The Master does his job
and then stops.
He understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.
Because he believes in himself,
he doesn't try to convince others.
Because he is content with himself,
he doesn't need others' approval.
Because he accepts himself,
the whole world accepts him.
The Master does his job and then stops. He understands that the universe is forever out of control, and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao. Because he believes in himself, he doesn't try to convince others. Because he is content with himself, he doesn't need others' approval. Because he accepts himself, the whole world accepts him.
Maybe a little meta, but I'd like to get a second opinion before I bother the moderators by email.
(1) Does anyone know why the preformatted sections (<pre>) are limited to a width smaller than the width of the post? At all widths, it's roughly 75% of the comment's width. For mobile, this is especially bad, but I'm not sure why it's there on normal screens resolutions either.
(2) You could test different widths. Right click the preformatted section and choose "inspect element". You should have the <code> block highlighted. Move to the parent element, the <pre>. On the right, you should see a max-width with some pixel value. Try setting that to "100%" (without quotes) rather than some pixel amount. Does that work fine for you? Would you like that change? It would be great if someone could somehow test this on mobile as well, but on desktop (if I resize the browser) it seems to work well.
Please don't: when used for code, preserving lines (even when requiring scrolling on mobile) is a good thing. 100% width is fine, no reason it needs to be as narrow as it is.
If a blockquote format is desired, that's great, but don't change the code formatting to make it a slightly-less bad (but still horrible, because of monospacing) way of presenting blockquotes.
I'm personally fine with using the > symbol at the beginning of quoted lines, not sure why people see the need to indent every line with four spaces, that's torture for both the writer and the reader (sideways scrolling long lines, and monospaced doesn't read nicely either). But I'm fine either way, so if there is a small css change that people seem to be in favor of which I (or someone else) can propose, that's probably easier than selling a new feature to the whole community, so I'd like to focus on that here.
When all under heaven know beauty as beauty,
There is then ugliness,
When all know the good as good,
There is then the not good.
Therefore being and non-being give rise to each other,
The difficult and easy complement each other,
The long and short shape each other,
The high and low lean on each other,
Voices and instruments harmonize with one another,
The front and rear follow upon each other.
Therefore the sage manages affairs without action,
Carries out teaching without speech.
Ten thousand things arise and he does not initiate them,
They come to be and he claims no possession of them,
He works without holding on,
Accomplishes without claiming merit.
Because he does not claim merit,
His merit does not go away. [0]
This is one of the key passages. Whenever we name something, it's opposite is created too. This problem lies at the heart of categorization and knowledge. Try to avoid that.
For those interested [1] has many translations of the Tao Te Ching to compare.
Online, nobody is a "master", because everyone is effectively anonymous. Your reputation for being right does not help you, and each point must stand on its own. Without the reputation, though, good arguments are often lost in the noise.
I could be wrong here, I'm not really familiar with Taoist thinking, but the way I interpreted the quote above is that it is more about being master of oneself, i.e. in control of your emotions and reactions, rather than being a master of the subject in the eyes of others. It seems to me that the point is not to care about reputation or winning the argument because you have no control over others anyway.
The first part of this chapter is important for understanding the whole, I think (especially with this translation):
"Whoever relies on the Tao in governing men
doesn't try to force issues
or defeat enemies by force of arms.
For every force there is a counterforce.
Violence, even well intentioned,
always rebounds upon oneself."
What this is saying (again IMHO ;-) ) is that in the conversation, you can't control both sides: only your side. You can't control how someone receives your words, or how they interpret them. If you try to press your case, you will cause things to occur which you may not anticipate and for which you have no control.
Therefore, if you are trying to assert some idea, rather than to clarify your own understanding, then you may actually create the antagonistic forces which you were originally trying subdue (cut off one head of the hydra and be rewarded with 2 growing).
This is one of the core principles in the tao te ching. The word tall has no meaning unless you compare it with short. If I draw a box and ask you if the box is tall, you can't really say. However, if I draw another box of a different size next to it, it is easy to distinguish which one is tall and which one is short. Similarly, if I draw a single box and call it "tall", you can get an idea of what "short" means -- definitely shorter than the box I drew.
In than way, declaration of one thing "creates" its opposite. If you make a declaration on the internet, it can create its own opposition. People who would never have thought about the issue, may come to defend the opposite point of view. The more you push your point, the more vigorous the defense. Had you done nothing, then nothing would have been the result.
