Volume 3 · The Corner Cabin · Essay 212

RenDanHeYi Principles

A principle is a spine. RenDanHeYi Principles is the sort of spine that lets a person, or an institution, stand up straight.

Applied daily, it changes less than you hope and more than you expect. That is how principles work — unglamorous, cumulative, and visible only in photographs taken years apart.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Picture the government office at four in the afternoon. The file moves only when someone owns it; until then it is everybody's business, which is to say, nobody's.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Tomorrow will provide the test. It always does.