The Book of Sand
I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
— Eduardo Galeano, In Defense of the Word
Every few years, the New York Times publishes a long piece explaining that the financial industry has consumed the real economy. The villain wears a different fleece vest or a different cufflink, and the conclusion always calls for regulation and a redirection of capital toward productive enterprise.
Readers nod. The op-ed page moves on. Finance continues without interruption until a few years later the cycle completes itself with fresh data and the same prescriptions that failed the last time around.
Oren Cass published the latest version on February 6th of this year. Goldman Sachs devotes less than ten percent of its revenue to helping businesses raise capital. Less than two percent of its assets are loans to operating businesses. Business investment has fallen from 5.2 percent of GDP in the 1960s to 2.9 percent over the last decade. Manufacturing productivity has been declining since 2012. America has gone from leading China in sixty of sixty-four frontier technologies to trailing in all except seven.
He calls it a grift and proposes transaction taxes and stock buyback bans.
Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity in Rolling Stone in 2010, and the image went everywhere and changed nothing. Greg Smith resigned from Goldman in 2012 and published his indictment in the Times itself, and by the following quarter the stock had recovered.
Dissent Magazine documented in 2014 that financialization accounted for roughly half the decline in labor's share of national income. Occupy Wall Street filled Zuccotti Park, and Dodd-Frank channeled the energy into regulatory machinery the industry began circumventing before the ink dried. Elizabeth Warren built a presidential campaign on the identical diagnosis.
Each one names the problem, proposes solutions that can only operate within the system being indicted, and dissolves.
Cass is the latest turn of the wheel, and the fact that he can cite his own predecessors without appearing to notice he is repeating them is the funniest and saddest feature of the entire genre.
· · ·
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and spent his childhood in his father's library, a room he later described as the central fact of his life. He went blind in his fifties and was appointed director of Argentina's National Library in the same year, a circumstance he recognized as one of God's finer ironies, eight hundred thousand books and darkness in which to read them. He spent the rest of his career surrounded by eight hundred thousand volumes he could not read, writing stories about labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite libraries.
He wrote a story called The Book of Sand about a volume with infinite pages that has neither beginning nor end. Every time the owner tries to find a page he has already seen, the book has rearranged itself so that no page can ever be found twice.
Financial apparatus of the kind Cass describes operates the same way. Regulate one instrument and the pattern migrates to the next, and by the time the regulator arrives the instrument has already become something the regulation cannot reach.
The essays diagnosing the apparatus operate the same way too, rearranging themselves every few years with fresh data and new bylines so that no reader ever notices they are reading the same page for the fourth time, like sand shifting underfoot, formless and impossible to grip. Every version of the genre leaves the same thing unsaid.
They are not hiding. Goldman Sachs is not embarrassed that less than two percent of its assets are loans to operating businesses. Private equity does not conceal that it buys assets from its own older funds and lends itself the money to do it. Cass found these numbers in public filings. Anyone can find them.
A Roman emperor who fed prisoners to lions in the Colosseum was not trying to hide the lions. A spectacle of that kind serves a specific strategic function, which is to demonstrate that power does not need to hide because no one who sees it can do anything about it.
When Gilgamesh enslaved his own people to build the walls and temples of Uruk, he did not build them in secret. Five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, a king pressed his name into wet clay and stacked it forty feet high so that every person who walked through the gate would feel, in the architecture of their own smallness, that the arrangement was permanent.
Cass's numbers, published in the New York Times, perform the same function. We take. You lose. Read it on a Sunday and go back to work on Monday.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life trying to describe what systematic dehumanization does to the people who endure it, understood that the visibility of the cruelty was the point. Systems that extract everything from the bodies they process do not require secrecy. They require acquiescence, and acquiescence is produced most efficiently when the people being processed can see exactly what is happening to them and discover that the seeing changes nothing.
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to a German-speaking Jewish family in a Czech city inside a dissolving empire. He studied law and spent his working life processing injury claims for a workers' accident insurance company, cataloguing the ways industrial machinery broke human bodies. He wrote at night in a language that was already becoming foreign to the city around him, in a body that tuberculosis would kill before he turned forty-one. He published almost nothing in his lifetime and asked his closest friend, Max Brod, to burn the manuscripts after his death. Brod refused, and the work survived.
Kafka built his entire body of work around the discovery that Levi would later confirm in the death camps. Josef K. in The Trial is told he is under arrest and spends the rest of the novel trying to find out why, and the system is perfectly visible, its offices open, its functionaries polite, its operations conducted in plain daylight, and none of that visibility produces any leverage because the system does not depend on secrecy.
The entire world depends on the impossibility of ever reaching the place where decisions are actually made.
The distance between the man collecting his bonus in Manhattan and the family losing its kitchen table in Cleveland is a Kafkaesque distance, engineered so that no one at any point in the chain is ever responsible for what arrives at the end of it.
· · ·
So let us talk about cost in the only language that matters, the language of the body.
A woman in Youngstown, Ohio loses her job when the plant closes. She is forty-three. She has two children in middle school. Her husband left two years earlier.
She lies awake in the dark and her chest tightens and her hands shake and she cannot make the shaking stop. Cortisol floods her bloodstream in waves that were designed by evolution to last minutes and now last months. Her children hear her crying through the bedroom wall and absorb the vibration of her terror into their own forming nervous systems the way soft clay absorbs a thumbprint.
