VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21, SECTION 2
Where the Differential Is, There the Force Gathers
The last section restored capital from a mouth sucking blood to a thing lying unmoved. Yet the heart surely will not have it: a thing lying unmoved, how does it come to have so great a strength? A railway, a factory, a whole city, all pushed out by it. This section sees this matter clear: a dead thing, how does it grow a strength. Seen clear, you will find it is like a most ordinary thing.
One. One person’s twenty piculs cannot do a great matter
Go back to that farmer of the last section. He has twenty piculs of grain left in hand, this is capital, real capital. Now ask one line: these twenty piculs of grain, what can they do? Trade for an ox, buy a good plow, send a child to a few years of study.
These matters are none of them small. Yet ask one more line: these twenty piculs of grain, can they build a road? Can they raise a bridge? Can they build a factory where a thousand people come to work? They cannot, the distance is far too great. See this matter clear: the one share of capital in one person’s hand, however able he is, however diligent, however good at reckoning, can only do small matters. For a great matter to be done, there is one road only: gather the little in the hands of ten million into one.
Two. How money is gathered
Look at a matter happening today. To build a modern factory, the money wanted is billions. There is not one ordinary person in this world with billions in his pocket. Then these billions, where do they come from?
They come from the little that some person, paid his wage each month, deposited, from the stack some old person saved after drawing his pension, from the hands of thousands upon thousands, that little by little, gathered over. In chapter sixteen those seven accounts were reckoned, and the sixth was this one. One person’s thousand can do nothing at all, ten million people’s thousand can build a factory, can lay a railway of several hundred li, can light every lamp of a city. Remember this word: to gather. This is the first thing this force does, and the most crucial thing.
Three. People and stock too are gathered so
What is gathered is not money only. Look at a car. To make one car takes several thousand people: the ones who design the chassis, tune the engine, write the program in the car, make the glass, make the seats, do the spraying, the assembly, the testing. Count further up and down the stream, and it is several hundred thousand people.
These several hundred thousand people, for the most part will not know one another their whole lives, different cities, different countries, different tongues, yet their hands combined into one car. Look at the stock too: iron ore dug from under the ground of one continent, copper hauled from another, oil drawn up from farther still. See this picture clear: the money gathered over, the people gathered over, the stock gathered over, the three gathered at once, and that matter one person could not do in a lifetime is done.
Four. Yet who is the chief commander
Now ask a most crucial question. This great a gathering, who is the chief commander? Who dispatches the deposits of those ten million? Who arranges the division of labor of those several hundred thousand? Who allots the ore and the oil of these several continents?
You will think: there must be a great room, and in the room a crowd of extremely clever people seated, a vast chart spread on the table. Here it must be said: there is no such room. No one is the chief commander. This matter sounds near absurd, yet just so it is. Then, with no one commanding, how does it gather of itself into one?
Five. Why water flows to the low place
Change to another question, one whose answer you have known since small: why does water flow to the low place? No one commands the water, no one stands on the mountaintop shouting go down. Water goes down because there is a differential.
This force is the same. Why does it gather of itself? Because there is a differential too. That differential is called return. Where return is high, there money flows, where the wage given is high and the work interesting and the future in sight, there people go, where the price can be paid, there stock is hauled. No one is commanding, it is that differential that draws them over. The last section said capital has no eyes, no heart, no notion of its own, today add one line: it has no good and evil either, it knows only the differential, as water knows only high and low.
Six. Precisely because it knows no good and evil, it also gathers wrong
Speaking to here, the most crucial layer comes, sit up straight and hear it. Precisely because this force knows only the differential and not good and evil, it will gather wrong. Think a moment: if a place built the highest differential in the wrong spot, what would happen?
Say, the one who earnestly makes things earns not a cent in a year, while the one who trades back and forth, driving up the price of a thing and then unloading it, earns enough in a month. Which way would this force walk? It would run, not off by a cent, toward that wrong direction, it would not hesitate, not doubt, not say one line this is not right, for it does not know what right is, what not-right is, it sees only that differential. Nail this layer down: this force gathering wrong is never its fault, it is that someone built the differential there.
Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next
This section saw clear the first thing this force does: to gather. One person’s twenty piculs can do only small matters, ten million people’s little gathered into one can build a factory, lay a railway, light a city. What is gathered is not money only, but people and stock too, several hundred thousand hands combined into one car. No one is the chief commander, it is that differential that draws them over, as water flows to the low place.
It knows no good and evil, only the differential, so when the differential is built in the wrong spot, it runs to the wrong place not off by a cent, and this is not its fault, it is the matter of the hands that built the differential. Now it is known how it gathers, yet it has not been asked: gathered up, what in the end did it make? These two hundred years and more, this force pushed people far, far enough that this morning you turn the tap and there is clean water, far enough that each of you sits here, reads letters, reads books, and these matters, two hundred years ago, most people dared not dream of in a lifetime. The next section speaks no reasoning, it sets out numbers only.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.