TAO TE CHING V

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.

Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?

It is empty without being exhausted:

the more it works the more comes out.

Much speech leads inevitably to silence.

Better to hold fast to the void.

Nature, leadership, wisdom.  These are all sentimentalized—which is to say falsified—by those who live far from these things.  Who lives in nature (not a cottage in nature) and thinks nature is benevolent?  Who binds human masses to some common goal and thinks leadership is sweet aphorisms on a desk calendar, speeches on a bedside table?  Who has gained the knowledge of rocks and time and, looking at humanity, thinks, What a lovely species!  How beautiful and virtuous!  Calm indifference to all particular things—which is to say, everything—is the hallmark of this detached trinity.

The sage is ruthless not because she struts across the city leaving heads and hearts lolling on the streets but because she doesn’t cater to the people’s infantile fantasies about themselves and the world.  For this refusal, she is considered ruthless.  If one understands heaven and earth—the vast coldness of heaven, the insignificant passions of earth—one also understands one’s self:  a microcosm of this coldness, these passions. 

The sage may laugh at the misfortunes of the world because she laughs at her own.  And only she who laughs at her own may also laugh at the world’s.  For this detachment and humor, she is considered ruthless.  The straw dogs want coddling.  When they have been used for what they are good for and find they are not coddled but cast out, they complain and accuse those who used them, though they were frequently complicit in their being used.  The dog complains, but the sage walks away whistling, setting out to do the next appointed task, even if this be banging pots by a shack until she dies.

The sage is a sage because she mirrors heaven and earth, not the rebellion against them.  The dogs are dogs because they rebel against this primary mirroring, eking out existence in the spiritual garbage heaps of the world.  There, there is another ruthlessness which the dogs call virtue and wisdom and leadership and nature and love.  But the sage is ruthless and her names are nothing but her breath—here, there, and gone.