I was reading the Tao Te Ching lately, and Chapter 18 struck me. Let me paraphrase (from Red Pine and a few other translations):
When the Great Way is left, kindness and justice arise
When reason arises, we encounter deceit.
When the six relations fail, we encounter obedience and love.
When the country is in chaos, we acknowledge honest officials.
I take this chapter to be one of failure. If people hold to the Tao, the Great Way, that connectedness-of-reality, you can have an orderly life. When you loose it things fall apart – even if we think we’re being virtuous.
The arising of kindness and justice sounds like a good thing. Reason is a good thing, correct? Yet the entire chapter is one of decline, ending with one of my favorite lines, the acknowledgement of honest officials – when shouldn’t they all be honest?
It’s a curious chapter indeed. Some things we’d think of are good are sneered at. When contemplating it, I had a useful insight relevant to political and social conversations of the day.
The way I read the chapter is the sense of the Tao, that unity, leads to harmony. There are kindness and justice, reason, good relations, and so on, but they are part of a “unified” worldview that is both mystical bust also practical. There may be kindness, honesty, and so on, but they are the result of holding to the Tao – not separate and distinct from it. “True” virtuous things, as it were, things that have a foundation.
But when you loose that sense of unity, everything is broken, out, separate, a substitute. That’s when I thought of the term bandied about these days (in 2026) – “Cargo Cults.”
The term “Cargo Cult Fascism” arose to describe certain would-be strongmen of our age who seemed to think that if they acted like fascist leaders, they’d have automatic compliance. The term spread to other areas of political and social discussion, noting just how much of our society was people acting out things but not actually doing them or caring about them or understanding them. Such people and their actions often failed and fell apart – bad but also dysfunctional.
But if you have “bad” Cargo Cults, that also means you can have ones of people trying to be “good.”
Suddenly, I understood this chapter of the Tao Te Ching better (especially considering the times of Taoist-versus-Confucian). It was about fragmented things, divided from a larger reality, imitative but with no foundation. Past a point you’re just going through the motions and not being anything, and not connected to the Way, the foundation of things, the depth of it all. Your kindness, your morality, no matter how hard you try, is going to be a bit hollow, a bit of an act, without that foundation.
I think that’s also why the last line hits me hard. Imagine a society in so much chaos that saying someone is an “honest minister” is a compliment as opposed to indicating that if that’s exceptional your government sucks. Also maybe that person is just a poser anyway.
Regularly reading great spiritual and philosophical works is good not just for your own spiritual “ecosystem” but for reviewing and thinking over modern and past times. This was a useful insight, helping me understand both past writings and our current situations.
(I mean the situations are both terrible but I understand them better)