last one is friend versus friend where it’s a relationship of equality. But the older of the two friends is supposed to be considerate of the other person, and the younger one is supposed to have reverence for the older one.

Now, those five relationships and all the different ways that you need to act in each one of them can get pretty hard to remember. But the main point of all of this was to make sense of the ambiguity of individual morality—a subject that was completely foreign to people of his time period. See, he didn’t live in an egalitarian society. He lived in a class system. So, he saw the world in terms of a hierarchy. Some people just had dominion over others, not just government officials over citizens, but like we talked about—father and son, husband and wife, etc. By distilling individual moral decisions down into a situational, hierarchical structure, it was much easier for the individual to understand at the time, or so he hoped.

But even if you memorized all five of his constant relationships and how to act within each one of them, following all this only made you loyal. And remember, loyalty was only number one of the four things you need to be a superior man. So, it’s obviously a tall order. You still needed number two, filial piety, which was respecting your elders, ancestor worship, and basically understanding your role as a subject in all the various relationships you might find yourself in where you’re viewed as an inferior.

You needed ritual propriety, which was one of the most important of the four. It didn’t just concern religious rituals but rituals in every context—societal rituals like marriage or giving gifts to people or being polite to others, bowing to them. But to Confucius, these rituals even were important down to the micro-level too. Your mat had to be turned in a specific direction before you sit on it. And then once your mat is actually facing Mecca, you have to sit down in a particular way. There are all sorts of these rituals Confucius lays out about virtually everything. He even has some about fashion sense and things that you should wear.

It's not unrealistic to say that he went a little overboard with this idea. And I guess it’s important to understand where he’s coming from. He was so conservative and so dedicated to the cause of helping China, he wanted people to perfectly emulate the successful periods in China’s history down to even the most basic of rituals. He thought even if one small detail was different, it may lead to the decay of society. But to Confucius, the most important thing is that you do these rituals with sincerity or authenticity. He really loves the term “sincerity,” and you see it a lot in the Analects.

Just as it was the role of a ruler to lead by example and to live a virtuous, productive life that, in turn, would lead to virtuous, productive citizens, it was the role of anyone in any relationship to practice sincerity and live virtuously by example to his other humans. Here’s how Confucius thought of it. “Sincerity becomes apparent. From being apparent, it becomes manifest. From being manifest, it becomes brilliant. Brilliant, it affects others. Affecting others, they are changed by it. Changed by it, they are transformed. It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can transform.”

Confucius’ sincerity is thought of as faithfulness sometimes or just a general regard for others. He thought if you can’t lead by example, you should look at others who appear to be more virtuous or successful than you are and try to improve yourself to become as good as them. And on that same note, if there’s someone who’s morally worse off than you, then you should try to lead them by example or teach them. The last of the four, reciprocity, can be best described just by Confucius’ golden rule that we already talked about: What you do not desire for yourself, don’t do to others.

Let’s talk about the rest of Confucius’ life. We left off when he started to gather followers and strengthen his views. So, basically, years passed; Confucius got more and more famous. People flocked to learn from him. But in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter how many people will sit in a circle with you and talk about how to become a better person. If Confucius was really going to have an impact on the future of China, he needed to get the attention of the people ruling China and find a way to get them to use their influence to enact his ideas. And for a long, long time, no one wanted to give him a chance. But he persevered.

In 501 BC, something happened. Not much is known for certain about Confucius’ life, and this period is especially difficult for me to make an executive decision on what is the proper information. Some sources say Yang Hao appointed him to be the Minister of Crime. Some say Duke Ding, the ruler of Lu at the time, asked him to be the governor of Lu. But regardless of who it was, Confucius had to be, I mean, jumping around, clapping, giggling like a schoolgirl, because now he had his chance. He had his chance to change China.

Confucius apparently was a huge success at whatever position he had. But it’s clear that he went a little overboard. And it really makes sense. He finally had all this power he’d been craving. He wasn’t just going to go into political office, toe the party line, and be content with business as usual. He was a maverick, you know, like John McCain.

