Then winter set in. There was no food in the city, and provisions and other supplies could not be brought through the harsh Russian winter. The greatest army Europe had ever seen began starving to death. Realizing the tragedy that was about to ensue, Napoleon had no choice but to retreat. The weather worsened. By the time the remnants of the army made it back to French territory, a half million men had been reduced to a few thousand. Thus ended the French empire.
That which goes against the Way comes to an early end.
A World That Seems Natural
Let’s say you’ve had a really bad day and feel overwhelmingly stressed out. You didn’t sleep well the night before because you had two presentations to prepare for work, and your daughter reminded you at ten o’clock at night that she needed supplies for a school project the next day. You’ve had one meeting after another all day long, and now it’s three o’clock, you’ve eaten nothing but chocolate, and you have a meeting coming up that you agreed to three weeks ago when you thought you would have time for it. In fact, you had volunteered to lead the meeting. You feel irritated just thinking about one more obligation.
So what might happen next? You could rush into the meeting, harried, stressed, angry at your pressure-cooker life, and just get it over with. The others at the meeting would begin to feed off of your stress, anger, and exhaustion. Your feelings would bring out their own stress, anger, and exhaustion. You might start making recommendations, but the others would probably oppose them because of the contentious mood of the room. Minor conflicts would begin to emerge that had little to do with the content of your suggestions. The entire meeting would become an unpleasant scene of conflict, and you would leave feeling even worse than before.
We’ve all probably sat through meetings like this, where subtle undercurrents of resentment and bad feeling end up undermining things. In fact, most of us have probably had this experience in life in general. It happens when we see ourselves as separate from others and let our unhappiness seep into their experience without our even being aware of it.
The Laozi is actually quite specific about who will be most influential in any given situation: it is those who practice nonaction (wu-wei), which in the Laozi means appearing not to move or act but, in fact, being very, very powerful. Remember the Russian generals who lured Napoleon deeper and deeper into their trap. Those who practice nonaction seem not to act. But in reality, they actually direct everything.
Here’s an alternative scenario, one more in tune with the Way. Let’s go back to the meeting you had volunteered to lead. It’s the same situation: you’ve had a hard, frenzied day, and this feels like one more obligation on top of so many others.
You rush to the door of the conference room. But this time, before you enter, you stop, breathe deeply, and calm yourself. You are stilling yourself, bringing down your stress levels, and your anger, and getting to that place where you can see everything as undifferentiated. When you still yourself, you’re getting closer to the Way.
Then, and only then, after you have gained a sense of stillness, do you walk into the room. You immediately sense the room and all the people sitting there in all of their complexity. You can intuit that there are some people who are stressed, some who are disengaged, and others who are excited to be there. Your job now is to help all these different people reach an accord so the meeting is productive. Without saying a word, with just a glance, you have quietly taken the measure of the people around you.
When you sit down, you don’t bellow, “Okay, now listen up: this is what we’re going to do!” No, you simply sit down quietly, exuding calm.
Of course, you have an agenda; a set of goals. You know how you want things to go. But instead of stating your position overtly and strongly, you elicit responses from the group. You raise a few questions, bring up a few points, and by the responsive tone you use, the words you choose, and the way you look at people, you create a mood that steers everyone down the path you want them to take. As the other participants begin to talk, the calm, interested, expansive way you respond to them brings out other thoughts. People begin to understand one another well. They begin bouncing ideas off one another, and plans form that you can help shape by encouraging or discouraging through nonverbal communication: smiles, frowns, nods.
Make no mistake: you are in charge. But because of the way you sit and make eye contact with people, the way you express your excitement about their ideas in an engaging tone of voice, your colleagues aren’t conscious of the extent to which you are directing the agenda. Slowly a consensus forms, as everyone connects over a certain set of plans.
When the meeting is over, the other participants might go away thinking, Wow, that meeting went really well; it seemed to run smoothly all by itself. But in reality, you ran the meeting. You shifted the mood of the room completely by your actions—actions that embody the principle of nonaction. Softly, subtly, you created a world in which everyone was connected, excited about their ideas, until what emerged in the end was surely better than what any of them could have come up with before, and yet different from what any of them thought they would want to do when they entered that room. You led by following. And by doing so, you were the Way.
When you become a sage, you don’t merely sense people well. Through your softness and suppleness in every encounter, whether with your family, friends, or colleagues, you generate a world around you. You can alter the way other people think and feel by the miniworld you have created.
