4 pieces from Mozi — each retold in modern English and traced to its source.
Every ruler wants the same three things — a rich state, a full population, a country in good order. Most get the opposite. Mozi has a blunt diagnosis and a radical fix: stop handing power to your relatives and favorites, and give it to whoever can actually do the work, farmer or artisan included.
A physician cannot cure a sickness without first knowing where it starts. Mozi looks at a world of war, theft, and broken families and finds one cause under all of it: people draw a line between their own and everyone else's. His remedy is plain, and it is the idea his enemies could never forgive.
An engineer builds a war machine that cannot be stopped, and the one man who walks to stop it carries no army — only a question the engineer cannot answer, and a belt he is about to turn into a city wall.
Mozi watched people walk carefully around the local magistrate and then do as they pleased the moment no one was looking. They had it backwards. There is a watcher you cannot flee and a standard you cannot argue with, and its name is Heaven. Here is what Heaven wants, and how to measure your life against it.