Daodejing lxxii

When the people lack a proper sense of awe then some awful visitation will descend upon them.

Do not constrict their living space; do not press down on their means of livelihood.  It is because you do not press down on them that they will not weary of the burden.

Hence the sage knows himself but does not display himself,

Loves himself but does not exalt himself.

Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.

Awe in our world has mostly been diminished to technology (the new, the bright, the virtual, the fast) and humanity (its flesh and flexing:  the beautiful, the powerful, the fast).  Though we may watch Planet Earth, we may go on a whale-sighting tour, we may camp in Algonquin for a week, we may love our cats, a proper sense of awe is not primarily virtual, abstracted from our lives, requiring damage to other species and the planet, legitimizing one aspect of nature over another, dependent on indirect or cognitive knowledge, but directed to what christians call god, daoists call dao, philosophers call being — the diverse contextualized unity of all things.

The shift in the twentieth century from utopian to dystopian fantasies (in art, in individual and collective psyches) reflects our growing knowledge (a spiritual knowledge, deeper than that pumped out from our academies and medias, difficult for us to acknowledge—that is, push into our behaviors—other than through art, our dreams and nightmares, our unconscious) that we may be bringing an awful visitation upon ourselves through our inability to orient ourselves to a proper sense of awe, to a proper sense of our place (our insignificance and significance, equal to the insignificance and significance of all things) in an endlessly vibrating empty-full universe.

Dao favors laissez faire, low regulatory, minimal bureaucratic-litigious, individually (but not systemic) anarchic government—both within the external state of society and the internal state of the self … one in which the best leader is shadowy and indistinct:  the opposite of what our improperly-awed society favors (the imaged and conspicuous, the named and reproduced).

So the sage is not particularly impressed with humanity or herself, does not need to build visible permanent structures, external to herself, to prove to herself or anyone that she exists and is following, like all, the arc from womb to grave, from earth to earth.

So she throws out what most people keep and cherish—the accoutrements of society:  its hard and feeble proofs—and takes what most people discard:  the still and the heavy, the supple and weak.  These are the procedures of awe, the policies of freedom, and the way of a long, animate and ethical life.