Ancient advice for politicians
Beyond left and right wing lies wisdom.
All Politicians should read and seek to understand this. It’s a chapter from the Tao Te Ching, written about 500 B.C. which explains clearly why so many policies and politicians fail or get distrusted more and more. The words may puzzle you at first, but hey, my explanation is underneath. :)
Chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching ~Lao Tzu
“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 nothing is left 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 the 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.”
The Way back from Ritual to Goodness.
If in your country the words “This is how we do things here.” or “Accept that’s the way things are.” are uttered a lot, then you’ve reached the ritual level. From there the step to dictatorship is thin as one nights ice, and has probably crossed over already. Ritual means nobody believes or understands why things are done as they are. And those who rule through the ritual will enforce it over the backs of those who complain. While all those who are on the losing side, only get more and more angry because of the injustice they sense.
“The End of the Rule of Law. The Abandonment of Common Good.” Chris Hedges on the current state of the USA.
A call for right winged hard liners justice is not much better. Whose laws are enforced to protect what and who? Now much left wing attitude lies only one level above it. Kindness. Read charity dinners and NGO’s. It basically means allowing injustice to take place while you show what a good person you are. You band aid the wound, but don’t cut down the thorns. Behavior that compares to the Dutch saying, ‘Mopping water, with the tap open’. Charity secretly says, “We are okay with the discrepancy between to poor and rich.We help, because it’s the right thing to do, but we won’t address the unfairness that grew the gap so big.” The real causes are not changed, let alone addressed openly enough.
Goodness doesn’t mean being a nice Christian (or Islamic or any other religion) routinely visiting your church/temple/mosque. If that helps, fine. Essentially goodness means working for the whole, keeping the balance, speaking truth and accepting better arguments than yours. And especially for all politicians: don’t protect your interests over the needs of the whole. Serve the whole as servant, without consideration for Self. That is true goodness. And then you still can go one level deeper with this: Tao.
Control itself creates disorder.
Those that act to enforce, will, as power corrupts, use corrupt power to control outcomes and prevent resistance. They work hard and make victims. Those that seek to know the future with their diagrams and make laws based on their assumptions or measurements will always be wrong. It is folly to try and control the future that way. Their reports most likely will blind them and many others, for what more was possible. Many know current education sucks, yet despite all evidence against the current system, politicians and high officials love to calculate test results within the current meme, just because this way has numbers you can check and score against. Thus they ignore what is really coming (the unknown) and ignore all signs and sentiments with different convictions than theirs.
Then ‘a truly good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.’ This is not a libertarians wet dream (no, it doesn’t mean no regulations so we all can be unregulated businesses cutting down the remaining forests), nor a right winged fear of government involvement. Truly doing no-thing means not enforcing. It means dancing with the wind, surfing with the waves. It means having no plans, yet be open to all that arises. There is no force being used over people, planet or even animals. When politicians, and business people, would learn to restrain from use of force over others, or even within themselves we’d all benefit. If they would shine, because of authenticity and integrity, like Nelson Mandela who radiated higher values and lived them, only then they’d win the respect, help and collaboration they so desperately seek. It’s all about changing from ‘change through force and regulation’ to deep change by becoming the shining example. :)
Note: each different translation of the same book will shed new light upon this ancient text by Lao Tzu. Thus read more translations to deepen insights. Quite a few a freely available online. This book is the basis of Taoism.
Another chapter with very actual importance, by ‘How Stuff Works’.