In taoist literature, the middle point between 2 extremes is called the "pivot" point. There is a point between being "tall" and being "short". If I grow my short box, it will eventually cease to be short and start becoming tall (and in comparison, the other box will become short). That point is the "pivot" point.
This is a concept of "utility". Normally for something to be "useful" you must transition between an extreme and the pivot point. If you have a cup that is always full of water, then it is not "useful" (in the ordinary sense of the use of a cup -- it might still be useful as a weight ;-) ). If the cup is always empty, then it is equally not useful. It only has utility when the cup transitions between being empty and full. The same is true of spokes on a bicycle wheel. Which is more important: the wires that provide tension on the outside of the wheel, or the spaces between the wires? Without the spaces, there would be no wires: only a disk. And then there would be no spokes. It's important to alternate between spoke and space.
So, to answer the parent's question: from (my interpretation of) a taoist point of view, you need to be careful not to press your case because you will create your own opposition. However, if you wish to have utility in your argument, it is important to move from the pivot point, to an extreme and back to the pivot point again (possibly over and over and over again). How you do that is beyond my ability to answer ;-)
I used to believe that equal treatment of opinions online was a massive win, but I’ve come to realise that lack of reputation is one of the greatest challenges we face.
That a Nobel laureate scientist and a redneck can share equal space on a subject is a real problem.
I’m not suggesting anybody be censored, merely that all opinions on a topic are not equal and shouldn’t be treated as such.
Why is that true? Either show the logic and reasoning that allows anyone to come to that conclusion or don’t. I don’t care if it’s a Nobel prize winner or a redneck, it’s the rationale that’s important.
Because humans defer to authority by default. You don't, you recognise the fallacy but how many people question their doctor's diagnosis?
The BBC in Britain has adopted the policy you suggest for a few years. They try pretty hard to show 2 opposing views in interviews.
It falls apart when all the experts align on one side of an issue, which is unreasonably common in these days of brexit. Yet, equal airtime is given to someone who is not an expert, lacks knowledge of the system being discussed, but has an opinion.
Humans do a great many things by default that are directly in opposition to determining truth. Look at any list of common logical fallacies. Every single last one of them is something humans do by default. They're intuitive and emotionally persuasive.
There is little similar between what was suggested by the person you're replying to and any policy which simply throws both opinions out. What he was describing was engaging with the content of an argument, not its speaker. This is proper. This is how things should be decided. "Who gets on TV" is an antiquated limitation which generated the difficult situation where someone has to make that call, and the unrelated constraint of needing to break for commercial or move on to the next topic in order to keep the audience engaged or keep to a programming schedule exacerbates it. The way the medium is used makes it impossible for a positions justification to be explained, only the position with no justification can be presented. This simply should not be done, but is the sort of thing which due to technological limitation was done out of desperation for a time. Commercial interests, of course, still motivate this approach, but those commercial interests, I think we can both agree, are not intimately tied to the ability of the medium to assist the audience in coming to a nuanced understanding of available views.
There is a very big difference between the ideal situation, where in every instance you have infinite time and access to all possible relevant information, and the practical situation with limited time (not 'oh I can't pay attention to one argument for 45 minutes' but 'if we do not do something before Tuesday, hundreds could die') and resources. It is not incorrect to discuss the ideal situation, because it will always be present and always provide the limiting constraints on the practical case. While you can be in a position where you could argue 'we should trust the expert because we have exactly and only 2 choices and his authority is better even though he can not explain it', even in that situation it must be admitted that what you are doing is wrong. It is a wrong thing which is being forced by circumstance to be done. In the ideal case, you are guaranteed truth. In the practical case, you try to do the best you can. In the practical case, the redneck might have a point (farmers, for instance, had been talking about global dimming for years before scientists gathered the data and became concerned... we were able to reverse it, but not before the pollution from England caused the jetstream to shift and led to several years of intense drought and famine (remember Live Aid? That was global dimmings work) in Ethiopia. Then you have cases where a doctor says other doctors should wash their hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies. He was not right because he had authority. In fact, the argument against him was that he was not respected enough in his field and that it was insulting to suggest that the doctors killing women and children left and right were actually at fault. Those were the more respected members of the medical community. We were saddled with leaded gasoline for decades because the community of research chemists all agreed it was safe and did so for financial benefit and based on very 'common sense' arguments (lead is so heavy! It will fall to the ground and not travel far from the road, how would it get in the air?). When a toxicologist reported the danger, he was met with insult and told he was entreating on chemists territory. Because people trusted the authority of the professional research chemists, he got ignored. Because of them having their authority trusted, they could not afford to even investigate the truth. If they lost that authority, and the trust, they would be done. All unnecessary and a tragic bit of scientific history every researcher should know. Those authorities are just people. They can be just as selfish, mistake-prone, prideful, etc as anyone else. It is not reason to dismiss them. It is reason to expect them to present you with solid evidence, solid argument, and to NEVER ask you to 'just trust them'. The same applies for the redneck. If he provides solid evidence, solid argument, and never asks you to 'just trust him', you review his argument and evidence exactly the same.