He definitely shook things up—lots of changes to laws. But most notably he was extremely strict, like beyond-any-modern-comparison strict. He established the death penalty for inventing unusual clothing, and he forced men to walk on one side of the road and women on the other, as was the custom at the time. Well, his really strict rules and staunch adherence to tradition actually worked really well. You can read the testimony of people living at the time that said that crime virtually disappeared and that people were really safe at the time when Confucius was in charge.

But unfortunately, even back then, when you get someone that’s highly successful in political office and highly popular among the people he’s governing and he also has this inconvenient attitude of government being something that needs to actually help the people it’s governing, you’re seen kind of as a problem for the ruling elite. The three warlord families realize that he was a dangerous reformer and that their days were numbered.

The narrative goes that the warlords got together and conspired, and they got together twenty-something beautiful girls and made an offer to his boss that if he fired Confucius, he could have all these girls. And the guy accepted. So, Confucius was fired and crestfallen. He didn’t really have much going on. So he decided to go on a nation-wide tour, just traveling from place to place, teaching his beliefs, picking up new disciples along the way, just trying to get the word out. This guy was going door to door like Mormons. He was on a pilgrimage.

But most of all, if he couldn’t hold political office and make change, he still really wanted to find a young person who could be mini-Confucius—much like Alexander the Great learning from Aristotle, much like the vision Plato had in the Republic. Confucius was 54 years old at the time. And time was running out for him. It was during this pilgrimage, this nationwide tour, that he met Laozi. And we talked about that meeting last time.

But he really didn’t have much luck. After 13 years of being a drifter, Confucius was now 67 years old and had managed only to make more enemies. At this point, he saw death on the horizon. An old friend from Lu asks him to come home. So he went back to his home town. And you’d think that things were going to turn up from here, but actually they only go persistently downhill. During this time, all around him the wars just expanded and grew. China fell further and further into disarray. And he was rejected, never offered a position in government.

Over his years of preaching, he accumulated a lot of disciples, some records say as many as 3,000 disciples. But it’s generally understood that only 72 of them were devoted to the cause fully. That’s not that many. And his star pupil and favorite disciple was named Yan Hui. I mean, Yan Hui was his salvation. He was the only hope for Confucianism to live on as far as Confucius saw it. But then Yan Hui just suddenly died at the age of 41.

It was then that Confucius sank into a deep depression. He spent the rest of his days just reading and writing commentary on the old Chinese classics he read when he was 15 and hungry for knowledge. Confucius died at 73 believing that he had failed. His last notable words are reported to be, “The great mountain must crumble. The strong beam must break. The wise man must wither away like a plant.”

Just two centuries after his death, the Han dynasty established the first great period of Chinese culture post-Confucius. And it was orchestrated and nurtured by Confucian thought and principles. They worked so well, the Han flourished for more than 400 years. Subsequent dynasties lived in envy of the Han and strove to emulate their success. And until the communist revolution of 1949, Confucianism remained the dominant philosophy of China and the surrounding area.

So, now it’s time for this week’s question. It’s kind of related to the episode, but mostly I’m just interested to hear your answers. I feel like everyone has one of these. Mine is tribalism. It seems branded into our DNA. For 100,000 years if an outsider showed up to your tribe of hunter-gatherers, you needed to treat him as an enemy. Because if you didn’t, he could be taking an inventory of all your supplies and come back with 100 guys with spears the next day. And that wouldn’t be very good. It exists everywhere in the modern world: country versus country, religion versus religion, political ideology versus political ideology, even down to Red Sox versus Yankees. People attach themselves to a tribe and see other tribes as the enemy, greatly oversimplifying the world and creating hostility in people that are actually very similar to them.

If all forms of tribalism cease to exist, I think the world would be a much better place. Call it impossible. It just may be. But we don’t work for Congress, so we have the benefit of dealing in abstractions. Oh, wait. Philosophize this: If you could eliminate or create one thing in the world that would leave it a borderline utopia, what would it be?

Thank you for listening, and you’ll hear my voice soon.