Michael Springate wrote:

>  In a response to a comment from Wei, Charles Moyer wrote
>
> "But I do believe Confucius hit upon something when he said that it was
> comparatively easier for one to be rich and not be puffed up than it was for
> one to be poor and not feel resentment."
>
> Charles
>
> I'd be interested in knowing why you surmise Confucious may have said that (if
> indeed, that is how he put it)?
>
> Could it be that the poor person sees the effect of waste and lost opportunity
> very keenly?
>
> Could it be that the wealthy believe "all is right" more easily than the poor?
>

[snip]
The Confucian Mencius offered an interesting gloss on this.

From Ellen Meiksins Wood, *Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian
Democracy* (London: Verso,  1989), pp. 149-50:

****
Plato would surely concur with Mencius' remarks to the lapsed Confucian, Ch'en
Hsiang, when the two were discussing the qualities of rulers:

    Why then should you think . . . that someone who is carrying on the government
    of a kingdom has time also to till the soil? The truth is, that some kinds of
business
    are proper to the great and others to the small. Even supposing each man could
    unite in himself all the various kinds of skill required in every craft, if he
had to
    himself everything he used, this would merely lead to everyone being completely

    prostrate with fatigue. True indeed is the saying, 'Some work with their minds,

    others with their bodies. Those who work with their minds rule, while those who

    work with their bodies are ruled. Those who are ruled produce food; those who
    rule are fed.' That this is right is universally recognized everywhere under
Heaven.

    If there is a fundamental difference between Mencius and Plato, it certainly
does not concern the division between those who work with their minds and those who
work with their hands, those who are fed and those who feed them , nor the
association of of these divisions with the separation between rulers and ruled. Nor
can it be said that these distinctions are less closely related to Plato's theory
of knowledge than they are to Mencius' views on the nature of the 'heart' and the
senses. The difference seems to lie in the *complementarity* of the 'complementary
grades and values' in Mencius' 'dualist hierarchy' as compared to the stark
*opposition* of the grades and values in Plato's epistemological and social
hierarchies.

    Perhaps the clue to this difference can be found in Mencius' last sentence. If
it seemed self-evident to him that these hierarchical principless were 'universally
recognized everywhere under Heaven,' it was far more difficult for Plato to assume
such a consensus, or even to proclaim it for rhetorical purposes. In the context of
Athenian democracy, which represented an unprecedented challenge to precisely those
'universal' principles, axioms that in the Chinese setting could be taken for
granted had to be asserted *against* the prevailing social order and the cultural
values that sustained it. . . . Plato's political philosophy illustrates more
dramatically than any other masterpiece of Athenian culture the pervasive cultural
effects -- whether direct or through the medium of opposition -- of the unique
relation between governing and productive functions, personified in the first
instance by the peasant-citizen and brought to fruition by the democracy.
*******

And on pp. 171-2 (at the end of the book):

******
    Plato sought a universal and permanent order underlying the world of experience
and flux; he looked for a universal principle of justice and the good to set
against the conventions of popular morality; he elaborated a principle of hierarchy
to challenge democratic aspirations to equality, and a theory of justice
diamentrically opposed to the democratic principle of *dike*; he used the analogy
of the practical arts to exclude their practitioners from the specialized 'art' of
politics; he hoped to restore the age-old division between rulers and producers,
developing a theory of knowledge and a concept of the soul which corresponded to
it. Virtually all the philosophical problems he confronted were questions raised by
the new social order. Plato was anything but a peasant or craftsman; but it is
difficult to imagine his invention of philosophy without the provocation offered by
peasant-citizens and all their 'banausic' compatriots, whose very political
existence challenged eternal verities, the truths and values 'universally
recognized everywhere under Heaven' -- at least, almost everywhere.
******

I don't see how it is worthwhile blaming Pound personally for accepting this
"truth" recognized everywhere under heaven. Since the 18th century expressions of
it have been more diplomatic, more mealy-mouthed one might say, than were Plato or
Mencius, but they were certainly the assumptions of the "Founding Fathers" in
Philadelphia. How could slaveowners believe otherwise? Pound has the great virtue
of making fully explicit, and with a beauty of language hardly surpassed by any
writer in English, those assumptions hidden in the Constitution. To me his title,
Jefferson and/or Mussolini, makes perfect sense.

Carrol