One particular reason is that more knowledgeable individuals are less likely to have careless omissions in their reasoning.
Most real-world problems are over-constrained or under-constrained, and a missing axiom (as much as you can have axioms for things as fuzzy as the real world) can give bogus results without being immediately obvious.
It depends on the subject being discussed. If it is something that the redneck is experienced in, I'd go with the redneck, and vice-versa.
If it is something that I do not expect neither to have detailed knowledge of, I'll base my trust on the transferability of the domain. So, for example, a nobel price winner in physics will still have a reasonable understanding of chemistry, and thus cooking.
I'd simply expect a scientist to have finished 4-8 years more in school, and to have spent several decades with smart and learned people. Again, depending on the subject being discussed.
There is also the case to be made that a Nobel price winner will have a reputation to uphold. Going on the record saying silly things will hurt him more than someone that has no reputation. Though I'm less inclined to this reasoning, as this assumes that reputation is something important to the Nobel prize winner.
Why defer to authority? Because it's the authority's day job to thoroughly understand and evidence their own opinions. Everyone else has another day job that isn't dependent on committing full focus to the logic behind their opinions on a topic, so it's inherently never going to be as well reasoned an opinion as that of a model authority. Obviously there are exceptions, but on a grand scale, this rule of thumb works extremely well.
I've been thinking about trying a forum with no usernames or reputation system, just trees of comments with varying root topics. Not sure how to filter the garbage though. I'm thinking let it happen, and figure out various ways to hide it, without erasing it, later.
There used to be a Tor onion forum like that, "talk.masked". It was linked from Core.onion (eqt5g4fuenphqinx.onion). I believe that it was one of the first onion sites.
As I recall, nothing was ever deleted. It was classified, and you could filter as you liked. But I don't remember specifics.
The owner took it down some years ago. Because the trolling had become intolerable.
Indeed! I have always preferred the Thomas Cleary translations (he's done a lot of chinese literature), but this Mitchell translation is REALLY good. I'm a convert.
I was going to comment, Take a look at the Dao De Jing, so I like that the top comment is a quote from it. The book is full of such pithy saying, and I often think that its advice to be like water isn't so much to go with the flow as it is that water takes in whatever people pollute it with and objects to nothing.
Slightly off topic, but I've followed this a little deeper and am wondering if anyone has any recommended Taoist reading? It appears this translation of Tao Te Ching is available in book form. Could anyone suggest a translation of Zhuangzi worth looking into?
The Masters do what needs doing
and that's all they do.
Do what you have to do
without arrogance or pride.
Get the job done
and don't brag about it afterwards.
Do what you have to do,
not for your own benefit,
but because it needs to be done.
And don't do it the way
you think it should be done,
do it the way it needs to be done.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's the best-selling philosophy book of all time, and you really can't go wrong with it. It's not about Taoism directly. But it is. You get that with Taoist sort of things.
That's not how the world works today though. The delphic aphorisms similarly argue for a certain cosmic indifference. Yet the past 500 years have been guided by excessive overconfidence and an irreverent belief that man Can and should control the universe, and that others should hold that belief too. And it's been wildly successful by material measures.
That's a material strategy, if it weren't successful by material measures it'd be just a failure in implementation. It's kind of like saying this path was the right path because we've made it pretty far on it.
I feel very conflicted about this philosophy, on one hand, I do believe this is a way one can find peace. On the other hand, because I have been living this way, I feel like I never stand up for anything that i believe to be right.
Essentially, it means "lead by example", "let others learn through acts and not words", "there are situations which no amount of skill can rectify", and "accept that some may not understand what you try to teach."
