Real Life Tao - The Madness of Kings

Trey Smith

I learned at the age of 10, when I was shipped off to a New England boarding school where the hazing of younger boys was the principal form of recreation, that those who hunger for power are psychopathic bastards. The bullies in the forms above me, the sadistic masters on our dormitory floors, the deans and the headmaster would morph in later life into bishops, newspaper editors, college presidents, politicians, heads of state, business titans and generals. Those who revel in the ability to manipulate and destroy are demented and deformed individuals. These severely diminished and stunted human beings — think Bill and Hillary Clinton — shower themselves, courtesy of elaborate public relations campaigns and an obsequious press, with encomiums of piety, patriotism, devoted public service, honor, courage and vision, not to mention a lot of money. They are at best mediocrities and usually venal. I have met enough of them to know.
~ from The S and M  Election by Chris Hedges ~

Few religions, philosophies or belief systems are monolithic. There almost always is an interplay of thought and ideas that are contributed by writers and thinkers down through the ages. While fundamentalists try to distill an orthodoxy of foundational beliefs, all this tack represents is a personal and often arbitrary delineation of a portion of that belief system's overall corpus.

The two prime figures at the center of Taoism are Laozi and Zhuangzi. It would take a great deal of mental and literary gymnastics to attempt to say that each viewed Tao and Tao's relationship to human society in the same manner. A great deal of Laozi's book, the Tao Te Ching, offers advice to rulers as to how they can rule in a sagely manner.

Zhuangzi, on the other hand, wasn't that caught up with trying to advise those in the ruling class. His school of thought argued that we should eschew external morality and rely more on the Tao that exists in us all. While I am sure that he recognized that government, in some form, is needed in human society, people who more fully grasp the essence of Tao don't need to be ruled. It is when we look to rulers to set the standards of the day that we unwittingly are admitting that we have hardly grasped the essence of Tao at all.

From my perspective, what Hedges has written above, has a Zhuangzian ring to it. The very desire to rule over others is about as anti-Tao as it gets! It is a mentality fueled by insatiable desire and, utilizing the jargon of psychology, we could say that it indeed is psychopathic.

This post is part of a series. For an introduction, go here.