tao te ching lxxx

Reduce the size and population of the state.  Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.

Even when they have ships and carts they will have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,

Will find relish in their food

And beauty in their clothes,

Will be content in their abode

And happy in the way they live.

Though adjoining states are within sight of one another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that these potencies will not harm the people.  The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a mutual accord.

So, here, we also have forces; instead of spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons, power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions.  So, here, we have a gap, infinite in practice, between the capacity of the force and its use.  Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death, and contentment.

How do we reduce the size and population of the state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs?  Or, in other words, how do we bring about return without catastrophe?  Isn’t this the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?