Discovering Naturalness Naturally (Tao Te Ching 57)

57.

Leaders use justice to govern a country.

They use cunning to establish military dominance.

But if you really want to inherit the world, don’t try to control it.

How do I know this is the way?

Like this …

The more legalistic and restrictive a regime is,

the poorer the people become.

When governments stock up on expensive weapons,

the people get confused.

When people start scheming in a culture, absurdity abounds.

When you see rules posted everywhere, it’s a sure sign lawlessness is rampant.

As a sage once said:

“I surf the Tao and leave others to wake up on their own.

I rest in tranquility, and let others attain their own alignment.

I'm not intrusive, yet folks discover abundance.

I rest in contentment

and let folks discover naturalness for themselves.”

Written Reflection

This chapter helps us understand difference between modern liberalism and the naturalness of Taoist anarchism. The Tao Te Ching expresses care for all beings, but it doesn’t express such care by advocating for a highly controlled society. States, even socialist states, cause everyday people harm when they become restrictive. We’ve seen this to some extent in China, but especially in Cuba. To be sure, part of the problem for anti-capitalist revolutions is the fact that the global economy has its tentacles wrapped around just about everything. Nonetheless, rules alone can’t change things. For another world to be possible, society needs to think less about finding ways to get people to appreciate naturalness, rather than force.

Admittedly, most small communities who try to live without hierarchy or gross economic inequality tend to get crushed by both statist servants of capitalism and and state capitalists who call themselves communist. But this has more to do with the global strength of big states rather than the way homo sapiens tend to interact in village communities. It’s hard to say whether we, as a species, tend to act more like the free-love hippies known as bonobos or like their more violent cousins the chimpanzees. But in either case, their self interest is never served by some impersonal state. Their existences are organic and cooperative.

Recently, American politics has indeed become absurd. Our chapter predicts this: “When people start scheming in a culture, absurdity abounds.” Scheming can be seen in the ways in which political actors disregard facts for the sake of their agendas, disregard justice for the sake of partisan loyalty, and plunge the country into chaos so long as their people remain in control. The whole thing, you see, is about control.This chapter is also particularly critical of the political philosophy known as legalism, which tries to control popular behavior through fear of punishment and hope of reward. The Tao Te Ching, on the other hand, encourages us a natural way of being, in which our behaviors and mutual cooperation involve intrinsic motivations.

There are times in which this seems to be too terrifying to trust. To be fair, trusting blindly that political systems will right themselves is not what’s promoted here. Rather, the idea that folks will eventually get tired of controlling governments—as we’ve seen recently in the political trends of young people in the United States and in the popular dissent of women and girls in Iran—depends on allowing folks to walk away from failed systems and treat their neighbors as fellow humans.

This chapter does not imply individualistic libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. To trust, for instance, powerful corporations is no safer than trusting powerful rulers. Rather, it depends on a perspective of mutual gift-giving. Sure, we may have lost that sort of language in a world panicking about scarcity and forced into a Hunger Games economy of competition. But eventually sick systems die out as systems. Trusting in the Tao to align things doesn’t mean everything will be pain-free. It does mean that one way or the other the Tao will ensure that, as the Rastafarians say, Babylon will fall. The question is, how much poison will Babylon spill into our naturalness in the mean time?

In any case, friends, surf the Tao and romance people in your circles into a better way of existing. That’s all we can do, but if enough of us try, it can have a healing effect. In the mean time, when you find yourself anxious, meditate on natural beauty wherever you can find it. If nothing else, find a few branches and behold the wonders of unworked wood (pu, 樸).