Rising Together to the Ranks of Lords: Innate Equality and the Pre-Qin Vision of Self-Cultivation, Compared with Western Freedom and Equality
Starting from a brief episode in the Analects, in which the noble Wenzi of Wei promotes his own household steward, Zhuan, to stand alongside him among the lords, this essay reads that small event against the great declarations of freedom and equality since the Renaissance: the West places its ideal at the starting line, while the pre-Qin thinkers built the ideal into lived reality.
VII. The Predicament of the Declaration (Part One): The "Ought" That Could Not Land
7.1 The Reality on the Day of the Declaration: Slavery, Property-Based Suffrage, and the Colonies
When the Declaration of Independence wrote the words "all men are created equal," North America still held several hundred thousand enslaved Africans. The plantation economies of Virginia, South Carolina, and other regions depended on enslaved labor, and among the signers of the Declaration were plantation owners who themselves held enslaved people. In the political practice of the day, the text's "all men" referred chiefly to a particular portion of white men; women, the enslaved, Indigenous peoples, and propertyless laborers were not equally admitted into the scope of "the people" being represented. Jefferson himself wrote the universal sentence, yet held enslaved people his entire life — a contradiction that cannot be explained away with the single word "hypocrisy." It reveals, instead, an enormous gap between ideal and capacity, interest, and institution.
The states did not, after the Revolution, immediately implement unconditional universal suffrage. In many places, eligibility to vote was tied to land, property, or the payment of taxes, and so political participation concentrated among the propertied. Even as the franchise for white men gradually expanded afterward, slavery and the exclusion of Indigenous peoples persisted for a long time. American constitutionalism did indeed provide a language and procedure for correcting these wrongs, and the movements for abolition, civil rights, and women's suffrage repeatedly invoked the Declaration — but these changes came only through civil war, constitutional amendment, court rulings, and long struggle by civic organizations; they were far from the immediate result of a single sentence written in 1776.
The French case was equally complex. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed equality of rights, yet the constitution of 1791 distinguished "active citizens" from "passive citizens," making property and tax payment conditions of political participation; women were excluded from formal citizenship altogether. Slavery in the French colonies did not vanish automatically because of the Declaration either — the slave trade and plantation interests in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), Martinique, and elsewhere continued to shape decisions made in the mother country. The revolutionary government abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794, only for it to be restored in some regions under Napoleon, and it was not finally abolished until 1848. This tug-of-war between universal principle and colonial interest shows that a declaration cannot, on its own, restrain a nation's appetites.
None of these facts need be used to negate the value of the Declaration. It is precisely because the text left behind the standard of "all men" that later generations were able to turn it against slavery and privilege. The problem is that its drafters wrote the ideal as a shared starting point without preparing, to an equal degree, to bear the sacrifices that ideal demanded: giving up cheap labor, sharing political power, and recognizing the personhood of colonial subjects and women. The ideal was not mistaken — the capacity to bear it was, however, far from sufficient.
7.2 The Falsification of Experience: Endowment, Origin, and Circumstance Were Never Equal to Begin With — "Preserving True Equality, Not Feigned Sameness"
People in reality have never been cast from a single mold. Some have great physical strength, some a quick memory, some the land and connections accumulated by their family, and some are born already facing illness, poverty, or war. Education, language, nutrition, and a sense of security then magnify these initial differences still further. To erase all of these facts is, of course, impossible; but to treat them as an unchangeable fate is equally unjust. What needs to be distinguished here are two separate things: legal dignity and basic rights, which ought to be uniform, and ability, experience, and the responsibilities one can bear, which can never be made uniform. This demand might be called "preserving true equality without feigning sameness" — upholding the equality that ought to hold, without pretending that the facts are already equal.
Modern politics has often swung between two extremes. At one extreme, natural differences are turned into social rank, with claims that the wealthy, the noble, or some particular group is naturally more fit to rule; at the other extreme, out of fear that difference will lead to oppression, there is an attempt to manufacture perfect sameness of outcome by administrative decree. The former fixes origin in place forever; the latter underestimates the time it takes for ability to form. The genuinely difficult work is to acknowledge difference while ensuring it never becomes a permanently sealed door: giving the poor education and health, giving newcomers a trial period and feedback, and giving those who face discrimination a means of appeal and access to public office.
The West's declarations of equality mainly address the layer of "no one may be treated with contempt under the law on account of status"; as for how a person starting from a very low point is to gain actual ability, this has, more often than not, been gradually supplied afterward by schools, unions, welfare systems, and social movements. If equality is understood only as an identical ballot or an identical law, one will fail to see the differing conditions that lie behind differing abilities; if equality is understood as guaranteeing everyone the identical outcome, it will undermine the meaning of effort, responsibility, and the division of expertise. The true difficulty of equality is not putting everyone on the same mark, but making it possible for everyone to change his own mark through learning and the bearing of responsibility.