True influence isn’t to be found in overt strength or will. It comes from creating a world that feels so natural that no one questions it. This is how a Laozian sage wields enormous influence.
The Laozian as Leader
When his achievements are completed and tasks finished,
The people say that “We are like this naturally.”
The enduring power of the Laozi lies in its potential to help one become infinitely more influential through softness, not hardness; through connecting, not dominating. But what makes a person so effective in a Laozian sense is the ability to generate a world that feels so natural that we can’t imagine it ever having been different, even though it is newly invented. Power and effectiveness, therefore, come not from direct action or overt tactics but from laying the groundwork so that a dramatically different reality comes to be. This is how one can shape things on a small scale, and it can also be how one effects changes that transform the entire world. Let’s now take a look at a few historical figures who exemplified this.
In America, we tell our children that our nation is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, as established in the Declaration of Independence.
However, if one looks back to the mid-nineteenth century, this idea was hardly accepted in the United States at all. The founding document of America was then seen to be not the Declaration of Independence, but the US Constitution, which took slavery for granted. In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln made the argument that all men are created equal. The president’s move was to claim implicitly that the Declaration of Independence was America’s founding document, and that we as a nation were dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
When he made this argument, in 1863, it was explosive. The press were incredulous: America was dedicated to no such proposition, nor was the Declaration of Independence the founding document of America. However, Lincoln’s vision not only won the day, it also came to be accepted as received wisdom for America as a whole. Today we commonly believe that the Declaration of Independence was the founding document of the United States and that the notion of equality for all was the foundational principle of our nation from the very beginning.
This notion would become the basis for many later developments: for instance, a century after Lincoln’s speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that when it came to race, Americans were not living up to their own professed values of treating every human being as created equal. He could make this argument only because the notion o
f equality was accepted as received wisdom. And this notion was only accepted after Lincoln made it so.
And what about the idea of the role of government in American life? We fiercely debate how involved the government should be in order to ensure economic prosperity, but few Americans would assume that the government’s role should ever exceed certain parameters.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that the United States needed a more expansive government to rebuild the economy and help those in need. When he offered his new reforms, the US Supreme Court argued that such a vision broke from what was allowed in the US Constitution. After many political battles, however, FDR’s reforms, which we know as the New Deal, were carried out. Those reforms resulted in the creation of a massive new federal government that regulated the economy, controlled the financial sector, provided financial assistance to the elderly in the form of Social Security, and aided the poor and needy through the welfare system.
To fund these reforms, FDR instituted a more progressive system of taxation than had ever existed before, in which the highest tax rates were in the 90th percentile. This radical new vision for statecraft was so successful that it ultimately became accepted wisdom in America. The model of a regulatory state controlling the financial sector, regulating American commerce, preventing the rise of monopolies, and maintaining a highly progressive taxation system continued for the next several decades. Democrats and Republicans supported it. The only significant tax cut that occurred over the next several decades was established by Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, who reduced it to the 70th percentile.
This regulatory state built the enormous public infrastructure projects and extensive educational system that helped propel America into the longest period of economic expansion in its history. This model was so successful that other countries looked to the United States as a guide for their own political and economic systems. All of this became accepted wisdom for how to run a state well.
We no longer live in such a world. We cannot imagine anyone in America paying taxes at a rate of 90 percent. We take for granted that a government should play a limited role in regulating the economy and in controlling the financial sector, because we believe these moves dampen economic growth. When did this change occur? In the 1980s.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president with a radically different vision for America, in which the reforms of the New Deal were portrayed not as having rescued the US economy but as having held it back. Reagan and his fellow Republicans advocated limited government regulation, especially in the areas of the financial sector, education, and public infrastructure, with lower tax rates to stimulate economic development. Although this view was highly controversial when Reagan was first elected, it had become accepted wisdom by the 1990s. Indeed, in the 1990s during the Bill Clinton presidency, this policy came to be known as the Washington Consensus, fully accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Here again, this vision, which became seen as the natural way to run an economy, was exported to the rest of the world as the proper and only way to understand economic and political behavior. Thus, it became impossible to imagine taxing anyone at rates up to 90 percent, even though these were tax rates that once had been seen as completely acceptable and even essential for running a flourishing state.
* * *
So, when did the world we take for granted emerge? How exactly did these changes occur?
In these three cases, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan were perfectly playing out aspects of the Laozi’s philosophy. All three were able to make new and highly controversial positions seem completely natural. In the words of the Laozi:
The Way constantly does nothing, yet nothing is not done.
