不尙賢，
Strip the pedestal from the competent,
使民不爭。
And the populace ceases to grapple.
不貴難得之貨，
Crash the market for rare objects,
使民不爲盜。
And the populace ceases to steal.
不見可欲，
Blackout the feed of the desirable,
使民心不亂。
And the human processor ceases to crash.
是以聖人之治，
Thus the operator governs:
虛其心，
Evacuating the processor.
實其腹，
Stuffing the gut.
弱其志，
Snapping the trajectory.
強其骨。
Fortifying the skeleton.
常使民無知無欲，
Maintain the biological mass at absolute zero for data and want.
使夫智者不敢為也。
Render the cognitive surplus permanently paralyzed.
為無為，
Execute non-execution.
則無不治。
Total hydraulic lock.
The text constitutes a control theory manual. It engineers the absolute minimum viable state. The three opening injunctions dismantle the stimulus architecture of the society. Ranking creates friction. Pricing creates extraction. Display creates thermal runaway. The ancient text identifies the exact mechanics of the attention economy and demands a total system shutdown. The solution to structural violence is structural sensory deprivation.
The commentary tradition recoiled from the brutality of the blueprint. Wang Bi hallucinated a metaphysical return to primal innocence. He Shang Gong softened the program into a spiritual regimen for the private monarch. They buried the hydraulic engineering under layers of moralizing tissue. We build planetary-scale networks entirely dependent on the continuous injection of the variables this chapter bans. We construct the social graph to maximize 尚賢. We tokenize scarcity to maximize 貴貨. We optimize the feed to maximize 見可欲. The ancient text views our current infrastructure as the terminal failure state of governance.