On the Path of Confucius

By Kim Dong-ryul · Original publication: May 11, 2020

English translation · Original: https://gujoron.com/xe/notice/1200698

I feel a certain frustration. It is a limit of language, a limit of expression. I believe in God. By God, I do not mean a bearded old man. The word is misleading, but I have found no better expression for the truth in my heart. This is the only way I can put it. I do not know whether it is some particular sensitivity associated with Asperger's. Whenever I reached a dead end or despaired before a wall I could not climb, God showed me a faint path. I have come this far relying on that guidance.

Now, before another wall, I ask again what God intends. What is the next plan? Perhaps I have completed the task assigned to me. Kim Dong-ryul, this is as far as you go. I cannot imagine the next page. I have done what I can. The Republic of Korea has acquitted itself reasonably well, and humanity will somehow keep moving on its own feet. Yet one thing troubles me: the passion for truth. Why does it not spread like a fever? Is truth so trivial to them? Do they regard it like a stone lying in the road? Is there no exhilaration in discovering truth? Do they never taste the pleasure of cutting away what is false?

Cut away Laozi, Zhuangzi, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Democritus, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant; cut them away, one after another. Do you not want the joy of striking the heads off falsehoods? If there is one person who cannot be cut away, it is Confucius. He made no particular pronouncement to cut away. He simply set up a signpost: human beings determine their own destiny.

Consistency creates a person's destiny. Energy creates consistency. Hormones create energy. Encounters determine hormones. Language makes encounters possible. Learning gives us language. The Analects opens with the joy of learning and meeting others. The story begins with an encounter. We can meet only when our languages align. Learning gives us language, and we must learn the language of a particular world to meet the people we need to meet there. An encounter brings joy, and our hormones change. Those hormones push us consistently in one direction, changing our destiny. Ultimately, the answer can be sought in neuroscience. There is right learning, right language, right encounter, right hormones, and right destiny. That destiny determines your life.

Human beings are animals governed by energy. Encounters bring pleasure, joy, and excitement; from these we gain the energy to move together in one direction. A person on a crooked path has not met whom they needed to meet and has never felt the joy of a true encounter. Or they are a psychopath whose hormones do not respond even when they meet someone.

Confucius showed the way. He called it the path of the junzi, the noble person; put simply, it is elitism and intellectualism. Look toward a higher world and hold a greater purpose. There you find the greatest common divisor that allows you to meet, and establish the least common multiple of what each can contribute. That becomes a signpost.

For two people to meet, they must find something in common. That common ground is always found in something larger. Even if we differ in sex, skin color, age, and taste, we share our humanity and the twenty-first century. We can therefore meet. A larger sameness overcomes smaller differences. Confucius's path is that of rationalism, progressivism, humanism, absolutism, and monism. If there is a narrow road and a broad road, choose the broad one. Why? Because it is easier to meet there. We cannot meet in a cramped back room; we can meet in a great public square.

Will you become a master or settle for being a slave? Will you enter the center of the group and become a decision-maker, or be content with a minor role in one corner? Will you open the way and lead, or remain behind with folded arms, sneering, testing, and mocking? Usually the snickering mocker becomes popular. After all, not even one person in ten thousand is the real thing. But the world is an arena of seven billion people. Rise to a slightly higher level, and those one-in-ten-thousand people number seven hundred thousand. In scholarship, sport, or art, they come at you as an army seven hundred thousand strong. The provincial habit of sneering from the sidelines works in backwaters such as Yecheon or Mungyeong.

Confucius said nothing difficult. Two is greater than one. If there is someone you truly need to meet, you are more likely to meet them on a broad road than a narrow one. On the path of the noble person, you are more likely to meet someone who changes your destiny. On the path of the petty person, whoever you meet is more likely to stand in your way. People are precious. Someone worth staking your destiny on is more precious still. You can meet that person on the broad road.

How can you fail to tremble before such a truth? Perhaps some people do. Some hearts have grown cold. Some people have no energy; their hormones do not respond. You cannot play a drum that makes no sound, or draw out a being that does not respond. An encounter becomes impossible. There are many paths of obstruction that prevent us from meeting, and one path that brings us together. Choose that one consistently and, at the summit, you will see the whole picture.

I have no desire to climb higher. I am awkward with people and afraid of meeting them. That makes people all the more essential to me. I wanted only to cast a small spark and see the world catch fire. God gave me a spark, and I wanted to light a lamp. It does not matter if it comes to fruition after my death. I have come this far with confidence in truth.

Become someone with the courage to say that what is wrong is wrong, without worrying about those who would attack your reputation. Once you belong to humanity's higher circle of decision-making, you have no reason to worry about the gaze of people snickering below. Are you students of Gujoron, or passing onlookers? All you can gain here is pride: knowing a little earlier than others a truth that everyone will someday know.

Mathematicians do not compromise. In mathematics there is no middle position, no watering things down. There is one correct answer; everything else is wrong. Cut away the muddleheads, and the one who remains is the person you must meet. Will you walk the path of truth, or become a beggar flattering the crowd?

Your chance of accidentally meeting the real thing in the street is one in ten thousand. Yet in a world of seven billion, there are seven hundred thousand such people. Do you feel no desire to enter that world? Are you not ashamed of being intimidated by Laozi or Zhuangzi and showering them with admiration, being taken in by a fool like Rajneesh and buying a hundred of his books, indulging in nationalist pseudo-history, creation science, or Moon-landing conspiracies? Some people calmly attend church or bow in temples. That will not set your heart on fire. You will not meet.

There is a higher world. Truth is close at hand, and anyone for whom one plus one equals two can visit it. But you must learn to acquire language, acquire language to meet, and meet for the hormones to respond. Without that response, even learning something good brings no joy. Instead, you waste your admiration on shabby cleverness, tricks, shortcuts, practical expedients, and experience. Are you not ashamed to skulk through back alleys instead of taking the path of a person of the world?

There is no meaning in conversing with a flavorless person whose hormones never make them tremble before truth. Tremble, and change your destiny. Then God will show you the way. If you possess a sensitive perception, you will already have found God's signposts.