VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 24
Scarcity Is the Board of This Game
Start with a riddle the West turned over for two hundred years and the ancestors closed in four characters. A cup of water and a diamond sit on the table, and water is far the more useful, three days without it and a person is gone, a life without a diamond and a person is fine, yet the diamond is dearer by tens of thousands of times. Ten chapters have spoken of positions and accounts and the card and hide and hair and chains and the rule and the force and the two frames, and walked around one bottommost question the whole time, by what does a thing have a price. This chapter asks it to its face, and its answer is the board on which every move of the last three chapters of the semester will be played.
The first section sets out the board. The riddle of water and diamond has a decent Western name and a two-thousand-year-old Eastern answer, a thing is dear for being scarce, so worn from familiarity that no one stops to see it says the dearness grows not from usefulness but from scarcity, water useful but many and so cheap, the diamond near useless but few and so dear. It takes the four characters apart and finds the bone in the middle, scarce, which is not the temper of the thing but a relation between how much there is and how many want it, the dearness never on the thing but on the relation. And it deepens chapter twenty by one layer, that rule the market is measures, at bottom, the scarce, few who can and many who want reading high, and it sets that onto the three of chapter seventeen, Cook Ding and Zi Qing and the hired emperor, whose one root is that a second could not be found. Then it presses down the discomfort that pricing by the few is cold, showing scarcity was a good rule to begin with, translating where is short into a number so that people and things flow of themselves toward the gap, the differential of the last chapter having these two characters underneath. And it leaves the hook: since the rule is set out of the many and the few, what if someone lifts a hand to change that few.
The second section splits scarcity in two, and this split is the thing not to miss. Born scarcity is fixed by Heaven, the good field leaning on water with two harvests, the gold mine settled hundreds of millions of years ago, the gift of a good ear or a steady hand, its few made by no one, the board itself, dead, favoring nothing and working no ill. Made scarcity is a human hand, and the section tells it as the plainest story, the village well the ancestors dug that all drank freely, until a person rings a wall and opens a door and adds a lock and sits taking one coin a bucket, and not one drop of water is fewer and not one villager more, yet from that day the water is scarce. And the crucial thing, seen to the death, is that on the rule the two are exactly alike, the rule reading the same number for the wall as for a true drought because it has no eyes and no heart, heaven and earth not kind treating the ten thousand things as straw dogs. The section names the hand’s work wei, the wall and the lock and the price all wei, neutral with the good and ill on the hands, and adds the more crucial half, wei the more refined the harder to recognize, the village wall still coarse and visible where the walls to come have no brick and no lock and no one at the door, only a paper, a decree, a name, ringing the water in just the same. And it shows why the split matters, that born scarcity you can only own and then answer by making the thing more, Li Bing’s long river of improving seed and cutting channels, while made scarcity you must first see the wall and ask who built it and by what right, never answering a wall by inventing a more water-sparing method.
The third section takes the most beautiful wall in the world apart, the diamond, a living specimen of made scarcity seen through not by a scholar but by a crowd who make machines. The line everyone can say, a diamond is forever, is no ancestor’s saying and no poem but a line of advertising written in the nineteen forties to sell a thing, written so well that a man pledging his life pictures a stone. The wall is built brick by brick, gather the ore of many places into one house, control the output by what the company would sell rather than what the earth holds, and the most crucial brick, say the scarce into deep feeling, giving the few a moving source so it becomes the eternal and the only and the thing worth three months of salary, not locking the water to take money but making you believe drinking this well is what love is. Last semester’s line is borne out, wei the more refined the harder to recognize, the village wall coarse and this one invisible, the shop counter and soft light and grading paper hiding it, and what guards it is not a watchman but the most labor-sparing guard, hope, the share in billions of hearts of I would give her the best. Then the Henan folk lift a hand, doing the dumb solid thing of making clear what a diamond is, carbon, the same element as pencil lead with its atoms merely ranged neat, and carbon atoms can be ranged neat with high heat and high pressure and years of trying, and what they make is a true diamond indistinguishable under test at a fraction of the price. The machine beat down nothing, quarreled with no one, shouted no slogan, it only made the thing no longer scarce, and the rule at once read a new degree, the four characters reversed, a thing not scarce is not dear, and the hundred years of the line and the salary and the once-in-a-life promise seen through by one machine.
What you carry out of this chapter is the board every later move sits on, and the split that lets you read the moves. A thing is dear for being scarce, and the dearness lives in a relation and not in the thing. And scarcity comes in two kinds that the rule cannot tell apart though their sources are a world apart, one the board that Heaven laid and you answer by making the thing more, one a wall a hand built that you answer only by first seeing it and asking who built it and by what right. The chapter closes by asking whether that wall has only one way of being built, and answers no, made scarcity has three moves, the diamond using only the first, each more refined and less visible than the last, and the last needing not one brick but only a decree, which the next chapter sets out one by one.
SECTIONS
Section 1 Why a Thing Has a Price
Section 2 Born Scarcity, and Made Scarcity
Section 3 That Diamond, and the Machine of the Henan Folk
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.