The chapter takes a single practice and runs it up five levels of social organisation. Cultivate it in the person and the power will be genuine. In the family and the power will be more than enough. In the village and it will last. In the state and it will be abundant. In the world and it will be everywhere.
The list is not a hierarchy of importance and it does not say that the larger units matter more. What it says is that the same operation applies at every scale and that its yield scales with the unit, which quietly denies that private cultivation and public government are different activities.
That is a strong claim and it is the reason this chapter is often set beside the graded sequence of self, family, state and world that Confucian writing of the period also uses. The units are the same, the direction is the same, and the disagreement is about what is being cultivated: there a set of moral relations learned and practised, here something the book calls power and refuses to define as a virtue.
The second half turns the list into a method of observation. Look at a person through the person, a family through the family, a village through the village, a state through the state, the world through the world. Each level is to be assessed by its own kind and not by a standard imported from another, which is a rule against exactly the sort of analogy the chapter has just made.
It closes with a question and an answer that explains nothing. How do I know the world is like this? By this. The same formula appears in chapter twenty-one and chapter fifty-seven.