If lords and kings are able to hold to it, the myriad things will be transformed of themselves.
Abraham Lincoln did not argue overtly that the Declaration of Independence was more of a founding document than the Constitution. He did not begin his speech by saying that although the Constitution is the founding document of America, let’s just say that the Declaration of Independence is instead. Rather, he wrote one of the most eloquent speeches in the history of America. With his famous opening line, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln rewrote history, alluding to a past that had never existed. Not only was the Declaration of Independence not the founding document, but also the president reinterpreted the statement about all men being equal to include slaves, even though many of the founding fathers (including Thomas Jefferson, who drafted it) were, of course, slave owners who included only white men in their definition of “men.” What Lincoln was saying was empirically false on both counts. But by laying out such a compelling and unforgettable vision, he planted the seeds for what would become accepted wisdom. Now we memorize entire passages of the Gettysburg Address, which has become part of the standard rhetoric of the United States in general.
FDR did not present himself as a radical revolutionary, battling entrenched institutions and notions to save Americans in a time of dire need. Instead, he endeared himself slowly to everyday Americans as a congenial grandfather type, who, in his “fireside chats” over the radio, was simply there to help them through the difficult times of the Depression, and to offer a few practical suggestions. Thus, he came across not as a new visionary marking a fundamental turning point in the history of the nation but as a solicitous neighbor offering advice to help people. (He was to use this tactic years later in a move that was to draw an isolationist America inexorably toward war—after having pledged not to enter the raging conflict in Europe—when he gently compared providing arms to our ally Great Britain to lending a neighbor a garden hose.)
Reagan also presented himself as a genial, witty, and kindly figure trying to help Americans return to an earlier, glorious time of individual liberty. Earlier in his political career, as governor of California, he had been a firebrand. As president, however, he drew from softer images that would speak to America’s past and present. He created an image of himself as all-American cowboy, referencing his career as an actor and as a commanding leader. He combined that with the mien of a jolly, reasonable paterfamilias. In one televised debate with President Jimmy Carter that was to become the turning point of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, he prefaced his response to Carter’s points not with direct rebuttal but by simply waving them off, chuckling, “There you go again.”
Reagan became the first president to salute the military whenever getting off the presidential helicopter. In the eyes of the public, this move became an iconic image of what a commander in chief does, even though the Constitution requires that the president be a civilian, and military rules dictate that a civilian should never salute the military. But that was beside the point. The salute allowed Reagan to show respect for the military—at a time when the country perceived itself as weak. It soon became unthinkable for an American president not to do so.
Each of these presidents pulled from earlier stock visions of America, such as the great orator calling forth our higher sides or the caring, grandfatherly neighbor. They hinted at traditions, such as Reagan’s allusions to the cowboy on the range forging his own glorious destiny. They wove all this into a new vision that eventually ushered in a new reality.
The world we take for granted today is not the world that existed before. All three of these figures were perfect Laozian sages, generating a radically new order that was fully accepted as natural by those within it.
All three were presidents, in positions of authority to begin with. One might assume that gave them a built-in advantage. From a Laozian perspective, though, when you are already in a position of strength, it’s all too easy to give in to the temptation to play strength over weakness. But Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan used weakness to effectively generate their worlds—the same approach that worked for Rosa Parks
and Gandhi, or that an office worker might use in dealing with a difficult boss. By employing less overt strategies, they were able to accomplish far more than they could have had they tried to impose their wills directly. The argument of the Laozi is that you can always defeat strength through weakness. If you’re in a position of strength, play weakness, and if you’re in a position of weakness, play weakness. Play weakness regardless of your starting position, and that is how you will shift situations in better directions.
The legend of Laozi as not just a sage but also a god who generated the Way is not as fantastical as it might seem. The Way does not exist in some natural, unchanging order that we must find and harmonize with. Rather, as Laozi shows us, we form the Way by actively weaving together everything around us. Each of us has the potential to become a Laozi—to become a sage—and generate new worlds.
6
On Vitality: The Inward Training and Being like a Spirit
Think of the most charismatic, energetic person you know. Have you ever thought of her as someone who is “full of spirit”? Have you ever noticed how being with her picks you up, and fills you and everyone around her with energy?
Or consider how, when you’re totally depleted, you say that you’re “low energy.” Your voice is dull, your mind feels foggy. All you want to do is crawl into bed and take a nap.
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