Today, I want to make a case for the reluctant hero. The person who doesn’t seek glory, but is nonetheless dragged into a conflict by circumstance. This is someone who wasn’t looking to get involved, but whose conscience will not permit him or her to walk away.
In other words, a person motivated by principle, by a sense of duty, rather than their passions.
I’d like to clarify exactly what I mean by this by first making a distinction:
This is not exactly the same thing Kant meant by saying an action has to go against inclination for it to have moral worth.
That statement, found in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, meant that moral worth requires conscience triumph over instincts to the contrary, in the same way that bravery requires, by definition, the overcoming of fear.
When you overcome your prejudices to give someone your full attention and a fair shot,
When you hold yourself back from temptation, knowing you’d likely get away with it,
When you stay up late or get up early to take care of something important, fighting the urge to blow it off all the while –
These are examples of conscience winning over inclination: acts of moral worth.
And what I’m going to advocate for today is something five degrees off from that:
Doing something despite having a lack of interest in the outcome.
Maybe a better term for what I’m talking about isn’t actually “the reluctant hero” but the disinterested hero.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t just say that in the beginning, some ideas are discussed so rarely that you need to explain what you don’t mean before you can say what you do mean.
The concept of the disinterested hero is summarized perfectly in chapter 68 of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, a school of Chinese philosophy that started roughly 2500 years ago.
I’ll reprint Gia-Fu Feng’s iconic 1972 translation below, and then proceed to expound upon it –
You could very well just take the 55 words of this chapter and meditate upon them daily or hourly for a year or so, and I’m sure you would come up with all kinds of deep insights. I’m sure because that’s what I did, and I want to tell you what came to mind for me, and how I applied it to my life.
SIXTY-EIGHT
A good soldier is not violent. A good fighter is not angry. A good winner is not vengeful. A good employer is humble. This is known as the Virtue of not striving. This is known as the ability to deal with people. This since ancient times has been known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
“The virtue of not striving.”
That sums it up, and yet I know it only raises more questions than it answers. As a first step in answering those obvious questions, read it again, and see how quickly your mind starts to clear up like a stuffy room once the windows are open.
What do these repetitive stanzas reduce to?
A good person is unemotional.
The skills of warfare do not require or benefit from the anger of the soldier.
The fighter is not better at fighting because he is angry with his opponent.
The person who triumphs is not enhanced by feelings of antipathy toward the person who lost.
The person who is in charge does not become a better boss by gloating over his or her authority.
Striving, then, is equated with the extra emotions: angry, violent, vengeful, proud or arrogant.
Lao Tzu says there is a virtue in not striving, a virtue in lacking the animating force of intense emotions.
In the very next line, he says something that sheds some light on exactly what he means by all this:
This is known as the ability to deal with people.
Again, his answers are puzzling, but they are answers.
In the absence of striving, in the absence of strong emotions that take us over, we have the ability to deal with people.
Well, I have to say I find that very interesting. What is implied here is that emotions make us forget that we are dealing with other humans. Emotions blind us by making us unthinking, lacking in sympathy, and myopic.
Let’s keep paraphrasing the lines until they become even less cryptic:
A good soldier/fighter/winner/landlord has the ability to deal with people.
Are you shocked yet? Because this is nothing short of shocking if you have truly grasped it.
Being good is less about having to be better than other people, and more about being good with people. With them! This can only mean that these sorts of strong emotions actually disconnect you from others, and turn you into someone trying to get something from others.
The angry soldier needs to kill the enemy, the violent fighter is trying to do as much damage to the other as he can, and the vengeful winner doesn’t want to win as much as he wants the other to lose, and the arrogant employer loves that his employees are dependent on him for their livelihoods.
All of these asymmetrical dynamics are actually quite unfortunate: wars, fights, stressful contests of skill, and the mutual interdependence of the fortunate and the unfortunate.
But for people animated by these violent emotions, they relish in the destruction, denigration, and subordination of the lesser, the loser, the weaker, the poorer of the two parties.
