VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 18, SECTION 3
How Thick the Hide, How Long the Hair
At the end of the last section a question was left: the hair cannot but grow, and cannot grow past its measure, so how thick is right. This question has no fixed number. Every place wants a number, a number that once reckoned settles the matter, yet this thing happens to have no number. The ancestors gave no number, they gave a rule instead. This section asks that rule out, and then, using it, gathers this whole chapter up.
One. In different ages, the ratio of hide to hair is wholly unlike
Look first at a plain fact. When a place first begins to make things, the hide is thick and the hair is thin: the factories rise one by one, the roads are laid one by one, the power is generated a degree at a time, and most of the money is put into things you can see and touch, the financial layer very thin, the derivative layer all but none. When a place has made things to a point, the hide grown thick, the hair begins to grow: to expand output, to change the generation of the product, to do a great project, the little in one’s own pocket is no longer enough, and so the money has to be gathered from the hands of tens of millions, and the hair grows out, and grows fast.
Notice, up to this step, the thing is all going well: the hair grows on the hide, the hide bears it, and both are good. But walk on from here and it goes wrong. There is a way of walking like this: the hair, growing and growing, comes to earn more than the hide, and faster than the hide by far, the hide taking three years, five, to return, the hair closing a deal in five seconds, and so the clever ones, the quick ones, the moneyed ones, one after another climb from the layer of hide up to the layer of hair. No one is willing to open a factory anymore, all of them gone to trade those bundles. Now the hide begins to thin, and the hair is still growing upward.
Two. The ancestors’ rule
Then what to do? How thick is right? The ancestors gave no number, they gave a rule.
Knowing enough escapes disgrace, knowing when to stop escapes peril, so one may last long, runs the line in Laozi, the forty-fourth chapter of the Daodejing. Know that it is enough and you do not bring disgrace on yourself, know to stop and you do not walk into the place of peril, and so, you last. Take these characters one at a time and weigh them. Knowing enough speaks of the amount, and to what degree is it enough. Enough is no fixed number, it is a matter of the hide beneath, whether it can bear the load or not. Knowing when to stop speaks of that step, and at which step should one halt. To stop is not to forbid the walking, it is that on reaching the edge one must know it for the edge. And one may last long, these four characters are the return Laozi gives: you have known enough, you have known when to stop, and what you take back is not more, it is longer.
Look clear at the shape of this rule of Laozi’s: it does not measure high and low, does not measure right and wrong, it measures one thing, whether the load can still be borne. This is the rule that was wanted.
Three. Set this rule onto four positions
A rule laid on the page is dead, take it down and set it on a person, and only then is it alive. Set it on a person who does finance: he must be clear that the fulcrum of his trade lands, at the last, on the hide, that under every contract he handles there is a person, on some street, doing some share of work, and whether the hide is sound or not decides whether this share of work of his has real value or is a turning in the void. Set it on a person who does the several derivative layers: he must be clear that the position he stands in hangs on a very long chain, that any one link on that chain going wrong brings his whole share of work down with it, and the further he is from the hide, the more he must know where the hide is.
Set it on a person setting the direction for a place: he must be clear that a place’s true holdings are its grain, its power, its roads, its factories, its crafts, and that the hair is a magnifier, and however good the magnifier, it cannot itself stand in for the thing being magnified. Set it on an ordinary person handing his money out: he must be clear on a most plain thing, this sum of mine, at the last, answers to which street, which factory, which line of work. If he himself cannot say this clear, then this sum of his is likely already up on several layers of hair, and the hide once stirred, it is gone.
Four. The position must know its own position
Set these four positions together and one line comes into view, and this line is the core of this whole chapter: the position must know its own position. Join this line to the meaning set last semester. Last semester it was said: wei the more refined is the harder to recognize. The three layers of capital are one increasingly refined wei: the first layer, you can still see that factory, those workers, the second layer, you can no longer see them, you see only a piece of paper, the third layer, what even that paper answers to can no longer be said, you see only a number leaping.
When that number is leaping, it looks not one bit like a lock, yet a lock it is. Last semester it was spoken: the visible lock is a lock that can be bargained with, and this layer of hair is the kind that cannot be seen.
Five. The meaning this chapter sets
This whole chapter is walked through, so set the meaning down. Capital is not one thing, it splits into at least three layers: industrial capital is the hide, it is slow, it is heavy, it is brittle, yet the load-bearing of the whole institution is on it entire, financial capital is the first coat of hair grown on the hide, it gathers scattered money into great money, fictitious capital is hair grown on hair, it is furthest from the hide. The three layers do not stand as equals, they rest layer upon layer, the hide gone, on what will the hair rest.
The hair is no evil, the hair must grow, yet the moment the hair forgets it is hair and climbs up into the position of the hide, that year, 2008, waits ahead. It needs no bad person, it needs only a crowd of ordinary people each doing his duty.
The rule the ancestors gave is this: knowing enough escapes disgrace, knowing when to stop escapes peril, so one may last long. The meaning this chapter sets is this one line: the position must know its own position.
Six. What this section set, crossing to the next chapter
Walked to here, turn and look back over the road of these four chapters. Chapter fourteen took the worker and the capitalist down off the scale. Chapter fifteen saw clear that value is handed out by four relays. Chapter sixteen reckoned that gap out entry by entry. Chapter seventeen laid out the card in the worker’s hand, scarcity. This chapter turned over capital’s family holdings and saw the hide and the hair.
Read to now, does that capitalist position not look very firm? He has money, he slaps the table, he decides who goes and who stays, he sits on that hide, and sits on those hairs too.
But there is one line to ask: can he sleep? That sum of money, left unmoved, grows smaller of itself. The market turns its face, and the thing in his hand overnight has no buyer. The technology changes generation, and his whole factory goes to zero. The money he borrowed must be repaid, and repaid on time. His team can leave at any moment. What he saved a lifetime to gather must at the last be handed to a son or daughter, and that son or daughter may not be able to catch it. Last semester one layer of meaning was nailed down, the last layer: the slaveholder is a slave too, the higher the position, the more the constraints. The next chapter sets those five chains, one by one, before you.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.