Tao Te Ching lxxiv

When the people are not afraid of death, why frighten them with death?  Were the people always afraid of death and were i able to arrest and put to death those who innovate then who would dare?  There is a regular executioner whose charge it is to kill.  To kill on behalf of the executioner is what is described as chopping wood on behalf of the master carpenter.  In chopping wood on behalf of the master carpenter there are few who escape hurting their own hands instead.

Li-jing longs to be a dancer but she’s an admin assistant; Sebastian longs to win the lottery and be rich but he is poor or at least middle class; Fimbria longs to be manager of dried prunes but she is assistant manager of dried prunes; Milkin longs to live as a hermit and bang pots but he sells travel insurance over the phone.

Most live there and not here.  Who knows whether it’s better to move there and make there here, to stay here and forget about there, or to continue living there and not here?  Dao says if you’re made to be poor, be poor!  If you’re made to chop wood, chop wood!

In this age, though, when we’re told that we can make ourselves according to our dreams of here and there—that we should! that we must!—how can we even say that we’re made to be anything but what we want?  Dao says only by returning to one’s roots, roots known by stillness, constancy, discernment; which may have little to do with one’s familial upbringing, cultural context or instilled knowledge.  Yet human society says, Add to your vitality! Increase your alertness and clarity! Extend your breath! Have a purpose! Be joyous!  Dao shrugs, ambles on, does its thing, wanders wherever.

In this age of innovation—when to innovate is to be good—the sage is unimpressed.  We eat, we blab, we crap, we die.  So why accelerate death by running around, spewing pollutants and noise from our minds and gadgets, avoiding silence and solitude, in order to be endlessly amused, entertained, affirmed, stimulated, offsetting pain to others in space or time for our spasms of joy and importance?  The sage has little regard for those who claim (through behaviour) that they are entitled to a greater share of life than anything else; she isn’t sentimental about life, about the particular species we randomly entered—it would be better for such claimants to be killed.  She readily restrains herself from killing, partly from a lack of time to kill the now teeming swarming hordes of innovators, popping out like pill bugs into the urban club, but more because she has returned and is not made to be an executioner but a sage.  And to do what one is not is to kill oneself.

The regular executioner will come when it comes, and it may very well not be human.