This is not virtue, because this is not how you deal with people.
The implication here is that, yes, life drags us into conflicts all the time, but something is wrong with you if you are happy about that. You have your duty to produce results, and that very fact stratifies the world into winners and losers, masters and slaves, those who eat and those who are eaten.
But are we required to be sad about it? Nothing to that effect is said here. It is enough to emphasize the fact that an enthusiasm for life’s inevitable moments of destruction is pathological and by definition antisocial, and that something of profound importance is lost when you are so excitable by the prospect of gain at another’s expense.
The ultimate unity with heaven is what comes to those who do what must be done, to the best of their ability, because anything that must be done must be done as well as possible, if it truly must be done at all. Unity with heaven is what you get when you understand that the best you can do is not the most you can do, the farthest you can go.
To do the best you can also means you must not do any more than is necessary: this is known as the virtue of not striving. It goes without saying that an angry, violent, vengeful person does not know when to stop, and this requires no elaboration on my part at all.
How did I apply this to my life?
To put it simply, the 68th chapter of Tao Te Ching taught me to focus on the person I’m dealing with, instead of trying to be true to the emotions aroused in me by the situation at hand.
I never questioned the emotions, and I never thought seriously about what it was I was trying to accomplish: I would capitulate to my feelings, thinking that this was “authenticity,” and that there was something noble in refusing to betray my feelings for the sake of superficial social conventions.
What I gradually came to understand is that my intense emotions were born of immaturity, even petulance, not “authenticity.” I saw that I was dramatizing my own emotions because I lacked the ability to deal with people. The moment I began to focus on creating the best possible outcome between myself and the other party, and therefore began to cultivate the skill of dealing with people, the emotions began to disappear altogether.
I still have emotions, of course, but they are speaking in their inside voices, so to speak – they are not shouting, feigning urgency, and attempting to hijack the conversation. They inform, rather than insist, because I no longer believe that emotions excuse anything, and because I now understand that emotions can function as a smokescreen that conceal the inability or simply the refusal to analyze.
Does that make me, as I implied before, disinterested?
I think that when you start to see your life as an aggregate of relationships, there is both so much more to be done and almost nothing to react to: you are action itself, and nothing is happening to you as much as you are the activity that is happening, the conduit through which moments of contact and exchange occur.
I think the examples of soldiers, fighters, winners, and employers are used to make the point clearly: often enough, we are called upon to enter into dynamics where not everyone can come out feeling like the winner, and there needn’t be any emotion involved at all.
In that moment, there is something that needs to be done. Our purpose, yours and mine, is to be calm and clear enough to perceive it, participate in it, and fulfill it.
The virtue of not striving means the virtue of not being on a crusade – some goal above and beyond the actual humans you share your life with. There simply is no life without others, in the most basic sense.
For this reason, nothing that comes between you and the continuity of your relationships with others can be called virtue: the only way forward is together, and this must inform and temper the moments when, yes, we must fight and militate against and dominate each other.
I cannot stress enough that these asymmetrical dynamics cannot be avoided, and, when I say that a communitarian ethos should temper our behaviors, I mean they should cleanse us of stupid, unthinking brutishness.
In no way am I saying, as a general principle, to become a pushover, without a spine and without boundaries. I am actually saying something quite opposite: become perfectly capable of delivering on what is demanded by life, unclouded by trite ideas of both pacifism and heroism.
What is there to strive for? Life has placed an entire life, an entire world, right in front of you: simply fulfill the roles you have been granted. This, since ancient times, is known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
Deep down, everyone is looking for the fountain of youth.
Or, said another way, everyone is looking for a way to make death less scary.
Whether you’re
taking care of your health to ensure that you age gracefully,
hoping your name will live on by meaningfully contributing to your professional field, community, or family,
or cultivating faith in reincarnation or an eternal reward in heaven for a life well lived
We are all, in our own way, taking steps to minimize the negating power of death. If our bodies must die, let it not happen any sooner or more ungracefully than necessary. Let us be survived by successful and happy children. Most of all, let us do something with our lives that makes them worth the time, the toil, and their ultimate brevity.