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and director of traumatic stress studies at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. In her research, she discovered that trauma of the kind we see in the Youngstown mom, and millions just like her, rewrites gene expression. Methylation patterns, for example, encoded upon the FKBP5 gene, a regulator of the body's stress architecture, can be inherited.
We learn that children carry their parents' cortisol dysregulation in their cells. Grandchildren carry it. The inheritance extends as far as thirteen generations from the original traumatic event.
Thirteen generations from the woman in Youngstown. Thirteen generations from each of the fourteen million households that lost their homes in the financial crisis.
Every adult in those households experienced stress severe enough to alter the chemical markers that wrap around DNA, and every child absorbed the alteration into a nervous system still forming, and those children will pass the disruption forward through their own bloodlines long after the men who designed the derivative instruments have died in comfortable beds in Connecticut.
A leveraged buyout that eliminates three thousand jobs in a single quarter produces epigenetic reverberations that will touch human beings not yet born. Those people will never know the name of the fund. They will carry the wound anyway, in their blood, in the architecture of their stress response, in the templates that shape how they perceive danger and possibility for the rest of their lives.
Beyond the body, beyond the gene, there is the wound to dignity.
A man who built cabinets for thirty years and lost his shop when the supply chain moved overseas does not simply lose income. He loses the story of who he is.
His hands, which knew the grain of walnut and cherry and could feel the moment a joint seated properly, become hands that fill out forms and wait in lines and pick up prescriptions. His children see him in the waiting room of the unemployment office and something shifts in their understanding of what a man is and what a life can hold.
You can measure cortisol. You cannot measure the moment a twelve-year-old boy stops believing his father's life was worth living.
· · ·
Eduardo Galeano was born in Montevideo in 1940, and by the time he was twenty-eight he was editing a left-wing daily in a country sliding toward military dictatorship.
He wrote Open Veins of Latin America in the last ninety nights of 1970 while working days at the university. The book traced five centuries of extraction through Latin American soil and Latin American bodies, following the silver out of Potosí and the sugar out of Brazil and the copper out of Chile and the blood out of everywhere, showing at each turn that the poverty of the South was the product of the wealth of the North and that the distance between those two facts was engineered.
Military juntas in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay banned it. Galeano was imprisoned and then exiled, first to Argentina and then, after the junta there added his name to the death squad lists, to Spain. He spent eleven years away from home.
Isabel Allende fled Chile after the 1973 coup carrying two things, an old edition of Pablo Neruda's odes and Galeano's book with the yellow cover.
John Berger said that to publish Eduardo Galeano was to publish the enemy, the enemy of lies, of indifference, and above all of forgetfulness.
In exile, Galeano began Memoria del Fuego, three volumes reimagining the entire history of the Americas from indigenous creation myths to the dirty wars. He wrote it because he understood something every critic of financialization has missed.
Official history, the history written by the institutions that profit from the arrangement, teaches us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present, he said. Accept it. History was already made.
An essay in the Times diagnosing the grift performs exactly this function. It presents the wound as history already made, and readers resign themselves to a present the essay has just confirmed is beyond their reach.
Publication of Cass in the pages of the Times is itself a function of the system he describes. A paper runs the exposé on a Sunday, sells advertising against the traffic, and board members who sit at the intersection of finance and media continue operations on Monday.
Commentators at the Free Beacon pointed out that the Times itself was rescued by high-interest lenders when its stock hit three dollars during the financial crisis. The paper's existence is a product of the financial engineering its opinion pages periodically denounce.
Galeano refused to accept it. He wrote his own history from the ground up, through the voices of the people who had been expelled from every official account.
He believed that memory is a point of departure rather than a place of arrival, a catapult throwing you into present times so that you can imagine the future instead of accepting it.
A people who cannot narrate their own past will never act in their own present, and the deepest function of permitted memory is to ensure that the narration always remains in the hands of the institution doing the permitting.
· · ·
Borges wrote that we are our memory, that we are a chimerical museum of shifting shapes, a pile of broken mirrors. If our memory has been written for us by the institutions that profit from our disorientation, the mirrors reflect someone else's image and we mistake it for our own.
Gilgamesh built his monuments and enslaved his people and when his only friend died he wandered the earth looking for immortality and could not find it. The immortality he wanted was the kind that power purchases, the kind stamped into clay, the kind that requires the smallness of others to maintain the illusion of size.
He came home empty-handed and stood before the walls of Uruk. The story ends with him looking at what he built and finding no comfort in it.
Five thousand years later, private equity firms build leveraged structures stacked so high and so abstract that no one can see the base, and the people at the base cannot see the top, and the distance between the two is the distance that produces acquiescence.
A woman in Youngstown whose hands shake in the dark is not going to be saved by a transaction tax. Her children will not be healed by a stock buyback ban. Communities gutted by leveraged buyouts will not be restored by an essay in the New York Times.
Galeano offers the only answer anyone has ever offered, which is to write your own history in a language the cycle cannot absorb.
The business owner who employs her neighbors is writing it. The parent raising children with their dignity intact is writing it. The healer who restores a wrecked perceptive system one body at a time is writing it. Each of them builds from the ground in a voice the apparatus has never learned to metabolize.
Conformist writers will continue to greet the twilight. Another essay will appear in a few years, the wheel will turn, and the grift will name itself again.
Meanwhile, somewhere a woman whose hands have stopped shaking will tell her children what happened to them in her own words, in her own voice, and the telling will be an act of a history the apparatus cannot enclose.