Chapter 72

The chapter opens with a warning to a government about the limits of intimidation. When the people do not fear what is worth fearing, then the great thing to be feared arrives.

The sentence turns on the same word used twice, and its force is that a population which has stopped being afraid of the ordinary penalties has not become docile; it has become the emergency. What a state has to fear is precisely the exhaustion of its own capacity to frighten.

The chapter then names the two causes, and both are material rather than moral. Do not narrow the places where they live. Do not press down on the way they make their living. Housing and livelihood, in that order, and the verb in each is one of constriction.

The reasoning that follows is worth stating carefully: it is only because they are not pressed down on that they do not tire of it. Not that they are grateful, and not that they consent. What is being described is the absence of the condition that makes a population stop caring what happens to it, which is the same threshold chapter seventy-four reaches when it asks how you can frighten with death people who are not afraid of death.

The chapter closes on the ruler rather than the ruled. The sage knows himself but does not display himself, cares for himself but does not exalt himself, and lets the one go in favour of the other. Self-knowledge and self-care are permitted; their public performance is what is set aside, which is chapter twenty-four applied to an office.

Chapters seventy-two to seventy-five form the most concentrated stretch of political material in the book, and they are unusual in it because the subject is not the ruler's character but the condition of the people.

Seventy-two concerns housing and livelihood, and the point at which a population stops being deterred. Seventy-three concerns the pattern of heaven and the futility of daring. Seventy-four concerns capital punishment and who is entitled to carry it out. Seventy-five states plainly that the people are hungry because those above eat too much in taxes, that they are hard to govern because those above act, and that they hold their lives cheap because those above pursue life too thickly.

The structure of that last chapter is repeated three times with the same shape: a complaint commonly made about the population, followed by an attribution of it to the government, followed by the conclusion restated. Every disorder is treated as the ruler's own product.

That is a stronger position than the rest of the book takes. Elsewhere the argument is that a government which acts less gets better results, which leaves the people as material. Here the people are given no faults of their own at all, and the chapters read as an indictment.

They also sit oddly beside chapter sixty-five, which treats an over-knowledgeable population as a governing problem. Both stances are in the book, they are seven chapters apart, and no attempt is made to reconcile them. That is one of the clearest signs that these eighty-one chapters gather more than one voice.