One Ruler, Four Ways From Laozi's Way of Heaven and Way of Man to the Nonuniformity Law across Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Man

Abstract: Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Ch. 77) says: ‘The Way of Heaven reduces the excessive and supplements the insufficient; the Way of Man is not so — it reduces the insufficient to serve the excessive.’ This observation of two-and-a-half millennia ago, limited by its era, divided the world into two Ways and granted ‘equalization’ to Heaven while blaming ‘concentration’ on Man. This paper uses one ruler — the nonuniformity law for open systems and its gradient-surplus principle — to rewrite the two Ways as four: the Way of Cosmos (gravitational self-aggregation → concentration), the Way of Earth (weathering, erosion, diffusion → equalization in the mean, while the event magnitudes remain heavy-tailed), the Way of Life (competitive Matthew effect → monoculture → mass extinction), and the Way of Man (cognition layered on Life’s Matthew). The ruler’s key scale is a screening length ℓ = √(D/λ): strong dissipation (short ℓ) compresses the distribution toward an exponential (equalized), while weak dissipation with strong multiplicative feedback (long ℓ) opens it into a power law (concentrated). Laozi’s two Ways are not the two ends of a line but two opposite directions on one ray, whose common origin is the exponential law, the constant-hazard zero of the coordinate in which sizes are measured here. We offer three refinements. First, the dichotomy is a projection onto one ray of a space whose canonical form is an origin plus two rays. Second, the moral valence is half-inverted — concentration is the default of gravity and life, while equalization is the exception that must be maintained by dissipation, and a colder theorem holds: uniform additive redistribution cannot stop multiplicative concentration; one must act on the multiplicative growth channel. Third, the Way of Man is the only Way with a choice, yet cognition systematically chooses wrong; wrong cognition intensifies the Matthew effect and hastens collapse, while correct cognition is the sole escape. Corollaries and guardrails follow.