If you have not yet awoken to this concern, trust me, you will: from antiquity to today, it runs through our culture at every level.
Is there a solution to this age-old problem?
Yes and no.
As I’ve stated in other blogs, wisdom and peace of mind have less to do with making problems go away and more to do with rising above them through understanding.
To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “the solution to the problem of life appears as the vanishing of the problem” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521).
The world doesn’t necessarily change, but your attitude about it can. You can look at the same world and no longer see a problem.
The sorts of changes that bring about significant positive improvements, then, are not circumstantial, but perspectival.
My intent for this and similar articles is to facilitate perspectival change,
And I do so by presenting teaser trailers, so to speak, for what life might look like if seen through wiser eyes.
This is how I changed my own perspective and thereby my own life: I read, reread, and eventually memorized (yes, really) an English translation of the Tao Te Ching, or “The Book Of The Way,” written by Lao Tzu some twenty five hundred years ago in ancient China.
Today, I’d like to share my thoughts on the fifty second of its eighty one chapters, which is the one and only chapter where we are told precisely, if obliquely, how the fear of death is to be overcome.
I’ll reproduce the entire chapter, and then go through it one idea at a time, so we might make a small but irrevocable step in the direction of wisdom, and away from avoidable suffering.
Chapter Fifty Two
The beginning of the universe Is the mother of all things. Knowing the mother, one also knows the sons. Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother, Brings freedom from the fear of death.
Keep your mouth shut, Guard the senses, And life is ever full. Open your mouth, Always be busy, And life is beyond hope.
Seeing the small is insight; Yielding to force is strength. Using the outer light, return to insight, And in this way be saved from harm. This is learning constancy.
You may have noticed one of the strangest lines in all literature;
“Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother/brings freedom from the fear of death.”
No, talking about serious or deep topics does not mean we are forbidden from acknowledging that we are perplexed, or that we find something opaque, unclear, or even ridiculous.
A serious conversation demands that we be open, and say what we really think: that is the beginning of seriousness, because it cannot be a performance. And I am thus demanded to say that when I first read that line, I found it utterly absurd. I granted it some hidden, deeper meaning, on principle, but decided it was something I was going to have to come back to. It simply made no sense, sounded silly, and did not inspire serious reflection.
Not at first.
Let’s walk through it together slowly, and I think you’ll come to see what I see now: the tip of a sort of iceberg; a mere thread that unravels an enormous knot if tugged at tenaciously.
The beginning of the universe Is the mother of all things
This seems straightforward enough. He is simply defining terms: the ultimate beginning is here called “the mother.”
Knowing the mother, one also knows the sons.
If the mother is the beginning of the universe, then who are sons? The universe, by necessity. He frames it as an obvious consequence: knowing the mother, one also knows the sons. Of course! In older, traditional societies, you didn’t know someone in isolation. You knew them as part of a lineage: if you knew a mother, you knew her children.
The familiar thing, the thing that should be taken for granted, is used to make sense of the esoteric thing:
If you know the world, and of course you do, then you know the source, the beginning of all things, far better than you realize.
The meaning of this will soon become clear after we put the last piece in place:
Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother, Brings freedom from the fear of death.
In light of the minimal decoding we’ve already done, we might rephrase this as
“Knowing both the present and the past removes the fear of the future.”
If this is true, why is it true?
Because the past is just a present moment that has already happened, and the future is a present that is yet to happen: besides their temporal arrangement, there is no difference between any of them, just like an old woman, a girl, and an infant daughter may all be the same person on different days.
What was it like in the very beginning? Just like this, but longer ago. What will it be like a long time from now? Again, just like this. Our lives are being lived now, but we didn’t exist in the past and will not exist in the future: the future in which we will be absent is no more dreadful than our absence in the past.
