taoism

Cultural Cargo Cults Ethics and Taoism

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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)

–Xenofact

The Defeated King

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Once there was a king who was proud and arrogant. He was given the crown but thought he earned it.

“Nobody can defeat me!” he said.

He chose minions who were craven and crawling. They always praised him so they could gain.

“Yes, Nobody can defeat you,” they said in a chorus.

The King stole and started wars. His thugs were turned loose to terrorize people. He destroyed ancestral monuments and antagonized allies.

“Nobody can stop me!” he said.

Most of the People hated the King, and the few who loved him were fools or liars. The People rose up against the King to put a stop to his. So many hated him that few wanted to serve him, even as he offered lavish gifts of stolen money.

“What is going on?” The King asked. “People are rising against me! Arrest Somebody!”

His minions found Somebody to arrest. The King was satisfied. Surely now that Somebody was gone the People would learn their lesson – Nobody could defeat him.

But the People pushed back even harder. His thugs were cornered and outmaneuvered, and many took to drink to drown their sorrows. Across the Kingdom the King’s name was spat like a curse.

“They did not learn their lesson!” The King screamed. “They dare to rise up against me! Kill Somebody!”

The King’s minions looked around. Some were scared. The King was clearly mad. The People were angry. Moreso the minions all hated each other nearly as much as they hated The People.

“Kill Somebody!” The King thundered, spraying spittle.

The King’s minions made sure to kill Somebody. Then,the King settled down, but he was still worried.

“Nobody can defeat me,” the King would whisper to himself.

The next day the King awoke to People escorting him and his family out of the castle. He cried for help, but none helped him, from the cooks in the kitchen to the guards he relied on. His minions were gone, doubtlessly scattered, captured, or turning on each other.

He didn’t recognize any of the People throwing he and his family out of the Castle. Not a one of them.

“How dare you!” The King screamed at them. “You’re Nobody!”

Then for the first and last time in his life, he understood something.

–Xenofact

The Petty People

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In reading various Taoist documents, especially some of the various comments on the I Ching (“The Tao of Organization,” and the “Taoist I Ching,” both translated by Thomas Cleary), I often see comments on “petty men” or “lesser men” and so on. I had a revulsion to these terms, but the more I saw them used, the more I started wondering what the authors meant, and that lent to some interesting conclusions. The conclusions are also instructive in analyzing such documents, so you get to read a column about it.

So in regarding “petty people” (let’s not be gendered here), the more I saw it used, the more I realized it wasn’t a simply dismissive term. Sometimes it was a simple acknowledgement that people had small moral and personal capacity – but they had a chance to grow. However most times it was very dismissive, a warning of people whose smallness was far worse, an outright danger.

Many of these discussions were also couched in terms of yin and yang, the receptive and the initiating – hardly a surprise as my two major sources were I Ching translations. In such takes on the I Ching of a social nature, yin and yang usually refer to followers and leaders. However depending on the time and place of a person, leadership or following could be good or bad.

In many cases warnings about “petty people” would come, often referring to them as yin, as followers. Yin and yang had their places, petty people however seemed to be followers, and often those were in the wrong place. Sometimes you might have a “petty person” in an appropriate follower spot, but often not – they seemed to get into the wrong place for them.

At some point as I contemplated this, it struck me why we had warnings about petty people. The dangerous petty people, the ones we got warnings about instead of “they need to grow” were followers who thought they were leaders.

Then a lot of what I was reading became clear. Or I’m arrogantly assuming I figured it out, but at least by writing it down you can put me in my place. Let me not be a petty person.

The “petty people” that we got warnings about were people who thought they were leaders, thinking they had good ideas, had authority, had something to say.. But at heart they were followers, having neither the strength to implement real leadership, but also probably easily led by other people and forces. Not just people of small capacity, but small people acting large.

That realization quickly catapulted me to looking at history both recent and in the past. How much horror was inflicted by people who were small but in positions of leadership? Who were led by emotions, manipulated by others, perhaps even knowing how small they were and angry about it. Insecure and arrogant and of limited ability and understanding.

I also thought about annoying internet personalities and influencers. Watching people put on performances, acting like they had something to say, but down deep they were mouthing platitudes or repeating what others said. They were acting like leaders while just following trends and imitating knowledge and characters. Many suffered audience captures, so-called leaders slavishly following their viewers or readers.

Leaders who are really followers. People who were, essentially, lied to themselves and to others. Those were the petty people various Taoist authors had warned me about. OK, that I assumed they were warning me about.

And perhaps my take is spot on and I’m brilliant. Or perhaps I’m off, but had a useful insight. Either way that’s an insight that helps me understand the world, all inspired by some Taoist writings and two big takes on the I Ching.

Which is why, to loop it all back, thinking over books like these are useful. You make the effort to think and analyze and learn a lot – and it may not matter if you went a bit off the rails or not. You learned something.

I suppose if I can keep learning, I’m at less risk of being one of those petty people.

–Xenofact