Let me take a different tack, and share a bit of a meta-sentiment.
Asking what something means is effectively asking for a translation. Unfortunately, that's almost always a lossy process, and in the worst case it invites an "understanding" that's largely different than the author's original intent.
If intended meaning is something you'd like to get at, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the question, "what mindset and situation would I have to be in such that those words come naturally, spontaneously to mind?"
Anyway, in my experience with lots of meditation, the sentiment expressed in OP's quote is something that feels close to home. I think it has more to do with staying close to the problem at hand and being keenly aware of how all the pieces of you fit into that picture.
There exists a mental space where you can do things and have desires while at the same time seeing a larger context that breeds equanimity. It's a space thst makes things like personal thoughts, feeling and beliefs seem as simple and matter-of-fact as crickets chirping in the night.
Things you can always change are how you think, feel and react to things.
Some of these types of books say that yourself is the only thing which you can truly change because, they say, everything else is an illusion or simply that trying to change others is a futile task. How you perceive reality is everything.
I find this idea to be very liberating and pragmatic and when I remember to utilize this in practice, things flow much better for me. I become more flexible.
As Bruce Lee says - "You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend."
What you can change is a drop in an immense ocean. And that's ok. Yo can either ignore the rest of the ocean (denial), or make peace with the fact that the tiny drop of the ocean you can control is all that really matters.
Well... it does have the advantage of being true. I'm just explaining one positive method of coping with this vast and amazing universe. Do you have another?
Have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? It's the best-selling philosophy book of all time. I actually only read it fairly recently, and was stunned at how relevant it was. It was written in the 70s, yet even includes a few passages about computers! It's not about zen, or about motorcycle maintenance. But they both make appearances. I'd recommend giving it a go if you get the chance. It might make Zen and Tao seem a bit less New-Agey to you.
Or, you could check out my personal introduction to the Tao... The Tao of Pooh. I read it when I was a teenager, thinking it positively absurd that anyone would create a book attempting to explain an ancient school of philosophy through Winnie the Pooh. It's not absurd. I found it sublime, and the idea of taoism made a powerful impression on me and probably played a sizable role in driving me to further study of philosophy.
Astrology is new age, and yet the stars predate all of us.
Chinese Medicine is new age, and yet the practice supposedly dates back 3,500 years. I wonder if they were also killing rhinos for their horns to make useless “medicine” back then?
I don't agree with this particular articulation of this position. Stoicism says something similar, "recognize what you can affect and don't mourn over the things you cannot affect", but this quote up there is taking it too far. This quote advocates for wise people to never try to convince other people, which would leave politics to unwise people.
I would say: If you try to convince others of something, focus your energy on one thing. You won't be very convincing if you argue "I've heard that X" on 100 topics, but it will be more effective if you go deep into one topic and have a huge number of arguments on standby, with links to further resources, so that you can create a concise and focused rebuttal when that particular topic comes up.
> This quote advocates for wise people to never try to convince other people
Other chapters in the Tao address this objection, by emphasizing the value of humility and leading by example over cleverness and trying to beat people into submission with words.
Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.
> This quote advocates for wise people to never try to convince other people, which would leave politics to unwise people.
There's convincing with words, and convincing by example.
"The Master does his job" - not necessarily in private or alone. If people see someone successfully accomplishing something, they will follow. For me, seeing something work is a lot more powerful change actor than someone talking in hypotheticals trying to convince me.
If you say something to someone and they are unconvinced, I doubt more prodding will convince them. Eventually they will say they are convinced, just to have you go away, and let them do it the same way. Then they become more entrenched in their beliefs, even if they know it's wrong.
“Every truth has four corners. As a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.”
To build on quotes from the Tao Te Ching, same translation:
“Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won't be any thieves.
If these three aren't enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.”
At the time and place that quote was written, wisdom referred to leadership, or reliable old people. And leaders would use their physical, mental or monetary abilities instead of talking people down in public display.
This "who can talk better to convince the crowd" business appeared more than once throughout history and was at it's peak effectiveness among the scientific community during the enlightenment phase of europe where your peers are actually as intelligent or more intelligent than you are, and your tools are empirical evidence rather than your charisma.
The idea later reverted to it's hellenistic form of democratic political dialogue which is only effective as the critics of it's listeners, or the demos.