If this is still too abstract to resolve real feelings of existential anxiety, and I say that it is, then think back to a time in the past that you know you experienced, and yet no longer remember. Some random point in your childhood, like the daily events of your eleventh year.
They took place, you witnessed, experienced, and participated in them, and they presumably felt as real then as this moment does now, and yet it is lost from memory. Lost from memory, and yet a link in the chain of moments that led you here: your childhood self is the mother to your present day self, you might say.
When the final days come, then, they will seem as natural in their temporal context as today’s events do now: unique and special in some ways, perhaps, but unremarkable and banal in other, larger ways. Whatever is happening now is at the end of a long series of cause and effect relationships that are neither unknown nor mysterious, even if major details have been forgotten: it is actually all quite ordinary. As ordinary as the fact that you were once eleven must seem to you now.
Surely, then, you can bring yourself to admit that the thought of yourself a decade from now isn’t that hard to imagine. You were once eleven, and then twenty one, and then thirty one, yet forty one is unimaginable? Sixty one some terrifying specter? Hardly. Whatever you are doing now must eventually become as distant, as undeserving of recall, as whatever you were doing during your eleventh year,
And this should feel relieving.
We arrive at the deeper meaning, at least in my mind, of this passage:
The mother is the level of the general, and the sons are the level of detail.
What is the justification for this interpretation?
The beginning of the universe is surely something none of us has experienced, but the present moment is the only thing that anyone has experienced.
In exactly the same way, nobody has experienced anything in general terms. Only the specific can become an experience. And, yet, a sense of the general emerges after enough encounters with specifics. Knowing the sons, one also knows the mother.
Is there such a thing as the specific in logic? Absolutely not. All logic is general, by definition. So, while nobody has ever, by definition, experienced the general, or experienced logic as such, logic nonetheless works. Generalities do explain, because what is wisdom if not the generalized explanation that makes the particular bearable, while still being too vague to replace detailed behavioral prescriptions in the present, toward the particular?
This, then, is the real, or rather a further meaning of the couplet
Knowing the mother, yet remaining in touch with the sons Brings freedom from the fear of death.
It means that we have to operate at the level of the particular: life is to be lived, and it is a hands-on activity. The details matter. The timing matters. They will always matter, and nothing supersedes them. And yet, the inferred sense of life that we are here calling the generalized, is like a kind of divine cosmic mother that gives birth to and eventually receives all the tumultuous activity at the level of the specific.
The big picture, the conceptual frameworks, the insights into life contained in literature, poetry, art, theater, music, the lessons of history, and, most importantly, our own memory: these come to the aid of the person wholly immersed in the present. They are not an escape from, or an alternative to life in the here and now, but they both enrich its myopia with their vastness and blunt its conjoined urgency and futility with their evidence of undying continuity.
The fear of being brought to nothing, coming to naught, and living in vain, is something of which we can be readily and repeatedly disabused by simply reaching out to the stratum of the generalized, where both the remembered past and the inferred future live: the past and future both live with us in the present at the level of the general, and thus the inevitable demise at the level of the particular seems less consequential, and, on days of rare exaltation, even illusory.
Keep your mouth shut, Guard the senses, And life is ever full. Open your mouth, Always be busy, And life is beyond hope.
The meaning of these six lines, in isolation, is fairly straightforward and does not demand elaboration, except to say that a life of restraint, of observation and reflection, is an easier life to live than one of hot pursuit.
Be still, and both perceive and receive life’s fullness: it pours into you when your movements cease. One need not change drastically, but merely notice the reliable correspondence between the slowing of activity on the one hand and the deepening of experience on the other.
To connect it to what has gone before, then, I might add that the proper relationship between the specific and the general is what tempers the addictive craving for novel stimulus in the present. To generalize is to strip a thing of its novelty, and the wise use this strategically.
I can tell you that I’ve talked myself into many a good thing and out of many a bad thing by doing precisely this: extrapolating into the unseen future by applying generalized reasoning and logic when the specifics available in the moment were insufficient.
