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.
X. Today: A Pre-Qin Vision That East and West Both Need
10.1 The Reality of Difference in Rank in the Modern Workplace: A Declaration Cannot Help You in the Conference Room
Modern companies often describe themselves as flat, open communities in which everyone can speak, yet their actual operation cannot dispense with clear differences of rank. Someone must approve a budget; someone must be responsible for a project; professional judgment must have a final signature; and in a crisis, someone must be able to make a decision without delay. Even if an office has no ancient robes of office or titles of address, position, authority, pay, and the bearing of risk still sort people into different layers. Declaring "we are all equal" cannot substitute for arranging these facts; if no one in a meeting holds the power to decide, equality only turns into a longer argument.
The problem is that modern organizations often describe difference of rank as a purely functional tool for performance, as though, once the org chart is drawn, the feelings of the people within those relationships no longer matter. When a new employee raises a point in a meeting, a manager can interrupt him publicly, or can press him for his reasoning and write his suggestion into a follow-up task; the very same command can come attached with resources and training, or it can come attached with nothing but the pressure to "find a way to get it done." Even people at the same rank can form a hidden hierarchy through access to information, proximity to decision-makers, or possession of a key skill. What truly determines whether an organization is legitimate is not whether it has hierarchy in name, but how that hierarchy is used.
Promotion is an especially good test of a company's realism. If promotion depends only on closeness to one's supervisor, subordinates will learn to manage impressions rather than improve their ability; if it looks only at short-term numbers, members will sacrifice long-term quality and the trust of colleagues; if a single failure is treated as a permanent stain, no one will dare take on a difficult project. A better system lets people know what opportunities come from bearing what responsibility, allows correctable mistakes during a trial period, and bases its evaluation on observation from multiple sides rather than a single person's likes and dislikes. It gives "you too can rise" a visible path, rather than pushing all the responsibility onto an individual's self-promotion.
If a project manager genuinely wants to develop a team member, it is not enough to write "shows great potential" once at year's end — he must hand over decision-making authority in stages: first responsibility for a controllable task, then leading a round of cross-department collaboration, and finally, in a retrospective, letting the person explain the trade-offs he made. The manager must, at the same time, supply boundaries, feedback, and protection, rather than treating delegation as merely offloading risk. The team member, in turn, must prove himself worthy of greater authority through preparation, documentation, and retrospection. This is precisely the modern translation of "rising together to the ranks of lords": difference of rank still exists, but mobility is brought about through concrete labor and openly earned trust.
What a conference room most needs is often not another slogan about equality pasted on the wall, but a handful of actionable forms of ritual propriety: no one is humiliated for speaking up; dissent receives a response; decisions record who is responsible; credit goes to whoever actually completed the work; and errors are examined for process before character is judged. Such ritual propriety lowers the cost of defensiveness and suspicion; only when subordinates dare report bad news does a leader have the chance to correct course in time. When high and low treat one another properly, hierarchy can serve a shared goal.
10.2 The Contemporary Form of the West: Polarized Rights and Identity Politics
The language of rights that arose in the modern era still holds irreplaceable value today. It protects the individual from arbitrary harm by the state and by organizations, and it lets marginalized groups voice their own experience. The trouble is that the language of rights has been continually subdivided and amplified, until it has cut public life into many mutually competing claims. Every group demands that its own history and feelings receive the highest priority, yet rarely explains who should bear the cost when different demands come into conflict, or how a shared judgment is to be formed. Identity politics can thus turn from a tool for correcting contempt into a new wall that locks people inside identity labels.
On online platforms, freedom of expression is entangled with competition for attention. Everyone has the right to speak, but not everyone commands the same means of being heard; content that stirs the most anger tends to gain the most exposure, while cautious, complex explanations sink instead. People believe they are fighting for an equal voice, yet may in fact be deepening one another's biases, driven by algorithms and emotion. The sentence of rights is not false here — it simply does not tell people how to practice restraint, how to weigh evidence, or how to answer for having spoken wrongly.
Public institutions face similar pressures. In order to correct historical exclusion, an institution may use group proportion as a quick metric; if that metric lacks any accompanying investment in ability-building and work outcomes, it leaves those it means to help under the suspicion of having been "hired only because of their identity," while making other members feel the rules lack transparency. Yet to reject any correction whatsoever is to disguise an old network of privilege as a neutral standard. The genuinely difficult work is to acknowledge, at the same time, that different groups have suffered real injustice, to build open standards of ability and supportive measures, and to give everyone a path to earning trust through learning and contribution.
The polarization of rights also changes the very language people use with one another. A colleague pointing out a problem is easily understood as denying the other person's identity; a person demanding that a duty be fulfilled is easily accused of violating another's freedom. To avoid conflict, an organization may simply stop giving clear feedback at all — with the result that those who lack ability receive no help, and genuine discrimination becomes still harder to identify. The pre-Qin teaching "seeing an unworthy person, turn inward and examine yourself" is not meant to be used to silence the injured, but it does remind us that criticism cannot stop at a moral label — only by grounding a problem in behavior, evidence, and improvement can dignity be protected and ability improved at the same time.
Remaining critical of these phenomena is not the same as mocking the Western ideal of equality. It is precisely because everyone's dignity deserves protection that we need to ask: how can members of a group avoid being locked into a label, how can free expression lead toward a better shared judgment, and how can those who gain an opportunity also gain the training needed to bear responsibility$1 The ideal demands that a person be treated as a subject; the labor of practice demands that this subject gradually become a trustworthy agent. Without the latter, the former easily wears itself out in mutual demand.