This is exactly the realism that "rising together to the ranks of lords" displays: Zhuan did not, on account of the dignity of his personhood, leap directly past the labor required of him, nor was he permanently barred on account of his origin as a steward. The change in his rank was mediated by talent and virtue, by testing, and by recommendation. The West's declarations supply a principle against discrimination by origin, yet they still need such a mediating process in order to turn "you have the right to be a subject" into "what you can bear today, and where you may rise to tomorrow."
7.3 The Mutual Exclusion of Liberty and Equality: Two Great Ideals at War with One Another
Liberty and equality are often placed side by side beneath a single banner, yet in concrete policy they actually pull against one another. If everyone is left free to buy, sell, invest, and compete, differences in wealth and influence will inevitably appear; if income, status, and outcome are forcibly leveled, the freedom of choice, property, and organization will be restricted instead. Lockean protection of property rights can prevent a government from confiscating at will, yet it can also let those who already hold assets accumulate advantage all the faster; the Rousseauian general will pursues equality among citizens, yet must face the danger of the will of the majority overriding the freedom of the minority.
The experience of the French Revolution was especially sharp on this point. The revolutionaries needed both to abolish aristocratic privilege and to safeguard property rights; both to let the people participate and to mobilize quickly amid war and famine. The Constitution of 1793 wrote universal male suffrage in radical terms, yet under wartime conditions it was never properly implemented; in order to defend the Republic, the revolutionary government expanded public power, restricted speech, and punished "enemies" through extraordinary tribunals. Liberty was made to wait, while equality was to be achieved through coercion, and the result was that both were eroded by fear and suspicion. The Revolution did not fail because the ideal of equality was too noble — it failed because organization, law, and human self-restraint were not sufficient to uphold two such demanding ideals at once.
Modern society is still working through this same conflict. Platform companies encourage free individual expression, yet may, through the allocation of traffic, produce enormous inequality of attention; markets allow entrepreneurs the freedom to experiment and fail, yet this lets capital and data concentrate in a handful of institutions; and in order to correct such gaps, regulation may in turn compress the space for innovation down to mere compliance. Every choice carries a real cost, and none of them can be replaced by the single slogan of "liberty" or "equality" in place of hard trade-offs.
The pre-Qin view of position offers a different point of entry: rather than pursuing an abstract sameness first, it first asks what obligation each position carries, whether difference corresponds to actual effect, and whether mobility exists between high and low. Liberty is not exemption from responsibility, and equality is not the abolition of differences in ability; liberty can endure only through self-restraint, and equality can be made real only through education, the recommendation of the worthy, and fair judgment. Only once these two great ideals are embedded within concrete relationships can they avoid destroying one another in their mutual conflict.
7.4 The One-Way Direction of Rights Discourse: Everyone Demands Outward, No One Labors Inward
Rights discourse is at its best in specifying "what others may not do to me": the government may not arrest arbitrarily, an employer may not discriminate, a neighbor may not encroach on one's property. It builds a boundary around the weak, and this is of the utmost importance. But once rights become the sole grammar of politics, problems can come to be phrased as a string of outward demands: I must be respected, I must have more resources, I must have unrestrained expression. Everyone searches for the "other" who ought to be held responsible, while rarely asking what he himself ought to bear within the relationship.
In a meeting, everyone may demand an equal turn to speak, yet no one is willing to prepare materials in advance or bear the consequences of a decision; in a company, members all demand to be empowered, yet no one is willing to bear the cost of trial and error when information is incomplete; in a public project, everyone demands a fair share of the benefit, yet no one is willing to maintain the long-term infrastructure. There is nothing wrong with the sentence of rights — what is wrong is treating it as the entirety of what completes a relationship. Without responsibility, skill, and credibility, rights only push shared affairs back into an empty field where no one is accountable.
Within Western thought itself there has always been effort to supplement rights. Kant understood freedom as autonomy — self-legislation according to reason. Tocqueville, observing American democracy, worried that individuals would retreat into private life and hand public affairs over to a centralized government, and so emphasized local self-government and voluntary association. Arendt, in discussing the "public realm," reminds us that rights have real support only within a world where people appear together and recognize one another. These efforts show that the West is not without a discipline of practice — it is only that the language of declaration rings louder, and often obscures the necessity of daily training.
The pre-Qin answer, by contrast, places the labor directly in front of every person: learn, cultivate oneself, and fulfill one's duty within one's own position; recommend and yield precedence to the worthy when one has the capacity to spare; employ others with ritual propriety when in a high position, and serve according to the Way when in a low one. It does not deny the legitimacy of demanding fair treatment from without, but it requires that one first ask "what can I do for our shared affairs." Rights protect a person from being violated; the labor of practice equips a person to live well with others. The two need each other, and lacking either becomes "an answer that is not an answer."