Tao Te Ching LXII

The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.

It is that by which the good man protects

and that by which the bad is protected.

Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return,

beautiful deeds can raise a man above others.

Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?

Hence when the emperor is set up and the three ducal ministers are appointed, he who makes a present of the way without stirring from his seat is preferable to one who offers presents of jade disks followed by a team of four horses.  Why was this way valued of old?  Was it not said that by means of it one got what one wanted and escaped the consequences when one transgressed?

Therefore it is valued by the empire.

One of the astonishing aspects of the Tao to a traditional Westerner is how little it cares about whether a person is good or bad.  The Tao acknowledges the distinctions:  some people are oriented to behavior we typically call good, others to behavior we typically call bad; whether these interpretations and naming are socially constructed, whether genetically defined, whether rooted in some objective reality is largely beside the point:  the roots of the causes of our naming, as is typically with the Tao, aren’t particularly relevant.

Unlike the Christian god, who supposedly rewards good and punishes evil—though we see little evidence of this on earth—the Tao (perhaps because it tends to being the this-worldly spirit of nature rather than the other-worldly spirit of spirits) neither rewards nor punishes, but quietly accepts.  So the sage quietly accepts, but does not do so stupidly—as the naïve and inexperienced might—but as one who has sojourned through the cold-hot expanses of the human soul and says without despair or exuberance, Well, this is it, this is existence … oh well.

But this subversion of the traditional western polarities—good and evil, of course, only being one—is not done to be subversive, not performed from some theoretical tour de force, not arrived at through nihilism or amorality … but is maintained as the best possible way to survive.  If you stroke the good for being good, they begin to behave well to be rewarded (then, naturally, they are no longer good); if you punish the bad for being bad, they naturally feel alienated and vengeful and one way or another, from time to time at least, the punishment will return to confront the punisher.  So the sage doesn’t flash and bribe, doesn’t scorn and destroy, but walks alongside the seemingly eternal struggles of society and accepts them the way she accepts water.