VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 23
Two Frames, Compared Stroke by Stroke
Start with the temptation this chapter exists to defuse: to pick a side. The last chapter set out the first use of the force, loosed to the freest, and the reflex is to ask whether the other way is better or worse. This chapter first fills in that other way and then lays the two side by side, and by the time it is done, it has shown that better-or-worse was the wrong question and dug beneath both to a single root that is the deepest stroke of the whole volume. It measures the second frame with the same rule it used on the first, core then merit then cost, sparing nothing and puffing nothing, and it holds to the volume’s one method throughout, set out the position and hand down no verdict.
The first section looks at the second use, whose starting point explains everything about how it walked. That start was low to the point of nearly no bottom, war and indemnity one after another, few factories and few li of railway, cut off again and again just as a little holding gathered, and a person standing up from such a start fears one thing most, slow. In 1978 the frame made one decision, to connect the market back in, but it did not copy the first set and did not loose the hands entirely, it fixed the direction first and gathered the force in concentration onto those directions, which said plainly is that it lifted its own hand to build the differential the force flows toward. Its merit is set out in full and owned without discount, more than seven hundred million pulled from extreme poverty in a few decades with no second instance in human history, a high-speed rail net over a whole country, a whole holding of manufacture from not one decent steel pipe to most of the world’s industrial goods, and the character fast, the same road others walked two centuries walked in decades, and owning this is not taking a side but seeing the fact. These grew from the core, the state gives the direction plus the concentration of strength, because the railway into the deep mountains does not earn short-term and is not on the differential table, so the market will not lay it of itself, and the frame fixes the direction and gathers the strength and lays it, trusting a person can point a faster road where the first set trusts the force to run the best road itself, one letting go of the hands and one fixing the direction. And the section names the hand’s own greatest risk, three characters, used past measure, with Laozi, governing a great state is like cooking a small fish, the fire steady but not turned too often or the fish falls apart, the hand exact the frame’s greatest strength and the hand past measure the stirring of a force that should have run itself.
The second section sets the two side by side on merit, five pairs, and holds down the which-is-better reflex until it dissolves. From zero to one against from one to ten thousand, the free set best at bearing the new thing because it can afford ninety-nine of a hundred ventures botching for the one that comes off, the directed set best at turning that one lab machine into thousands made fast and cheap and reaching the mountains. Setting the rule against being the engine, the free set first standing up the whole skeleton of sea routes and ports and contracts, the directed set becoming on that skeleton the machine best able to put out goods, one laying the road and one running on it. Allotting money by finance against by the state, the free set leaning on bank and market where money runs to high return, fast and nimble but short in the hair grown thicker than the hide, the directed set gathering money and putting it out by direction to the railway that does not earn and the village in the mountains, steady and long but short in that a wrong direction is a great sum wrong. The rule steady against the direction steady, both a kind of steady that lets a person dare stake his holding, one trusting the paper will not change and one trusting the road will not change. Rush up first against lift the broad face up, one raising the top higher and one holding the bottom up. Five pairs, two wholly different roads, and the merit landing at last on one and the same matter, a person living longer and eating fuller and coming to read and traveling farther, which the Book of Changes named long ago, all under heaven comes to one home by roads apart, two roads and one home, and taking a side revealed as the wrong question, the right one being which set walks which matter smoother.
The third section turns to the back and compares cost, and digs. The environment, the free set spreading the unpaid account of air and water long across two centuries, the directed set compressing the same pollution into a few decades poured out at once, one spread long and one pressed tight over the same base, that running too fast leaves no one to reckon the account for those behind. The splitting, the free set’s on rich and poor as money flows down the differential and the gap widens with no hand lifted, the directed set’s on coast against inland and city against country as the other face of concentration is the place not concentrated onto, splitting no one set’s monopoly, one growing on the differential and one on who is chosen. And the most crucial pair, the excess, the free set’s excess of freedom that grows the hair thicker than the hide until a small gash collapses the whole coat, the directed set’s excess of the hand that turns the fish too often until it falls apart, looking like two errors in two directions, one too loose and one too tight, until the section digs one layer deeper and asks what each really is. Loosed past measure is the money end running into what should not be the money’s to decide, a person’s life and learning and old age and water and air read wholly by the rule, and governed past measure is the hand reaching into what the rule should read, how much a thing is worth set by force and a road pointed by force, and set side by side these are not two errors but one, money crossing the line and the hand crossing the line, the same three characters, crossed the line. Confucius spoke it more than twenty-five hundred years ago, not in that position one does not plan that position’s governing, not deference but position, the economy one position governing the making and sending and reading, politics another governing the direction and the boundary and the taking-up of those who fell through the gap, and all the costs of both frames dug to the bottom being one line, one side crossed the line.
What you carry out of this chapter is the deepest stroke of the volume and the honesty that comes with it. The two frames are not a ranking, their merits come to one home and their costs share one root, and the root is not an economic error at all but a crossing of the line between two positions, the economy and politics, each with its own work that the other botches by reaching in. The chapter is scrupulous that setting out a cost is a family holding and not a list of crimes, and that where exactly the boundary falls is a question this volume cannot finish, left to volume four the Political Institution and volume five the Legal Institution, this volume able only to point the position out and point it clear. And it closes by turning down, beneath the force, to the question never yet asked to its face, by what does a thing have a price, whose answer is two characters that are the board of the whole game.
SECTIONS
Section 1 The Eastern Frame, the State Gives the Direction
Section 2 Merit Set Against Merit, Roads Apart That Come to One Home
Section 3 Cost Set Against Cost, Digging to That Root Held in Common
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.