VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 47
Check and Balance: Let No Single Hand Hold the Whole Field
The four commons are told to here: all four are there, they feed one another, each keeps its bound, and that share with no owner goes to the many. Yet all four rest on one underlying ground: no single hand can grow so big as to hold the whole field to the end. Chapter forty-three answered half of this matter: a single hand holding all cannot stand, for it will be pushed back by the very things it cannot measure. That line is true, yet it bears a hard flaw: waiting for it to be pushed back often takes time—sometimes tens of years—and through those tens of years, many a person’s whole life passes away. So this chapter answers the second half: is there a strength that pushes it back on the spot? This chapter is set in three sections, walking through three strengths that push back, and drawing together the weightiest block of this semester.
The first section begins with a fight two thousand one hundred years ago, to dig up the very root of check and balance. Chapter forty-one counted the five ropes on that boss’s back: the timber, the buyer, the bank, the master craftsman, and the law. Not one of these five was designed by any man; they grew out of the position itself—to want one thing is to take on one restraint. Yet the strength on the two ends of a position-grown rope is seldom equal; where it grows slack, a single hand begins to rule. So a human act must be added: bring both ends to the same table. In the sixth year of Shiyuan under Emperor Zhao of Han, that debate on salt and iron set one side speaking of state revenue and border defense, and the other speaking of competing with the people for gain and harming customs. Neither side spoke nonsense. When the debate closed, the liquor monopoly was dropped, the iron officers inside the pass were withdrawn, and salt and iron largely remained as they were. Neither side won all. That fight left three things behind, which stand as the very footing of check and balance: the accounts set in the open, a place for words to be spoken, and the words spoken left on record.
The second section looks at the second strength. That stone that held firm for over a hundred years was not so rare in the ground; men held the mine, pinched the supply, and spread a word of forever, making it seem rare. This is just that line from chapter forty: that grid was not made by working, but blocked out by standing in the way. How did it loosen at last? Not by men cursing it down, but by someone in a furnace pressing carbon into the very same thing—same composition, same hardness. Some places in Henan now turn out more in a year than was ever dug out from under the ground. That wall was not leveled by anyone; it still stands there, only the road has turned around its side. The wall-builder draws the chessboard small; the gap-filler draws the chessboard big. Yet this road does not grow on its own; it asks for three things to be complete: someone willing to stake money and try, someone who knows how to make it, and no command standing in the way to stop them. So check and balance is not four rules glaring at one another with open eyes; it is each doing its own work well, and thereby pushing back the others of itself. At the end, this section divides two kinds of walls: the wall that blocks harm should stand high and clear, while the wall that blocks others from doing the same thing must bear a time limit and be watched over.
The third section looks at the most unfeeling strength of all. That film company with a hundred years of history had the finest skill and the largest factories, and had even built a camera that used no film under its own roof. Yet later on, people simply stopped buying film. No one issued an order to close it down, no one robbed it, nor was it argued down in any debate; it simply sat in that decent room, watching the order slips grow fewer day by day. This scale cannot be persuaded and cannot be commanded, for it is made of thousands upon thousands of strangers each taking their own counsel. It knows no person, and so the larger the house, the heavier it falls. Yet it too has places it cannot reach: it can push back what is not good, but it cannot carry a person through when he cannot go on. To that forty-year-old weaver, the people who stopped buying his cloth did nothing wrong, yet what is he to do? This scale answers not a single word, leaving it to those three hands in chapter forty-two to catch him.
What this chapter sets firm is this layer: check and balance is not who commands whom, but that no one can win the whole field. These three strengths brought together are three roads: a person can still speak, a person can still make another thing, and a person can still choose not to buy. These three are just the larger form of those three from chapter forty-four: words can be reasoned out, the books can be seen, and a person can walk away. Where all three roads stay open, no single hand can grow into a sole ruler; where all three are blocked tight, failure may still take tens of years to come, and through those tens of years, many a person’s whole life passes away. The four commons joined with check and balance bring the great middle section of this master map together here. The next chapter raises the eye a notch higher, to see what kind of upper structure is pushed out as these four run down below.
Contents of This Chapter
Section 1: That Fight Over Salt and Iron: When the Words Ended, No One Won All
Section 2: A Wall Built Up Can Be Filled Away
Section 3: The Market’s Scale: No One Fought It Down, People Just Stopped Buying
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1: That Fight Over Salt and Iron: When the Words Ended, No One Won All