Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

240 DEBT
Lti adopted the prince's cause and eventually contrived to make
him King of Qin. He went on to became first minister for the king's
son, Qin Shi Huang, helping him defeat the other Warring States to
became the first Emperor of China. We still have a compendium of
political wisdom that Lti commissioned for the new emperor, which
contains such military advice as the following:
As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks
some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death
instead, they will consider running away the most profitable
thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be the
most profitable thing to do, no blades will cross.
This is the most essential point in military matters.57
In such a world, heroic considerations of honor and glory, vows to
·gods or desire for vengeance, were at best weaknesses to be manipulated.
In the numerous manuals on statecraft produced at the time,
everything was cast as a matter of recognizing interest and advantage,
calculating how to balance that which will profit the ruler against that
which will profit the people, determining when the ruler's interests are
the same as the people's and when they contradict.58 Technical terms
drawn from politics, economics, and military strategy ("return on investment,"
"strategic advantage") blended and overlapped.
The predominant school of political thought under the Warring
States was that of the Legalists, who insisted that in matters of statecraft,
a ruler's interests were the only consideration, even if rulers
would be unwise to admit this. Still, the people could be easily manipulated,
since they had the same motivations: the people's pursuit of
profit, wrote Lord Shang, is utterly predictable, "just like the tendency
of water to flow downhill."59 Shang was harsher than most of his fellow
Legalists in that he believed that widespread prosperity would
ultimately harm the ruler's ability to mobilize his people for war, and
therefore that terror was the most efficient instrument of governance,
but even he insisted that this regime be clothed as a regime of law
and justice.
Wherever the military-coinage-slavery complex began to take hold,
we find political theorists propounding similar ideas. Kautilya was no
different: the title of his book, the Arthasastra, is usually translated as
"manual of statecraft," since it consists of advice to rulers, but its more
literal translation is "the science of material gain. "60 Like the Legalists,
Kautilya emphasized the need to create a pretext that governance was a
matter of morality and justice, but in addressing the rulers themselves,