Jeremy Bentham vs. Yang Wan Li

In the Bible we have the notion of the 'invisible hand', or 'mysterious management' (economia), such that the Katechon keeps the Eschaton, the Day of Wrath, at bay. How did this 'spontaneous order'- e.g. the medieval 'Law Merchant'- come about? The answer was that, for any useful purpose, there was an inter-subjective 'self-knowledge' or 'Synoida' (as with Socrates) which was also the Stoic notion of synedeisis which evolved into the Christian doctrine of 'Synderesis' or the in-born 'still small voice of conscience.' In other words, there were good enough 'self-enforcing' Schelling focal solutions for coordination and dis-coordination games. 

Jeremy Bentham, in taking over Hutcheson's maxim regarding maximising the greatest good of the greatest number (itself, Liebnizian or, going further back, derivable from the School of Salamanca), wrote

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.

No doubt, Moh Tzu had, more intelligently and to a better practical purpose, anticipated this 'Common Sense' utilitarianism before the birth of Christ, yet, nevertheless, it is a fact that there was a 'great divergence' in productivity and mechanism design between England and China which may well have originated a century or three after this was written- 

'When Yang Wan Li, prefect of Changzhou, found leisure to write some poetry he found the difficulties of administration grow light. Unfettered from past models, writing in a natural style, he was astonished by his own productivity. Having returned to the capital, Yang received a letter from an old friend 'Changzhou has recently had another change of prefect. The prefecture you once found no trouble in administering is now at least ten times as difficult! Are you still not ready to bring out those poems you wrote there?"

Yang Wang Li wasn't writing virtue signalling 'eight-legged' essays. In any case, the Bureaucracy was still aristocratic in all but name. He, quite sensibly replied in what we might term 'Hayekian' or 'spontaneous order (with Aumann public signals)' terms- 

'The Poems are a tool to straighten out the world. There are people who say, “In the Way of the sages, the Book of Propriety is strict, while the Poems are easy-going.” Well, I must ask: who is there who understands that the Propriety is easy-going within its strictness, and the Poems strict within their easy-going nature? When the sages were finding the way to straighten out the world, they first had to find how to hunt out the world’s strongest common feelings.

Which reduce to Utility or Survival Value. Where this dude fell down, as did China in general, was in not creating fiscal mechanisms for endogenous growth and 'Tiebout sorting' though, no doubt, at the margin, this happened anyway.

When they had found these common feelings, and worked in accordance with them in the task of straightening people out, how could they fail to be obeyed?

Bullshit isn't obeyed. It is kow-towed to. Experimenting with mechanism design at the local level provokes disobedience till you find an incentive compatible solution. 

For reform grows from repentance, and repentance grows from [acknowledgement of] public society. If repentance is not spoken about, it is no longer unsettling: if it is not spoken about in public, self-interest and denial take over. ... The sages would never allow the world to lose the sting of repentance, or to deny the force of public criticism. And so in this way they called on the public to make the criticism, and used that criticism to inspire repentance. So the world’s miscreants cannot avoid
repentance. Repentance brings reform, and reform brings return to the fold of goodness. This is the way that the Poems teach! Are the poems really easy-going, then? Majestic in the inexorability of their criticism, absolute in the implacability of their judgments: are the Poems really not strict?' Yang Wan Li, Shilun

In this context, I offer my own poetic response- 

What the Celestial Emperor in wry jest has spoken

I understand- the paulownia leaf as jade token

Enfeoffing poor poets

Poor poets! Beauty buys grief not land.

This is my version of Yan Wan Li's
(from 'Sunflower Splendour')

In my version, I've put in a reference to the founder of the Sate of Chin (from which we get the name China) who was enfeoffed jestingly by the Emperor with a paulownia leaf cut to look like the jade token of feudal office.

I suppose, Scholiasts don't mention this because it would be otiose to mention something obvious to those who actually know Chinese. 

Yan Wan Li somehow captured my imagination when I was young. 

When I wrote the above, I thought he representseda sort of Utilitarian ontological dysphoria that unites all that is best in Buddhism with China's own long and variegated tradition of literary culture as inculcating zeal for the common good.

Now I know better. Love buys grief. Poetry is a fugitive flower never natal to where it lands. Thus, not in its being captured by a context, or becoming canonical, it can ever flit before our eyes as a dandelion blown our way by winds outside the Cosmos.