Week 5 · 1 February 2027 – 7 February 2027
The cost of aggression
Chapter 18 Against Aggression II
This week's question
Mozi adds up the cost of a campaign: lost planting seasons, ruined equipment, dead soldiers, all to gain an empty city while losing thousands of people. He calls it 'throwing away what is scarce to fight over what is plentiful.' Take a conflict, an expansion, or even an internal feud in some organization today. If you list every cost the way Mozi does, does the ledger balance? Who pays, and who collects?
This week's practice
Choose one thing your family, workplace or community is currently fighting over. List the time, money and relationship costs each side has spent, and see whether the total exceeds the value of the thing itself.
Introduction
非攻中, Against Aggression II, replaces the first chapter's moral argument with an account book. The first chapter said attacking a state is wrong. This one says: even setting right and wrong aside, it does not pay.
Mozi begins with the seasons. Winter is too cold and summer too hot for campaigns, so armies move in spring and autumn, exactly when people plant and harvest. "In spring it takes the people from sowing and planting; in autumn from reaping and gathering." Lose one season and the people who die of hunger and cold "cannot be counted."
Then materials: bamboo arrows, banners, tents, armor and shields, "which go out and rot and do not come back, beyond counting"; spears, halberds, swords, chariots and horses, "which go out and break and wear and do not come back, beyond counting"; oxen and horses "which go out fat and come back thin," and die on the road beyond counting. Supply lines stretch so far that soldiers starve and sicken beyond counting. The repetition of "beyond counting" is deliberate.
Finally the result. What does victory bring? "Reckon what is gained, and it is less than what is lost." Taking a city of three li with an outer wall of seven li costs thousands or tens of thousands of lives. But what the world lacks is not land; it is people: "What the world lacks is people; what it has in surplus is land." Sacrificing what is scarce for what is plentiful "is not the business of a state."
An objector says: but some states became great through conquest. Mozi answers plainly. If four or five doctors out of ten thousand cure their patients, you do not call their method good. Of all the states that once made war, only a few survive. That does not prove war profits; it proves war mostly kills.
The chapter's other value is that it shows how to do the accounting: list every cost, including the invisible ones (time, population) and the ones that fall on other people (soldiers, peasants).
The three tests
This is a textbook application of the third test, application. Mozi breaks "benefit" into parts: time, materials, animals, lives, each a cost that can be checked. The objection (some states grew strong by war) is a first-test precedent, and Mozi's doctor analogy identifies it as survivorship bias.
Ask what Mozi's ledger leaves out. The cost of defending? The cost of not fighting? Do the omissions overturn the conclusion?
For families
- Play "add it up" with a child: if two people argue over a cookie for half an hour, what could that half hour have been used for? Was it worth it?
- Tell the line about oxen and horses going out fat and coming back thin. Ask: who suffers in a war?
- Make a family list of "what we are most short of." See whether, as Mozi says, the shortage is rarely things and usually time and people.
For chapters
- Reading: from "in spring it takes the people from sowing" to "reckon what is gained, and it is less than what is lost."
- Debate: ask everyone to bring their ledger from the practice. Focus on the split between who pays and who benefits.
- Three-tests review: check whether the doctor analogy really answers the precedent "some states grew strong by war." What do we call survivorship bias today? Record the group's view of the third test this week.