Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
A master, in at least one sense of that term, is a person who has mastered a skill. Such mastery is always a noble accomplishment, one that displays knowledge: “know-how.”
In fact, the very word master comes from the Latin magister, which meant "chief, head, director, teacher," and which itself ultimately derives from the Proto- Indo-European term *mag-yos-, the comparative form of the PIE root *meg, meaning "great." Thought to its roots in that way, to be a “master” is to be someone who has the power — not in the degenerate sense of coercive force, mere strength, but in the root and rooting sense of potency, capacity, ability — potency, capacity, ability to achieve or accomplish some work, task, or endeavor.
Accordingly, masters in the most radical sense are those who also have the power, as capacity, to help or guide others in acquiring mastery themselves. Those who are fortunate enough to become apprentices to such masters, as occurred throughout the medieval period in the various guilds, are allowed, if they but persist in their apprenticeships long enough to learn the trade or craft at issue, to become masters in turn. Thus do such masters — masters in the most genuine sense — reproduce themselves.
Furthermore, as I claim in my second sentence above, all such mastery is indeed noble. That word that comes from an identically spelled French one, which itself comes from the Latin term nobilis. In turn, that Latin word is itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *gno-, which means “to know.”
Those who are ignorant — most especially those who are willfully ignorant: those who do not want to know — never attain mastery. They thereby always remain ignoble, and glory in their very foulness, their stinking to high heaven. They absolutely reek of their willful ignorance, which is to say of their stupidity.
What is more, and even more important, only true masters, those who truly know what they are doing, can ever learn how to teach others to become masters in their turn. When those who have mastered some skill also acquire skill in aiding others to master it, they — and they alone — become master-teachers.
Master shoemaker and his apprentice, circa 1914
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Good fun is enjoyable, engaging, and amusing. It can be deeply meaningful by connecting you to others and boosting your mastery.
— Elaine O’Brien & Andrea Seydel,
The Power of Play: Optimize Your Joy Potential
There are also masters in a second, degenerate sense of the term. That is the sense in which a master is not someone who has mastered some skill and is therefore endowed with the capacity to learn how to help others master it. Rather, a master in this degenerate sense is instead someone who dominates and controls others as though he (the masculine gendering of the pronoun is appropriate here) owned them. That claimed “ownership” may even be recognized by the laws of the nation in which the claim is made, as it was in the United States of America from its foundation up until the end of the Civil War. Such legal recognition is by no means necessary, however, as the persistence of what the whole socialist tradition has long called “wage-slavery” proves.
The sense of mastery at issue here in this second sense of the term is precisely such “dominion and control” as is at issue in enslavement of any form. Those are also — and far from accidentally — exactly the terms Descartes, to give one crucially important example, employs in his Search for a Method. He therein proposes that the very method he eventually discovers through his searching be adopted universally, in order for humanity to establish “dominion and control over nature.” His method, he proclaims, will allow man (again the gendering is appropriate here) to dominate and control nature herself as a whole.
In truth, it is precisely through applying just such a method that all experimental modern natural sciences, and eventually all the so-called “human sciences” as well, do indeed proceed in all their endeavors. The very “mastery” of nature herself for which Descartes called, in just that sense of dominating and controlling, is intrinsically the goal of all modern — which is to say experimental — science as such.
Being a master in this second sense of dominating and controlling demonstrates no acquisition of any skill — any skill, at least, other than that dominating and controlling as such. That is, it requires no mastery at all in the original, root sense of the term, the one considered in the preceding, first section of this post. Instead, it requires no more than the “strength” of which Lao Tzu speaks in the quotation at the top of today’s post. (I will leave it up to readers of this post to decide for themselves whether that also applies to the quotation from The Power of Joy with which I prefaced this current section of today’s post. I have no need to dominate and control readers’ interpretation of that quotation. They can play with it themselves.)
Masters of this second sort may be, and indeed typically are, deficient in any mastery of the first sort. Instead of mastering any skills of their own, masters of this second sort simply rely on those they have enslaved to do all the work for them. Thus, it is the slaves of such masters of the second sort who are in the best position to acquire mastery of the first sort—a topic I will address more fully in my next post, “The Mastery of Slaves,” set to go up on the morning October 9 this year.
