Vol. 11: See Who Has the Upper Hand: Which Side Decides the Nature of a Thing, from "On Contradiction"

At the end of the last post, I left a question: of the two opposing sides inside a contradiction, which one decides what the thing looks like right now?

That sounds a bit convoluted, so I won't answer it yet. First, a small story from when I was training chest. Longtime readers may remember it.

Back then, when I benched, all I could think about was getting the weight up. Set after set I pushed. The weight went up, I did the movement, it looked like I was doing everything right. But afterward I often couldn't say what I'd actually trained. Sometimes my shoulders were more tired, sometimes my arms were more sore, sometimes the weight went up but I felt nothing much in my chest. Same bench press, and I was working hard at it, but whether it counted as "training chest," I honestly didn't know.

Only later did I slowly see that the problem wasn't that I wasn't trying hard enough. It was something I wasn't even aware of at the time: in every set, two forces were straining against each other. One was pushing the weight up. The other was controlling the movement and sending the effort into the chest. Whichever of the two had the upper hand decided what that set actually was.

The Nature Is Set by the Side with the Upper Hand

Mao devotes a passage of "On Contradiction" to exactly this.

I've covered the background in the last four posts: 1937, Yan'an, curing the Party's dogmatism. I won't go into it again. Let's go straight into this section. The last post was about the principal contradiction: when several contradictions sit together, which leads and which follows. This post goes one layer further in: even once you've fixed on one contradiction, the two opposing sides inside it aren't equals.

Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary. The principal aspect is the one playing the leading role in the contradiction. The nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect of a contradiction, the aspect which has gained the dominant position.

The key to this passage lies entirely in "the nature of a thing is determined mainly by the principal aspect." It means the nature of a thing right now isn't the average of the two sides inside it. It's set by the one side that has the upper hand and plays the leading role. The secondary side hasn't disappeared. It just doesn't get the final say for now.

Put it back on my bench press and it's plain. Both sides, the weight and the control, are there. But as long as "push the weight up" is in the lead, the nature of that set is weightlifting, and whether the chest got trained is anyone's guess. Only when "control, send the effort into the chest" rises up and takes the lead is it really chest training. Both sides are always there. The one that sets the nature is always the one with the upper hand.

And right after, Mao adds an even more important layer:

But this situation is not static; the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes accordingly.

The leading side isn't fixed in place. When conditions change, the side that was on the bottom may rise up and become the new leader, and then the nature of the thing flips too. His most familiar example is strength and weakness. At first the enemy is strong and we are weak, the enemy is the leading aspect, and the nature of the whole war is defense, retreat. But through effort, the weak side grows stronger bit by bit, attack and defense trade places, and the nature of the war turns from defense to offense. Same war, same people. What changed is who holds the lead inside it.

Don't Total It Up. See Who Has the Upper Hand

Here's this section twisted into one sentence to take away:

What a thing is right now isn't decided by everything in it. It's decided by the side inside it that has the upper hand. And the upper hand changes sides, and when it does, the nature flips with it.

This sentence overturns an instinct buried deep in how we judge things.

When we evaluate an event, an object, a person, our habit is to total it up. List the good side, list the bad side, add and subtract, and give it an overall score at the end. It looks thorough and seems fair, but it's often off. Because in reality, what decides a thing's nature usually isn't the average score. It's the overwhelming lead of one particular side.

Think about it. A thing can have a whole pile of strengths, but if one fatal flaw has the lead, its whole nature is bad, and the strengths can't stop it. The other way around, a thing tangled in troubles can be good in nature as long as one side is strong enough to hold the lead, and the troubles can't outweigh it. What sets a thing's nature isn't quantity. It's who has the upper hand. However carefully you do the math, the total score won't necessarily match what the thing really is.

The second layer is harder. The upper hand changes sides, so a thing's nature isn't settled once and for all. That it's good now doesn't mean it'll always be good. That it's stuck now doesn't mean it'll always be stuck. What you really need to watch isn't how it looks at this moment. It's which side is holding the lead inside it, and which way that lead is tilting.

Below I'll act out these two layers with two of my own experiences. In one, I twisted the lead around myself. In the other, it shifted slowly on its own.

Lowering the Weight Was Really Handing Over the Lead

Back to training chest. How did I break the deadlock? I lowered the weight.

At the time that was pure instinct. Only with this section's language can I explain it. When the weight is too heavy, you have no room to control the movement. Your head holds only one thing: get it up. At that point "pushing the weight" is the absolute leader, and "control and feel" is pinned beneath it, with no chance to even raise its head. When I lowered the weight, on the surface I was lightening my load. In substance, I was moving the lead with my own hands from the "weight" side to the "control" side.

Once the weight dropped, room opened up. I could keep trying different angles, looking for the path where my chest really joined in. It was in that process that I found the problem was the bar path. But notice one thing: what turned this from "pushing blindly" into "training chest" wasn't putting in more effort. It was putting in less. I pressed down the "weight" that had been on top crushing everything, and let "control" rise up and run the house.

