Welcome back. I write a lot, here and on X, about being good. What “good” means in an absolute sense, and what getting better means in a relative sense.
You need both. If all you have is relatively better or worse, you can do objectively bad things while telling yourself those acts are better than a hypothetical alternative – these are lite cigarettes, diet sodas, not the really hard drugs, and I don’t drink as much as these other people.
“Better,” as an idea, might hold you over for a time – but “good” is the only way you can truly hold your head high.
Similarly, if all you have is a kind of Platonic “good” floating out there in the ether, painted on a ceiling somewhere in Italy (oh, Italy), it never quite connects to the decisions and actions and plans that you make today.
“I want to be good, and I make that happen by choosing better.” That, right there, is the relationship between the two: “better” is the filter applied to decisions, and “good” is the overall sense you get when you make decisions correctly more often than not for long enough.
The road to goodness, therefore, is walked one decision at a time, and this is the tricky part:
Getting better means understanding more than you used to, literally from one decision the next, one day to the next.
What that means, of course, is that the picture of what it means to be good is always evolving over time – or, rather, it is evolving for the person who is getting better.
This why it’s so difficult to continue improving: you always have to give up some idea of what “good” means to you. The immature idea has to be surrendered when the more mature idea is presented.
And that is what “better” actually means: the more fully matured understanding and application of “good” between the two or however many options you have.
To get better from there is to repeat that process, and this, by definition, always requires a willingness to add on to or replace what may have worked just fine at a prior juncture.
This requires flexibility. It also requires humility, which is actually indistinguishable from flexibility: move according to what is truly necessary, rather than in the limited ways that best please you.
A failure of flexibility, for example, would be to reach a certain degree of goodness and say, “ok, this is good enough for me.” If you’re looking for the day when you give up this tedious business of getting better, and finally pat yourself on the back for being good, you’ll find it, but it will be your invention.
I should know. This was my main preoccupation for some time. I liked feeling confident that I was good, and I liked hearing it from others. Unfortunately, I was neglecting those daily decisions, those daily acts of choosing better than before.
That requires scrutiny. It requires a clear image or vision of a goal, and sustained attention on it. You have to be looking for the opportunities to continually fork off in a different direction in order to continually make progress.
It is impossible to muster that potent panacea called “sustained intention” for something you don’t truly want. You have to want it, like a teenager wants sex, or else there’s just no way.
Why say all this? Because most people want to be seen and regarded as good, by themselves and others, far more than they actually want to get better. Getting better is work! Nothing but work! Needing to feel good is, and here I’ll say something embarrassingly obvious, often at odds with the will to work hard.
I believe my lengthy preamble has led me to a declaration of intent for the remainder of the essay:
Let’s really make the important distinctions surrounding this topic, this business of betterment in the pursuit of the good, perhaps not once and for all, but certainly with due rigor. Certainly, we can and should advance the conversation to the point where we can say a seed has been planted, and an irrevocable step in the right direction taken.
To accomplish this, I turn once again to my old friend Lao Tzu, who lays this out with perfect clarity in chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching. Close to halfway through the eighty one chapters, we are handed a subtle but thorough accounting of the distinctions I’ve just begun to discuss. Here we go:
A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.
A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
Let’s go through it one idea at a time, because we want to actually benefit, not merely appear sophisticated to an ignorant person.
A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.
Trying is not doing. Becoming is not being. Even if the former may eventually lead to the latter, it is not a guarantee, and there is a fundamental, rock solid difference between enough and not enough.
In today’s world of lowering standards for the sake of sparing the feelings of mediocre performers, this could not be emphasized enough: trying to be good does not make you good. It makes you someone who is trying. Good on you for doing so, but keep it up, and expect no rewards until the goal is achieved.
A hunter cannot feed the village by advertising the fact that he is pursuing the bear or the boar, and there is no such thing as incremental progress to be celebrated: up and until the food is placed on the plates, nothing of value has been delivered.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.
This doesn’t mean that trying to be good is foolish. It means that it is not the good man who must try to be good. The good man is not aware of his goodness, because he is aware of no delta, no change, between the state of folly and the state of goodness. He is profoundly established in goodness like, and I’m sure you saw this coming, a fish is established in water.
