The chapter closes on a piece of court etiquette and treats it as evidence for a metaphysical claim. The noble takes the humble as its root and the high takes the low as its base, which is why lords and kings call themselves orphaned, widowed and unworthy.
Those three terms were real self-designations used by rulers of the period when speaking of themselves, a formal humility built into the language of address. The chapter does not invent them and does not recommend them. It points at an existing convention and asks what it implies, which is a rare argumentative move in this book and a strong one, because the convention is not in dispute.
The reading offered is that the practice preserves something the practitioners have stopped noticing. If the high genuinely rests on the low, then a ruler who names himself by deficiency is stating the actual structure of his position rather than performing modesty. Chapter forty-two quotes the same three words and draws the companion conclusion, that a thing is sometimes added to by being reduced.
The chapter ends by refusing the obvious inference in a line that is difficult in every recension: the desire is not to be as prized as jade but as common as stone. The point is not that low status is better than high but that the terms are relational, and that a person who wants to be counted among the rare has misunderstood where his standing comes from.
It is the same argument the book makes about rivers being kings of the valleys because they lie below them, transferred from geography to the protocol of a court.