That's the plainest form of the principal aspect transforming: neither side disappeared. The one in charge just changed, and the nature of the thing changed with it. I didn't add anything new to the bench press. I didn't change equipment or add sets. I just moved the lead inside it.

I'm not telling you this as a gym tip. It only sank in later that many of the things I've been stuck on have the same structure as that bench press set. It's not that something was missing. It's that something that should have been on the bottom quietly took the upper hand and pinned down the side that should have been in charge. And the key to breaking the deadlock often isn't adding something. It's helping the misplaced lead back onto the right side.

This Column Changed Its Nature as I Wrote It

On the bench, I twisted the lead around in one move. There's another kind of transformation that you don't twist in one move. It shifts slowly on its own. Writing this column was that kind.

Honestly, when I started Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works, I didn't feel steady at all. Take the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, an intensely political book, strip out the politics, pull out just the dialectics, and map it onto ordinary people's lives: could that road actually go anywhere? Would it come out neither here nor there? Would readers accept it? I had no idea.

In this section's terms, there were two sides straining inside this thing too: doubt on one side, confidence on the other. And doubt had the lead. So at the time, the nature of the project was an uncertain experiment. I was sweating the whole way through writing the first post.

But I didn't stop there. I kept writing. From Vol. 1 onward, post by post, every time I finished one, readers' feedback, my own grip on the content, and whether the posts connected with real life would come back and feed me a bite of confidence. Each post fed a little more, and at some post along the way, I suddenly noticed I wasn't nervous anymore. At some point confidence had risen up and taken the lead. The nature of the thing, without my noticing, had changed from "an uncertain experiment" into "a road I'm sure I can keep walking."

There was no day when I sat down and "decided" to believe in it. It was the practice of writing that fed the confidence side bit by bit until it outweighed doubt. The lead quietly changed hands, and the nature changed with it. That's the opposite of the bench press. There, I saw it clearly and twisted it around myself. Here, I just kept writing and was pushed around one bite at a time by practice. In one, you reach out and change the lead. In the other, you keep doing the work and the lead changes sides on its own.

The Same Courage Made Him, Then Undid Him

Talking about the lead changing hands, I naturally think of Xiang Yu.

At the Battle of Julu, he broke the cooking pots and sank the boats, took only three days of rations, and forced his whole army to win or die. That reckless courage, in the struggle against Qin, was an overwhelming leading strength. With it he all but single-handedly smashed the main Qin army, and his nature was plain to see: the Xiang Yu of that time was the Hegemon-King no one under heaven could stop.

But when the situation changed, in the years of grinding it out with Liu Bang, trouble came. Same Xiang Yu, same drive: trusting only hard strength, doing everything himself, not thinking much of advisers, not bothering to build up his rear. That drive hadn't changed a bit, but in the new situation it quietly flipped from a leading strength into a leading weakness. When he needed to use people well, he couldn't. When he needed to hold his rear, he couldn't. However strong he was on the front line, he couldn't stand being hollowed out bit by bit on every side. At Gaixia he was still the man whose "strength could uproot mountains, whose spirit overshadowed the world," but his nature had completely flipped: from the invincible Hegemon-King to the defeated man who took his own life by the Wu River.

What made him win and what made him lose were the same thing. What changed wasn't the thing itself, but its leading position in the contradiction, which switched sides as conditions changed. So whether a strength turns into a weakness often doesn't depend on the strength itself. It depends on whether it's in the leading position right now. Training chest and writing the column were the lead changing for the better. Xiang Yu was the lead changing for the worse. Transformation always runs both ways. It can lift the bad into the good, and it can drag the good into the bad.

Watch the Lead as It Shifts

Put these three stories together and they're really three directions of the same principle.

The bench press is you reaching out to twist the lead yourself. The column is the lead being fed by steady practice until it turns. Xiang Yu is conditions changing and the lead tilting toward the bad on its own, with nothing to stop it. All three taught me the same thing: when you look at something, don't just look at how it is right now. Look at which side is holding the lead inside it, and which way it's moving.

These past couple of years I've come to think this is a very practical skill. When something is worrying you, don't rush to sentence it to death. First see whether some bad side has only taken the upper hand for now, and whether, like lowering the weight, you can help the good side up. When something is making you proud, don't relax too soon either. Check whether the leading strength you're proud of might quietly flip, once conditions change, into Xiang Yu's courage. Look at a thing's total score, or look at the lead inside it, and you'll come to very different judgments. A thing's nature isn't its verdict. It's a snapshot of this moment. When the lead moves, the photo has to be retaken.

But having said all this, a new question comes up.

This whole post has been saying that the two sides of a contradiction transform into each other, and the lead can switch from one to the other. But think about it carefully, and there's something strange here. The two are clearly opposed, straining against each other: strong and weak, doubt and confidence, pushing weight and controlling the movement. How can you become me and I become you? Two things fighting head to head: by what right can they turn into each other?

In other words, how exactly are the two opposing sides tangled into one contradiction, and how do they end up fighting together? Besides opposition, is there also a relationship between them where neither can do without the other?

That question will wait for the next post.