My last point leads us perfectly to the concluding passage:
Seeing the small is insight; Yielding to force is strength. Using the outer light, return to insight, And in this way be saved from harm. This is learning constancy.
The “outer light” is objective reality, the specific phenomenon happening now. Returning to insight, and being thereby “saved from harm” means returning to reflect on the repository of collected experience, or the general.
Using the language of the first stanza, we might say that, rather than fight with the sons, discuss the matter with the mother, “and in this way be saved from harm.”
Again, a modeling of the correct relationship between activity in the present and action informed by the generalized sense garnered from experience and reflection. The truisms, the patterns, the wisdom, the principles that exist only at the level of abstraction nonetheless steer us clear of danger as we navigate the particular.
When he says, in closing, that this is learning constancy, he means just what he says: that if we both participate in and observe life properly, we should only become steadier with time. We should expect to accumulate enough of the general to become ever more unphased by the particular, the culmination of which is to be unphased even by the termination of all particulars.
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 “whenTao 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.
Welcome back. Today, I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism.
I want a model of reality that I find credible, yet also provides me with some buoyancy in the face of life’s entropic forces.
What I don’t want to do is commit suicide unto the faculty of reason, which is how Albert Camus described faith.
Allow me to elaborate: I refuse to take refuge in something I know I don’t believe, just because it sounds reassuring. I can’t pretend to be convinced when I’m not, and, if I did, the internal conflict that would ensue would be far worse than living with the honest admission of uncertainty.
If you can get on board with that, or at least take that for a test drive from now until the end of my article, I think we can have an interesting discussion.
Before proceeding, another word of clarification: the reason pretending to believe what you do not is worse than whatever alternative honesty would bring as a consequence is that pretense is unhealthy.
Begin building on a foundation of falsehood, and, with every passing day, the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness only grows in intensity. When the time comes to assert what you actually believe, to stand up for your principles, there will be no weight behind it. You will have no credibility with yourself, and what should ring true only rings hollow.
So, we can’t cling to what we don’t truly believe, and, instead, we have to admit to our true beliefs.
One of those true beliefs, one true statement I can make now, however, is that beliefs drive behavior, and I therefore want the beliefs that will drive the right behavior. I want a good life, meaning that I want to live in such a way that I can look in the mirror and see a good person.
My fundamental beliefs about life, the world, and my place in it are what determine my actions, good or bad.
This is obvious: my beliefs about the weather govern how I dress myself.
If I want positive outcomes, then, I need positive beliefs that facilitate them.
So, if dishonest positivity is not an option, but some positivity is required, then neither is cynicism an option. Cynicism could be here defined as the belief that all positivity is dishonest and therefore not to be engaged in.
I gave a good overview of Negativity Bias in a previous newsletter, which I encourage you to read, but I’ll summarize here by saying that our biases make it hard for us to adopt a positive mental attitude: negative information is seen as more important, more true, and more sophisticated.
If faith is the suicide of reason, as Camus said, then I say cynicism is death at the hands of reason: an airtight explanation that nonetheless makes life impossible.
A brave and daring person, then, should insist that life’s horizons be kept bright without giving any insult to the faculty of reason in the process. Win win or no deal.
This brings us back to what I said at the outset: I want to talk about the intersection of positivity and realism. The most believable and the most uplifting, simultaneously.
I encountered an excellent prospective model for such a belief system in chapter 39 of the Tao Te Ching, which I will now reprint in its entirety, and proceed to analyze.
These things from ancient times arise frome one: The sky is whole and clear. The earth is whole and firm. The spirit is whole and strong. The valley is whole and full. The ten thousand things are whole and alive. Kings and lords are whole, and the country is upright. All these are in virtue of wholeness.
The clarity of the sky prevents its falling. The firmness of the earth prevents its splitting. The strength of the spirit prevents its being used up. The fullness of the valley prevents its running dry. The growth of the ten thousand things prevents their dying out. The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall of the country.
Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high. Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.” Do they not depend on being humble?
Too much success is not an advantage. Do not tinkle like jade Or clatter like stone chimes.
Before going through it in more detail, let me just tell you, in broad terms, what it is I believe you’ve just read: a presentation of a harmoniously interconnected world.
A world that is healthy, thriving, morally upright, and responsibly governed, where those who occupy the highest positions are humble because they are enlightened: they understand the inextricable link between what is above and what is below.
Here’s where we get to do a bit of what salesmen call “objection handling.”
It’s clear enough that the world isn’t perfect, or, at least, that kings and lords do not appear to “depend on being humble.”
It’s clear to anyone with eyes that there are plenty of problems at the level of governance, and that it is far from “whole,” as the text appears to state.
Here’s where I come to another important point about what it means to find the intersection of positivity and realism:
You have to be capable of stating and advocating for your ideal in the face of less-than-ideal circumstances.
I am certain that Lao Tzu did not believe all rulers everywhere to be whole and upright – he criticizes bad rulers frequently in other chapters.
What is being presented here, then, is the ideal that may never be realized, but toward which the real can always be nudged.
The key to being both honest and optimistic is to be in possession of a clear ideal: the 39th chapter of the Tao Te Ching presents one perfectly. Scanning all of creation from top to bottom, and praising it for its wholeness, its cohesion, its dutiful integrity. Everything performing its part perfectly because it is perfectly intact.
What is the benefit of accepting the image of the world put forth here?
I’ll answer with another question: If you saw the world and everything in it as whole and good, how would that influence your behavior?
A good world doesn’t need to be changed, only taken care of. A good person doesn’t need to be changed, only cared for.
Good people don’t always do what I want them to do, Good people make mistakes, Good people can stall out in their development, Good people can get angry and say things they don’t mean,
And still be good people.
Similarly, the world contains death, disease, malevolence, tragedy, ruin, and baffling wastefulness,
And none of this constitutes proof that the world is broken in any way. These things are real, and the world contains them.
The notion that the world could and therefore should exclude things that are undesirable is to misunderstand what the world is: the world is the arena of cause and effect, the gallery of what is real. Presence in the world is conditioned only by the presence of prerequisite conditions: if it has been caused, then it is.
Whence comes the notion of incompleteness, then? The world as I have described it is perfectly sensible, perfectly complete, and perfectly good: all causes are entitled to their corresponding effects. That is fairness, that is wholeness.
People are who they are because they are elements of a world governed by actions, not by moral judgments.
Rather than decry the world or humanity for its ugliness, then,
And here is the leap into wisdom,
Recognize what is perfectly complete and fair in its ugliness.
The existence of something, the incontrovertible fact that you have experienced something is proof only that the world admits this, too, through its gates.
Where is the fault, the brake, the lie?
You should by now see what I have done:
I began by granting that the description of a whole and upright world was merely an abstract ideal,
Only to go on to prove that it is no mere ideal, but the actual state of affairs. You would have done the same, were you in my shoes.
There is nothing wrong with the world, Nothing wrong with humanity, And nothing wrong with you.
Believing something to be wrong turns you into a kind of impotent god, equipped on the one hand with superior knowledge (you know how everything should be) and lacking any ability to bend anything to your will on the other.
To believe that something is wrong with the world, humanity, and yourself is to hold a belief that leads different people down different avenues,
But never done the avenue of knowledge, never to enlightenment.
If you think a thing to be incomplete, you leave it to go in search of what might complete it, all the while neglecting it. Were you to operate under the assumption that all the puzzle pieces had been put back in the box, however, you would simply set about putting it together straight away, as no necessary thing is missing.
By knowing the world to be complete, you are free to engage it completely.
The disparities of the world do not prove the world to be broken.
Let us look again at the chapter:
Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high. Princes and lords consider themselves “orphaned,” “widowed,” and “worthless.” Do they not depend on being humble?
What does this mean, the low is the foundation of the high?