If you are contemplating your goodness, it can only mean that the memory of folly is still so fresh in your mind that you are surprised, relieved, perhaps and hopefully even overjoyed and grateful, that you have at last found goodness. Total goodness is marked by the cessation even of this.
A truly good man is unaware of his goodness, and is therefore good. To have goodness and to be unaware of it is to truly have it, to be truly good.
A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.
This idea is best understood as an extension of the previous idea: to “do nothing” does not mean inactivity, but, rather, activity that is so perfectly natural that it is utterly unremarkable in the eyes of the doer. Again, if you ask a fish what it was doing all day, I doubt it would say “swimming.” And yet, swimming took place.
At the highest levels of proficiency, actions become invisible even and especially to their doers. Actions done with the maximum skill “leave nothing undone.” They accomplish their objectives totally, as if a problem had never even emerged, let alone been solved. Like a dinner so completely consumed that you can look at the plate and wonder if there was ever food on it in the first place.
Contrast this with the foolish man who is always doing, yet much remains to be done.
The first thing to understand here is that this is not a denigration of the foolish man, but simply a delineation between foolish and good: the foolish person is the less skilled of the two.
The fool speaks words that create confusion, requiring further clarification or resulting bad instructions, misunderstandings, and offense.
The fool cannot do tasks as well, requiring supervision, or intervention, or correction, lest sub par word be admitted.
All of this looks like a lot of activity, because it is. It is so much more than would be necessary if a truly skilled, a truly good person were in the place of the fool.
The worst thing a fool can do, then, is give up. It takes time to get good, and much of that time is spent in tedium. Again, the objective has to matter to you very intensely: you have to want to do it right more than you want to feel good. You have to be willing to forgo superficial comfort long enough to taste the satisfaction of real accomplishment.
Eventually, you must forgo even that much: an actual fish receives no medals for swimming, and yet out swims everyone. If you are truly committed, this is where you are headed.
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.
It is clear enough that the chapter creates a ladder of understanding that progresses as one line allows the next. The truly kind man is not exactly the same as the truly good man, because, while they both leave nothing undone, the truly good does nothing, while the truly kind does something.
The difference between truly good and truly kind is, then, in the sense of going out of one’s way. Making a special effort. Or, perhaps, in the necessity to do so. The truly good is presented as the highest form, with the truly kind coming in second.
What is the deeper significance of this, and why does it matter? Because, while the person making an effort in ways we can recognize might seem more praiseworthy, it only means that the person who is so advanced that the same task can be accomplished without effort is all the while going unnoticed.
This is meant to, perhaps, slightly or duly chasten those of us who like to congratulate our high achievers. To those high achievers, hear the subtle message being passed along here, implied by nothing more than the ordering of Lao Tzu’s observations: to become the very best you can possibly be, you must become good to a degree that will be unrecognizable to those who nurture and encourage you now.
It will mean a sacrifice, not merely on your part, but on theirs: they will feel as though they are losing something, even if this is not the case in reality.
Goodness is invisible, but kindness looks good. And, it is good.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
What are we to make of this?
It’s one thing to distinguish between a good man and a kind man, which is already difficult enough, but it seems a lot to grant that a just man is not quite the same thing as a good man. In many circles, the good and the just are tautologies.
What can it mean, then, to say that a just man leaves a great deal to be done, and more than even a foolish man?
Because someone who goes about dividing the world into camps of innocent and guilty, with the innocent and guilty functioning as accounts receivable and accounts payable, respectively, is someone going about creating more work for everyone, work the judgmental “just” man has no intention of completing himself.
How can I say this? Because Lao Tzu has implied as much but the stratification of the good, the foolish, the kind, and the just.
The good is good,
The foolish tries to be good,
The kind can achieve goodness with effort,
And the just man is placed outside of all this. The just man is neither good, striving for goodness, nor occasionally achieving it. And yet we call him just. What then is the meaning of just, since it is not equal to good?
The one who assesses the relative goodness, kindness, and folly of others, in a way that creates problems, and does not necessarily solve any.
What happens at one step lower than this?
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.
Again, the relative placement tells you what you want to know. The nature of the disciplinarian better explains what is really meant by “a just man.”
If a disciplinarian is someone who doesn’t set an inspiring example, but simply tells others how to behave, and even employs intimidation tactics (he rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order), then the step preceding this would be, it seems, a preoccupation with the moral failings of others, rather than a focus on one’s own choices.
