From Son of Heaven to Self-Improvement: Deconstructing Legitimacy • HUYIFAN

Legitimacy is usually assigned to law and political science, but in everyday experience it is quite concrete. Promotion, a raise, who becomes the leader, even who has the final say at home, all revolve around the same question. Why him and not me?

Legitimacy here means the narratives and structures used to answer that question. They suppress the envy, fear, and resentment inherent in human nature and exchange them for an order that can last.

These narratives and structures unfold along two dimensions. The first concerns the legitimacy of acquiring power, or why someone occupies that position. The second concerns the continuity of exercising power, or why obedience continues once the original reason has failed.

Pure violence can establish rule in fact, but violence itself does not constitute legitimacy.

1. The Son of Heaven in the East: The Emperor in the Flesh

In the ancient East, the difficulty facing the human community was direct. Every faction could mobilize violence, yet none could afford the cost of prolonged civil war. How was the impulse of I could be the boss too to be prevented from arising in every corner?

The emperor appeared in answer.

A throne won by fighting relies on legitimacy in fact. The winner is king and the loser is bandit, and if you do not accept it you fight until you dare not ask why again. The reasoning is simple. Whoever can keep winning represents order.

But rule established through conquest faces a fundamental predicament. The conqueror will always grow old, an army cannot remain permanently on a war footing, and continuous violent deterrence is costly and unsustainable. The real difficulty is not how to seize the throne but how to keep that position unchallengeable after the weapons are put away.

This is where the narrative of legitimacy begins to work. Formulations such as the mandate of Heaven repackage the violent seizure of power as an expression of cosmic order. Past conquest is traced back to the arrangement of Heaven's will, and past slaughter is explained as carrying out Heaven's justice. Through this narrative conversion, the source of power shifts from a specific military victory to an abstract transcendent ground. What matters is not whether these formulations are true but that they successfully provide support beyond violence for a rule that violence established.

A throne handed down is a more refined design. The key to hereditary succession is not the selection of the most worthy but the sealing off in advance of that dangerous question, why not me. Once the throne is narrated as the natural continuation of bloodline, ancestral temple, and the mandate of Heaven, the vast majority are excluded from the competition from birth, and this buys a stability that is not exactly wholehearted acceptance. Once everyone feels that I could do it too, war is only a matter of time.

The function of the name Son of Heaven lies precisely in this. It packages a specific body as the interface of cosmic order. What subjects are required to obey is on the surface this person, but in substance it is said to be an unquestionable mandate of Heaven. The humiliation of submission is transferred into resignation before Heaven's will, and this also cuts off the resentment and envy directed at a former weaver of mats who became the Son of Heaven.

2. Reason in the West: The Emperor in the Spirit

The modern West is often summarized as ruling by reason. This transformation went through a long historical process. Monarchs in medieval Europe likewise tried to package themselves as agents of God, but the church, as an independent center of power, always formed a counterweight to secular power. When a king had to justify the legitimacy of his rule before the pope, power was already no longer a pure fact of violence. The Renaissance and the Reformation further weakened the monopoly of any single authority, and Enlightenment thought began to redefine the source of power through concepts such as contract, right, and law.

If we do not romanticize reason, we can understand it as a process in which sovereignty was gradually disassembled from a single body into a series of abstract personified organs.

The state, the court, the constitution, the corporation, the people, and sovereignty are all like fictional persons: they can issue orders, be held to account, and continue across generations, yet they are not identical with any specific individual.

Within this structure, Jesus can be understood as a kind of emperor in the spirit. He supplies a supreme measure that transcends the secular. All are regarded as sinners, and any secular power must limit itself before God rather than lightly equate itself with absolute rightness. This weakens the possibility that any single mortal holds the whole of authority, and the highest legitimacy is suspended in a spiritual existence that cannot be touched.

Rule by reason is therefore not the appearance of a perfectly rational person but the forcing of rulers to embed themselves within abstract personhood. Sovereignty, law, procedure, and representation together constitute a head without a body, and the individual can act only within the structure it describes.

3. Centralization and Division: Two Defensive Mechanisms of Legitimacy

A collective facing internal competition has two basic responses. Either it establishes an unchallengeable apex and closes off the space of competition, or it divides power among multiple subjects so that no one can monopolize the whole of authority.

The Battle of Guandu in Romance of the Three Kingdoms offers a window for observation. Cao Cao won through concentrated decision-making, and Yuan Shao was defeated by internal division. Military command requires a high degree of concentration in order to achieve efficiency, while political legitimacy must handle a more complex problem, how to keep answering the challenge of why you, when there is no external enemy applying pressure.

The Eastern imperial system chose the path of centralization. By concentrating all power at a symbolic apex, it excluded in advance the possibility of competition for the vast majority. The advantage of this structure is clear decision-making and the avoidance of continuous internal strife. The risk is that once the apex fails, the entire system faces collapse. Imperial power must therefore continually reinforce its unchallengeable character, and any questioning of why is treated as a threat.

The Western system of divided powers chose another road. By letting multiple institutions check one another and different groups share power, it prevents any single individual from monopolizing authority. The cost of this structure is reduced decision-making efficiency and rising coordination costs. The benefit is improved fault tolerance and a mechanism of self-correction. Distributed power means that the question of why you can be asked continuously without leading to systemic collapse.

The two models answer why not me in fundamentally different ways. The answer of the former is that sovereignty is granted by Heaven, suppressing competition; the answer of the latter is that reason is king, making competition rule-bound. Which is more effective depends on how effectiveness is defined: the efficiency of short-term decision-making, or the capacity of a long-term system to correct itself.

4. Effort and Metaphysics: The Double Placebo of Modern Society

When force and bloodline can no longer serve openly as sources of legitimacy, modern society needs new stories to explain the inequality of position and resources. The heaviest of these narratives is effort.

Effort provides the legitimacy that looks fairest. Status, income, and opportunity are explained as the result of greater investment and greater ability. Credentials and certificates are the proof of effort. The question of why not me is answered here by saying that he worked harder.

It supports the hope of upward mobility and makes people willing to endure pain; the cost is that it attributes failure first to the individual and weakens direct accusation of structural injustice.

Practices such as fortune-telling and metaphysics, alongside effort, play a subtle supplementary role. They provide another set of explanations for the extreme differences that effort cannot account for. Fate, fortune, and feng shui repackage an unbearable unfairness as something already determined.

For winners, such formulations can smooth contingency and luck into good fate, adding a further transcendent halo to a position already held. For losers, they offer the consolation of having lost to destiny.

Structurally, effort channels discontent into self-improvement, while metaphysics channels indigestible resentment toward a transcendent force that cannot be held to account, so that conflict does not tear everything apart. Together they maintain the legitimacy of difference.

5. Fabricated Legitimacy

The emperor, the Son of Heaven, reason, institutions, effort, and metaphysics look unrelated to one another. In substance they are all different ways of taming human nature, different answers to why not me.

Some answers rely on fear, some on tradition, some on abstract procedure, some on the belief that effort can break through, and some on fate. None of them is entirely pure, and none is entirely false.

Legitimacy is human nature in disguise. Whenever a narrative of legitimacy is at work, the question to ask is whether that narrative protects collective life or maintains order on behalf of the emperor.