Overcoming Anxiety and Fear (Tao Te Ching 13)
A lonely tire swing at the Taosurfer Ranch.
13.
Both praise and shame
invite anxiety and fear.
Serving one’s ego
only leads to a fiasco.
What does it mean
that praise and shame
invite anxiety and fear?
Praise puffs you up;
shame tears you down.
Trying to stay on top
brings fear that you will fall.
Fear of failure
keeps you from rising up.
This is why praise and shame
invite anxiety and fear.
What does it mean
that serving one’s ego
only leads to a fiasco?
Fiascos happen
when we care more
about looking good
than doing the right thing.
So let go of ego, and
there will be no room left
for anxiety or fear.
Realize that you are
one with the whole world.
Then, the whole world
will be your playground.
Love the world as yourself
and you’ll inherit the world.
Reflection
“As somebody once said there's a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fiasco...A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folktale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because it didn't happen to them.”
–Drew Baylor, Elizabethtown
In the critically panned but occasionally smart movie Elizabethtown (2005), the main character Baylor (played by Orlando Bloom) is a prodigy shoe designer. There’s a lot of pressure on him to be great and he operates in an arguably superficial business world. He creates a shoe that is touted as the pinnacle of his life’s success, only to learn that a problem with his design will cost the brand $972 to fix. Before getting canned, his boss shames him. Baylor despairs, and comes to the realization indicated by this quotation.
For many within our profit and success driven society, none of the money or fame can really compensate for the constant stress and uneasiness that comes too often with professional life. Many of us spend half our careers longing to finally arrive, and the second half regretting that we can’t stay on top or that we never really reached the heights we longed for. This is the anxiety and fear that Lao Tzu wants to help us shed.
In this chapter, praise and shame lead to anxiety and fear because it relies not on a joyful presence, but worry about the past or the future. Unfortunately, this is often precisely what commercial society wants from us. It’s about incentivizing good worker behavior. Fear of loss and hope of gain. Carrots and sticks. Fame and shame. As common as such tools are in the workplace, the Tao Te Ching recommends laying them down as ineffective and even counterproductive.
At least according to one psychologist, despite our almost universal Western belief that incentives and punishments are the best motivators, Lao Tzu is right in practical life. Alfie Kohn, in his book No Contest: the Case against Competition (Why We Lose in Our Race to Win) (Houghton Mifflin 2nd rev. edn., 1992), argues that competition isn’t actually a basic, natural way of existing in human society. Rather, it adds a toxic element to almost every relationship and in fact keeps us from truly excelling. This is primarily because the fear of judgment within reward systems tend to deaden intrinsic motivation for endeavors that we might otherwise enjoy.
We’ve seen this a lot over the last twenty years, in our work within higher education. Young people have well-meaning parents who do everything they can to incentivize their students as they head off to college. But too often, this pressure leads to student anxiety, and this anxiety too often tangles them up internally, sometimes causing them to freeze up and fail to turn in projects that they at first were delighted to pursue. The lesson here is important for almost all of us.
We will become self-fulfilling prophecies if we constantly live in anxiety that we won’t measure up. By focusing on beauty, excellence and artistry of the work we do instead of our own image or even material gain, we ironically stand a better chance at being successful. Even when we aren’t we live much healthier, less anxious lives.
There is some fascinating poetic repetition in the original Chinese of this chapter. We didn’t repeat the repeated phrases in our English translation because of our overall interest in helping the reader understand the key themes in accessible ways, without resorting to footnotes. We believe that we’ve captured the core truths Lao Tzu is after.
One aspect of our rendering is worth noting: here and elsewhere, we distinguish ego from our true self. Some observers assume that the Tao Te Ching involves a sort of Zen-like dissolution of ego altogether. (We’ll leave aside the question of whether Zen in fact does advocate the annihilation of ego and merger with the void. Zen does seem to have been influenced by Taoism, and thus one can find strands of teaching within it that resemble what Lao Tzu is after here.) Rather, we think the overall approach to our individuality in the Tao Te Ching involves a rejection of ego—our false, contrived selves—and an embrace of our self—our true natural identity, with its interrelation to the whole material world.
To illustrate, imagine someone who’s a CEO. They got into this business through a series of personal circumstances, family networks, and chance encounters. They have a constant fear that they will be shamed for not really being as smart about their industry as they appear. They have impostor syndrome. To overcome this, they might get louder, more aggressive, and more boastful, all to look the part. This attitude, however, causes people to avoid giving them constructive criticism for fear that they will negatively react. Without those important insights, they are likely to end up making a disastrous move that colleagues could have helped them avoid.
What if, on the other hand, a CEO were to lean on natural gifts while humbly and sincerely seeking wisdom from colleagues in his or her downline? Often, this can help them become more effective than other companies in their industry because they are willing to adapt and address the needs and techniques discovered by those folks who have boots on the ground, as they say. Such people let their true, sincere selves shine rather than the ego-costumes. And in this, they often wind up “inheriting the world.”
This chapter isn’t primarily about how to get ahead in business, however. It explores the connection between mysticism and ethics. Mysticism isn’t magic. It isn’t about manipulating the world through supernatural or esoteric techniques, in order to gain something. Rather, it is an awareness of ultimate reality. It is a passive reception of the beauty, truth, and goodness all around us. Most importantly, it is an experiential realization of our interconnection to all things. It leads to compassion and ethical behavior.
This concept is apparent in the anonymous mystical work, Theologia Germanica. This treatise, written by a priest in the fourteenth century, a time during which some priests were prohibited from administering the sacraments due to a split between rival popes, addresses the idea of motivation for acts of love. It suggests that no real ethical value comes from “hirelings,” that is, those who want to do good just to get “saved” or earn points for the afterlife. Rather, acts that flow spontaneously from love rather than fear of punishment or hope of reward, is the basis for a truly ethical life. This means, it isn’t about incentivized behavior but about an awareness of reality.
But how does mystical awareness actually motivate ethical life? By seeing the connections and unity of the universe—our connection to eternal reality and perhaps even God on the one hand, our connection to other humans, and our intimate connection to the natural world—causes us to treat it as we would treat ourselves. That is, when we see that we are all in this together, it is easier to act responsibly toward the poor. When we see other humans around the world as part of our common humanity, it is harder to bomb them. When we recognize our connection to the oceans, it is harder to dump plastic bits into them. In other words, spiritual awareness doesn’t give us more will power; rather, it makes acts of injustice and cruelty seem distasteful, ugly, and repulsive. In other words, mystical realization changes our hearts.
If we haven’t said so enough, we are neither trying to Christianize the Tao Te Ching or force Jesus into the mold of Lao Tzu. We do, however, like to note when there are key similarities between their core teachings. This chapter is particularly resonant with the teachings of Jesus, specifically the Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, we intentionally allude to Jesus with the phrases “love the world as yourself” (see Mark 12:31) and “inherit the world” (see Matthew 5:5). In each case, they teach something that is both spiritually noble and also practically healthy.