A just man, then, is a disciplinarian in the making: someone standing on the sidelines of life, critiquing the plays on the field but having no influence (no one responds).
And why do the words and actions of a disciplinarian fall flat? Why does no one respond, and why is that met with escalation, rather than reflection and adjustment?
The all too obvious answer is that no one likes or respects a disciplinarian very much, because, again, obviously, the strategy of a disciplinarian is off putting. People don’t like being told that what they’re doing is wrong. They don’t like being micromanaged and intimidated, and, if they comply, it is not truly voluntary.
Perhaps, and this is inference on my part, not elaboration based in the text, many a foolish person fails to become good because they fall victim to disciplinarians, rather than come under the tutelage of a truly good or kind person. They encounter too few exemplars of goodness, and too many meanspirited people who pick at their faults like vultures.
Let’s continue.
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
This both summarizes and advances the discussion, and with remarkable economy (writers, take note).
If “when Tao is lost, there is goodness” sounds like an indictment of goodness, it is and it isn’t. Let’s revisit my pedantic illustration: fish don’t hold swimming lessons, and even anthropomorphic fish wouldn’t have a word for “swimming.”
Goodness both emerges as a concept and becomes the stratum on which we settle when we lose the Tao. When we lose the way.
What exactly does that mean? That total integration is, to borrow a title, beyond good (and therefore, by necessity, beyond evil as well) – beyond a moralizing worldview, and therefore beyond a moralistic approach to behavioral prescriptions.
What is good if not that which redeems the bad, which stands above it, and orients, organizes, and stratifies us as a society? Good only has a relative meaning: better than bad! As basic and obvious as this sounds, and is, we have to spell this out if we are to so much as point at the Tao as something beyond it.
To be above and beyond good and evil is to be amoral (not immoral). Almost nobody you will talk to has a working model for amorality that isn’t, actually, just immorality hiding inside a word salad. Amorality is not and cannot be nothing more than an attitude that fails to separate good from bad, and therefore fails to achieve what only good can – the mitigation of suffering.
A Taoist conception of amorality has to deliver something better than anything a dualistic concept of good possibly could, and that can only be the chiseling away of self congratulation and addictive clinging in response to the good on the one hand and self chastisement and compulsive aversion in response to the bad on the other.
It can only mean discernment purified of the clouding emotionalism of moral judgment. “Good” is what works, and “bad” is what doesn’t: in this way, the Tao overcomes the inevitable clash and competition between varying moral systems.
One need only observe the difference, and choose accordingly: feeling proud of good and ashamed of evil ends up being nothing more than an impediment to the free exercise of discernment and agency, because they burden the perceptions of both with excess conceptual baggage.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
We can afford a bit more brevity here in light of what has already been said: we now descend a ladder made up of more familiar steps:
Simply being nice can only be called the highest aim of someone who knows naught of real good, and this can only be because he has neither witnessed nor tasted of true evil. Good as such is, just as light and dark are born of one another, born of evil.
It is no great leader who can conceive of nothing higher than niceness as an answer to meanness.
By all means be nice – but it is no answer to evil, and I will not go into battle under the banner of “nice.” That is suicide. Why do I say that? Because good people have to be prepared to kill truly evil people, and that is not within the repertoire of a “truly kind man.”
When we lose kindness, after having already lost goodness, we harden into clerical judges. We don’t lead, but only administrate. We no longer nurture each other, but only indemnify.
This is the path to ritual, described here as the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. This is not unduly portentous. What do you have left when people can no longer identify and promote the truly good, can no longer persuade through kindness, and cannot even articulate the difference between right and wrong, cannot even properly outline systems of rewards and punishments?
You get ritual: we do what we do because it is what we do. In other words, an argument from tradition. A fallacy. Why is it like this? Because that’s how they did it back then. Senseless, empty parroting!
And, why is this the beginning of confusion? Because rituals are our way of acting out our values, acting out how we distinguish good from bad and enshrine the good. The rest all flows from there, from those values. Without goodness and the rest, you have the husk of faith and loyalty: halfhearted performances, mere appearances, and no underlying and pervading essence.
