This week I read excerpts from two masters of efficiency: Guan Zhong and Shang Yang. The excerpts talk about the laws of the land and how Shang Yang views the general people and what he believes their purpose is.
I find it interesting how Shang Yang cares so little about people. His only interest is in whether or not the state is strong. The purpose of the people is to keep the state strong and anything not serving that purpose is bad to him. He doesn’t even want the public to learn because to him, a large amount of smart people may end up being more powerful than the government. There’s nobody to notice when the government is doing something bad or immoral, which is a good thing to Shang, but crazy to me.
I also read an excerpt from Han Fei’s writing. The excerpt is about his extreme view of reward and punishment and why the system is necessary.
What stood out to me was the section where Marquis Chao of Han put his crown-keeper to death for putting a coat on him just because it wasn’t his job. It shows just how serious punishments were at the time. The crown-keeper just tried to be nice and was killed for it. Nowadays, people would be rewarded for going above and beyond just the minimum of what they had to do. But in the Warring States period, people had to do only what they had to because of the overwhelming paranoia surrounding the time period. Anyone stepping out of line brought the idea that they would take advantage of any leeway they could get and the ruler wouldn’t have complete control of everyone around him.
I also listened to a podcast about the tomb of the first emperor of Qin, which was found relatively recently in 1974.
It was interesting to learn how elaborate the tomb is. It has multiple rooms with tons of terracotta warriors, real weapons, and tons of other stuff. It’s impressive how something so big was built so long ago, but also sad because it must have killed a lot of people in the process of building it. It’s also funny how the emperor thought he would live forever when his tomb was filled with mercury.
Finally, I read a penal code in Qin law. It went through a list of crimes and punishments for those crimes and then how laborers were treated.
I found the priorities for crimes to be interesting. It’s another example of the amorality of the time as robbery is considered more serious than murdering kids. I guess killing kids doesn’t hurt the government, but stealing does. Some of the situations brought up are also strangely specific which implies that these kinds of things happened enough to need them to be addressed in writing.
Additionally, I looked at the use of music during the Zhou period for my show and tell. It was stressful to get it together and I’m not that proud of it, but I will learn to be better prepared for my next show and tell project. I also want to do something more interesting than just a blog post for my next show and tell.
Next week I will look back at my older blog posts to reflect on my growth.