10.3 Translating the Pre-Qin Vision into Modern Terms: Bringing to Completion, Self-Advancement, and Honor
Applying the pre-Qin vision today cannot mean copying ancient titles and ranks — it means translating the actions embedded in them into modern institutions. The first step is bringing-to-completion: whoever holds resources must turn opportunity into other people's ability. A company can assign mentors to newcomers, let members take turns leading meetings, meeting clients, and handling budgets, and correct mistakes through retrospection rather than humiliation.
Bringing-to-completion also means letting the worthy build independent credibility of their own. When a superior recommends a subordinate, he should spell out that person's specific contribution clearly, rather than simply saying "this is my person"; when a project is handed off, the new lead should be allowed to face stakeholders directly. If an organization genuinely wants to keep its talent, it must allow that talent, when necessary, to surpass the person who cultivated it and move on to a larger stage.
The second step is self-advancement. An individual should not understand every ascent as a gift owed to him by others. Being willing to take on a difficult task, proactively learning the relevant knowledge, and writing up, after a failure, a retrospective that others can use — these are the contemporary forms of "learning what is below." Self-advancement does not mean endless overtime, nor does it mean accepting unreasonable demands; it requires choosing labor that genuinely grows one's virtue, understanding, and strength, and, when one's boundaries are violated, serving according to the Way and, if necessary, stopping. A person needs both the ambition to rise and the judgment to refuse being worked to exhaustion.
Self-advancement also includes bringing one's peers to completion. Seeing potential in a newcomer, a senior employee can share methods and let the newcomer take on responsibility within a controllable range; seeing a colleague unfairly judged, one can supplement the record with facts; seeing a flaw in a proposal, one can raise it at a fitting occasion. Such mutual help does not weaken competition — it turns competition away from hoarding information and toward improving ability. Being willing to teach others is precisely how one paves the road for the greater affairs one may bear in the future.
The third step is honor. Modern organizations need to decide anew what deserves to be rewarded. Beyond revenue, speed, and ranking, they should also honor those who uphold quality, those who tell the truth in a crisis, those who bring newcomers up to speed, and those who share credit with their peers. Such honor needs a factual basis, an open explanation, and room for later review, so that it does not become a leader's private favor. If the recognition a person receives can clearly point to a behavior others can learn from, that recognition becomes education; if success stories are packaged only as the work of geniuses, recognition will mislead those who come after into thinking no labor is needed.
Honor can also be aimed at the correction of error. If a team discovers a flaw in its process, and a member voluntarily admits that he once overlooked a certain risk and pushes for a fix, this deserves to be recorded; if an organization only punishes those who admit to problems, everyone will choose silence instead. What ritual propriety and posthumous naming offer, as inspiration, is a way of letting public memory preserve not only victories, but also honesty, responsibility, and correction. Preserving what is learned from failure turns a single loss into the next capacity of the community.
Bringing-to-completion, self-advancement, and honor cannot be separated from one another. Bringing-to-completion without demanding self-advancement raises people into dependency; demanding self-advancement without bringing-to-completion disguises structural obstacles as personal laziness; honoring outcomes without honoring process lets people trade opportunism for applause. Only when the three mesh together do they form a ladder from low position to high: someone opens the door, someone walks in to practice, and someone tells those who come after what an honorable path looks like. It does not promise that everyone will reach the same position, but it guarantees that everyone can see what the next step ought to be.
10.4 For the East and for the West: The Lessons Each Still Needs to Make Up
For Eastern societies, the lesson most urgently needed is to make respect and mobility within difference of rank far more explicit. Family, school, and company often have deep networks of personal relationship; such relationships can bring care, but they can also turn into a closed circle that listens only to acquaintances and never to dissent. If a superior, in the name of "I am cultivating you," holds onto opportunity indefinitely, a subordinate will find it hard to build independent credibility. Open standards, an appealable procedure, and traceable records of contribution should be used to keep the demand that "the ruler employ the minister with ritual propriety" from remaining a mere private virtue, turning it instead into a daily institutional practice; at the same time, protection for personal dignity, expression, and the right to withdraw must be preserved, so that loyalty is not mistaken for silence.
Eastern societies also need to understand learning anew. Learning is not merely the qualification for crossing some threshold — it is the ongoing process of continually expanding the scope of what one can bear. A person who already holds a title must still "examine himself daily" (Xunzi, "Exhortation to Learning"); an organization that has already tasted success must still check whether it is excluding newcomers and the less powerful. If only established high positions are worshipped, and no one honors those who cultivate their successors, mobility will grow ever narrower; if every act of criticism is treated as a disruption of harmony, an organization will accumulate risk beneath a surface of quiet.
For Western societies, what needs to be made up is the relational labor that must follow after rights. Equality before the law and individual liberty should continue to be protected, but citizens must also learn to bear dissent, keep their promises, take part in local affairs, and give their time to shared decisions. Identity and experience deserve to be heard, but they cannot replace the testing of fact and ability; institutions must correct historical injustice, yet must not leave any group permanently stranded in the position of being merely protected or merely represented. Only when one can move from recipient of help to contributor, from demanding to be seen to actively seeing others, does equality gain a sustained life of its own.
Both East and West, moreover, need to make up a lesson concerning those in high position: the greater the power, the more it must accept true information, the more it must yield precedence to the worthy, and the more it must let credit and resources flow downward. The West cannot rely only on constitutional text and expect leaders to become virtuous automatically; the East cannot rely only on private ethics and expect organizations to become fair on their own. Both need to turn education, evaluation, recommendation, appeal, and public honor into stable mechanisms. The value of the pre-Qin vision lies not in offering a replica of some ancient institution, but in reminding us that any ideal must pass through human labor, the ritual propriety of relationships, and long-term judgment before it can become a reality fit to be lived in.