Claim. Contrary to Communist historiography, history develops through harmonious give-and-take between subject and object (leaders and people); struggles that have occurred were not class struggles but conflicts between relative good and relative evil whose function was to redirect history rather than to develop it.
Elaboration. Lee directly counters Marxist historical materialism (C. Historical Ground for the New View of Absolute Value). Natural phenomena do not develop through struggle, and neither does history. The engine of historical development is harmonious subject-object give-and-take — leaders and people in functional correlation.
Struggles have occurred, Lee concedes, but their taxonomy is wrong in Communism. They are not class struggles; they are struggles between forces of relative good and forces of relative evil — equivalently, between value perspectives more in accord with the Way of Heaven and value perspectives more in discord with it. Crucially, struggle is not the developmental mechanism; it serves the distinct redirective function of turning history toward a better direction. Development and redirection are separate operations.
The empirical case Lee offers: relatively good sides have suffered setbacks but “in the long run” always prevailed. Mencius supplies the maxim: “Those who follow Heaven, survive; those who do not, perish.” Secular powers have risen and fallen, but religions advocating the cause of goodness have managed to survive. Saints and righteous people who fell victim to evil forces became exemplary models for later periods. These facts, Lee argues, show the Way of Heaven operating in history.
Lee adds a second law of history: a goal was already set at history’s starting point. As living beings grow according to ideas inherent in seeds/eggs, history develops toward an ideal already encoded at its outset. He cites the Garden of Eden in Genesis, the prophecies in Isaiah and Revelation, and the Tangun mythology of Korea as God’s symbolic communications of the lost original ideal that history must restore.
This is a significant historiographical commitment with several pressure points: the long-run survival claim is selection-biased (we see surviving religions because surviving religions wrote the histories); the harmony-as-engine view struggles with conflict-driven innovation (scientific revolutions, civil rights movements). UT’s reply would be that genuine development in these cases comes from constructive give-and-take, while the struggle is the redirective shake-up — a distinction worth a future thread.
See also. give-and-receive-is-harmonious-not-struggle, law-of-repulsion-as-good-evil-struggle, history-is-law-governed-with-two-law-types