You have people doing things for no good reason, because the reasons are unknown to them. They therefore go through the motions without the intention of representing and advancing goodness – what is advanced, however, is conformity, the stock in trade of the disciplinarian.
An inner spark of faith in one’s own goodness begets loyalty to the path of goodness, the continual choosing of better over worse, day in and day out. It is self sustaining, self renewing. Enforcement wears people down, leading them to seek not redemption but escape, distraction, and oblivion. This, surely, is the meaning in saying that ritual is the beginning of confusion, rather than, say, the articulation of goodness.
Or, perhaps, this is what ritual becomes when it is all we have left. I shall return to this at the end.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
What follows this last couplet is the summation of the chapter, and so this is the last truly new idea laid out to outline the edifice that is about to receive its finishing coating of sealant, so to speak.
Knowledge of the future… is the beginning of folly.
Not quite folly, but the start of it. One step in a foolish direction. What I find interesting is that Lao Tzu does not appear to negate the possibility of obtaining such knowledge, but implicitly grants it, and explicitly equates it with folly.
This implies something somewhat shocking: some knowledge is foolish. Bad. The information is not incorrect or unreliable, but both its pursuit and possession are nonetheless not to be counted as good, and, by implication, to be desisted from.
This anticipates the moral question hanging over today’s technologists like the Sword of Damocles: can we truly say that there are forms of knowledge, and therefore entire skill sets, that are better not to have at all?
Lao Tzu here says, unmistakably, yes. There is such a thing as a road better left unexplored.
Due to the positioning of this statement within the chapter, it is fair to infer that the sorts of people who seek destructive knowledge are those who have already been reduced to ritual, reduced to husks of their true selves. This seems entirely accurate.
Those who can no longer distinguish between good and evil, between kindness, politeness, fairness, and corrective scolding, who are simply held in their social roles by peer pressure, and who have been reduced to pantomiming rather than expressing society’s ideals – what is there for them to seek? Transgressive knowledge. Cleverness. Cunning. They seek their own advantage in a corrupted world.
When there is no absolute good to strive for, one can only strive to get ahead of one’s neighbor, and this leaves the door open for sorcery, for magic, for the knowledge and know-how of manipulation. This, you might say, is what becomes of better when it lingers on after the death of the good. It falls down a ladder from better to more to merely different. Novel. Stimulating. Extreme. We have all seen what happens to people who can only appreciate novelty.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
This puts everything into perspective, and is the perfect summation of what has come before.
What is the relationship between ritual and the Tao, or true goodness? The relationship between what is real and what is superficial.
Therefore, the surface is not real, or at least of no real value. It may or may not correspond to an inner depth of virtue, but this presumption of correspondence is the basis of the allure we have for the surface.
This was later expressed by 18th century French novelist Stendhal: “beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Poignant, poetic, and all too familiar. Promises can be broken.
A truly great person knows the difference between hard assets, so to speak, and a promissory note. A great person can find happiness without being misled by mere beauty.
The final exhortation, therefore accept the one and reject the other, drives home yet another defining characteristic of a great person: he or she does choose. Does say yes to some things and no to others. It is neither a universalizing yes nor no to the world, but a selective acceptance of substance and a rejection of shallowness. One cannot have both, because it it were possible, a philosophy by which one might do this would have been given here.
We do have to look past the awkward words to hear someone’s true meaning and intent.
We do have to look past appearances to discern one’s character.
We do have to reject what is merely palatable for what is richly nourishing.
We do have to reject what is merely comforting for the sake of what is edifying, challenging, and rewarding.
We have to reject what is stimulating, seductive, charismatic, and charming, and accept what is truly worthy of respect, commitment, and trust.
The validity of this message lies in its straightforward acknowledgement of what all experience teaches us: that all is not one, that the world is indeed made up of diverse elements, and though all are equally real, they are in no way equally desirable, or of equal depth and value.
Substance is better than appearance.
Kindness and understanding is better than conformity born of fear.
Goodness is better than mere politeness.
Unostentatious virtue is better than a victory parade.
We have gharish, vacuous images on the one hand, and subtle inner essences on the other. They are never found together, and it is therefore unacceptable to avoid the decision between the two.
To reject the superficial for the sake of the real is what it means to choose what is better, and what it means to be good, even great.
Choose wisely.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.
-Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 