Daodejing LXXV

The people are hungry.

It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes that the people are hungry.

The people are difficult to govern.

It is because those in authority are too fond of action that the people are difficult to govern.

The people treat death lightly.

It is because the people set too much store by life that they treat death lightly.

It is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.

What is this?  Having no use for life is wisdom?  Valuing life is foolishness?  Doesn’t this go against the West’s just and Christian heritage? Secular humanism? Common sense? The prevailing winds? The ego? Yoga? Shoppers Drug Mart’s Marketing Division? Everything we have fought for over these civilized millennia, these continents of blood?

Doesn’t such a warped and dysfunctional attitude lead to unabombers, psychopaths, depressed recluses, all forms of maladjusted lunatics, malcontents and anticitizens?

Isn’t it clearly, unmitigatedly wrong?

Having no use for life is only a destructive tendency, is only to be interpreted negatively, however, when set within an etiological environment we are typically enculturated to assume as a given.  Chuang Tzu shrugs his shoulders at life but laughs when he does so.  Lao Tse avoids harming himself and others because such activity arises from oppositions and hierarchies established between and among life and death—oppositions and hierarchies which are no more necessary than a hoary deity waiting for Judgment Day and the cosmic division of humans into good and evil.

Within Dao, the people view themselves as they are—transient aspects of the universe that rise and return, who have their natural beginnings and natural ends.  Who, then, needs to destroy life or prolong it?  The wisdom that is spoken of refers to a withdrawal from our infantile tendencies to cling.  We recoil at the words of this vignette because we have become addicted to an ossified life (to a life that doesn't properly know either life or death), and so are committed to a process of the appearance of prolonging life without regard for anything particularly resembling life.

So the sage bypasses our common dualities (of the governing and governed, activity and passivity, life and death) by sojourning on the way of nature, a way acknowledging all ways, an unlit way below the fluorescent and concrete labyrinths of our minds and hearts—labyrinths which have no minotaur at the center, as we might fear, but only nothing ... an abyss leading to the way.