Nothing can be raised up unless there is something else above which it is raised. That is what being raised means in the first place.
To have contempt for what is beneath you is like the treetops having contempt for their own trunks and roots, contempt for the soil on which it stands. The earth gave you something to stand on, gave you something over which to aggrandize yourself.
I can only say I am literate because others are illiterate. If I’m tall it’s because I’m taller than others, and their relative shortness is the basis of my status as tall: they gave it to me by creating the disparity.
This is the inextricable link between what is above and what is below. Great people only have value because of the mediocrity of others. Their greatness is owed less to their own accomplishments than to the relative lack of accomplishment of others.
This is why Princes and Lords “depend on being humble” – they are rulers because they are not subjects, the same way that night is not night as much as it is “not day.” One’s entire identity, everything you might claim for yourself, is created, even as a concept that can occupy your mind, by the reality of a disparity between one state and its opposite.
We have now revealed the meaning of the opaque closing lines, then:
“Too much success is not an advantage. Do not tinkle like jade Or clatter like stone chimes.”
Too much success is what you have when you forget that you only have success in contrast to those who are less successful, including your previous self. I cannot spurn the thought of myself as a helpless infant, because the level of change between my infantile state and my present state constitutes the sole basis for my sense of pride in how far I’ve come.
Headaches handed the billions to Advil.
Therefore do not posture and peacock, do not boast and tinkle and clatter: you only insult that which made you, which gave you everything you have.
How does any of this solve real problems for real people?
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “the solution of the problem of life is seen as the vanishing of the problem” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521).
The disappearance of the problem, not the appearance of the solution.
The Tao Te Ching is not a book that offers solutions as much as it accelerates the dissolution of problems. It offers a series of common sense perspectives that, when put together, taken deeply to heart, and applied assiduously, remove self created suffering from your life.
To be able to look around at the world, at humanity, at yourself, and see that all is as it should be – including the unceasing demands for attention placed upon you by all three – is to be at peace.
To think of the world, humanity, and yourself as broken, incomplete, and morally flawed is to live in misery: your best efforts amount to little more than putting lipstick on a pig.
When all is as it should be, nothing need be added, but the sense of moral condemnation is automatically subtracted. You live in a household that must be continually set in order. Things drift into disorder of their own accord – simply attend to disorder as and when you encounter it.
No, it does not minimize the scale of any problem to state it so plainly. What it intentionally minimizes is the self aggrandizing sense of drama that people are, evidently, eager to tack on to the problem. The drama frames the problem as exceptional: I tell you now, it is the rule.
To see the world as it is to be the exception can only mean that the alternative model for the world you hold in your imagination is, to you, the rule. The thing to which the present aberration must eventually yield.
“The humble is the root of the noble.” What is humility, but the ability to relinquish your private reality and submit to what is literally right in front of your face? Surely, this facilitates frequent and thorough attention far better than holding onto a fantasy into which you retreat in ways and at times that are not fully within your control, and are certainly detrimental.
The humility to relinquish one’s fantasies for the sake of reality. Fair enough, but, in what way is this “the root of the noble?” Because, and here I’ll be a bit cute if you don’t mind, the road to attainment is paved with engagement. Let the fantasy world wither so that the long neglected garden of the real might now flourish. The more you abandon self aggrandizing fantasy for the sake of humble toil, the more you take on the quality of nobility: skilled, accomplished, influential. Someone of substance and consequence.
To earn the respect and cooperation of others, perhaps even their admiration and deference, takes time and effort. “Therefore the humble is the root of the noble.”
It is the person who tries to circumvent this process that eagerly declares himself a success, “clattering like stone chimes.” Eager to announce and gloat in his superiority over the humble, he is a plucked flower without roots, destined only to wither. This is the fundamental distinction between fantasy and reality: the presence or absence of these humble and prosaic foundations.
See the world before you as the right one, the real one, the better one, and do what it requires of you: this is the path to nobility.
And that, I believe, is as honest as it is encouraging.
Make Beautiful Choices 