Accomplish Without Action

: Praising the worthy results in contention,
: Esteeming the valuable results in theft,
: Displaying the beautiful results in desire.

Therefore,

: Empty their minds,
: Fill their bellies,
: Weaken their ambitions,
: And strengthen their bones.
: If they lack knowledge and desire
: Then they can not act;
: If no action is taken
: Harmony remains.

This is such arrogance! The speaker wants to keep others in ignorance and powerlessness because he knows how things should really go. There is some truth to this - filling someone's belly will often weaken his ambition. However, people act whether or not they have knowledge, though their actions will be a lot less effective. Crime in inner cities occurs even though people in the US have enough food. However, it is their powerlessness and lack of alternative means of expressing their desire that causes them to act. In any case, ignorance and apathy do not necessarily lead to harmony.

You SHOULD praise the worthy, esteem the valuable, and try to make the world more beautiful. Anybody who says otherwise is confused, wicked, or trying to be funny or make a point. If the purpose of this is to make some point other than the obvious one (which I think is wicked and confused), then I don't get it.

-- RalphJohnson

Lao Tse seems the consummate pragmatist. Harmony is the goal. Harmony is achieved by eliminating greed, caused by esteeming the valuable, eliminating envy, caused by praising the worthy and by eliminating avarice, caused by displaying the beautiful. When people are kept healthy, well fed, clothed, housed and entertained, then there is harmony. Jesus said: don't throw pearls before swine nor give what is holy to dogs, else they turn and rend you. Sounds like just what Lao Tse said. Most people are content with food, self-medication and mindless entertainment. Isn't this what our capitalist rulers have done to us? Hasn't it worked well? -- AlbertWagner

I think the point is that this is evil. To me it is a warning. If you want to preserve your power, provide bread and circuses. There have been many novels that explored this theme. But eliminating ambition is very difficult. Perhaps crime in the inner cities shows that ambition still remains (however poorly guided). -- SteveHayes

If the desires of inner city people were sated (== bellies filled), perhaps they would not be so prone to crime? -- MikeLoutris?

Where I work, they praise the worthy - the worthy being people who create crises or allow them to arise through bad management, then save the day by slamming fists down and demanding that someone do something. They esteem the valuable, huge documents that say nothing (not working software). They make the world more beautiful by creating displays of meaningless statistics that show how worthy and valuable they are. -- KielHodges (And, yes, I am looking for other opportunities!)

Better to work with the worthy and let contentment and harmony bind them to you. Plainly esteeming the valuable doesn't make it more valuable - and often it results in someone stronger taking it from you. A topical example is Jobs losing his lock on the GUI to Gates. If he'd just built and sold the thing we'd live in a very different world today. Instead he took every action he could, and was swiftly out on his ear.

So the moral of the story is, "Act more like Bill Gates"?

I think here FindingTheMiddleWay (between striving for harmony (at the cost at creativity) and striving for freedom (at the cost of potential crisis)) applies.

I'm not sure what any of the above has to do with Accomplishing. To me the title reminded me of the master (athlete, artist, craftsman) achieving his/her goals effortlessly without frenzied actions driven by fear or desire (of course there has to be some action, but the point is as little as possible - efficient, minimal). Not forcing. It is said that using 10% of your brain at any given time is a good thing - fMRI shows when a person does a task well, specific areas are focused on the task; the rest of the brain is relatively quiet. If everything lit up, it would be a sign of distraction, inattention and ineffectiveness. The effective master goes through motions fast and slow almost as if he/she is a spectator, distanced from the actions yet accomplishing expertly.

This needs to be taken with a grain of salt; to accomplish is to act. In my estimation, the subject at hand is not how one may accomplish anything oneself, but how one may prevent others from accomplishing anything by specifically removing the will, desire and necessity to take action. I suppose that stripping those around you of the will to live in any meaningful way could itself be considered an accomplishment, though a detestable one; look at government (pick a card, any card) for an example.

If one is able to both create this situation and reach personal goals while maintaining this situation, one's own accomplishments are apt to be lauded with greater praise than they may be otherwise. For example, had he exercised these principles upon Mozart, Salieri might have been recognized as a genius by comparison to the remainder of his contemporaries.

It should be noted however that desire does not so readily give way even when there is truly nothing to incite it. When every petty thing for which a man may wish is his, he is not content, for he no longer wishes for petty things. -- hart

Two important topics are raised in the bottom, information and harmony. I disagree with the idea raised that people won't act without good information -- *plenty* act based on biased news reports, rumors, or trivial information. So I think that part is untrue.

Without action, harmony results, but doing nothing doesn't help anyone, so FindingTheMiddleWay is important to balance action and inaction.

As for the top part, just because something exists doesn't mean it should. Unworthy people may be annoyed at the worthy, but if instead they try to become worthy, no contention will occur. (I assume the word desire is used to mean covet.)

To me, this is an early, and not very good, version of a Buddhist koan. The idea being that desire is the root of unhappiness and disharmony. By eliminating desire, or its causes, one remains happy, negative action is not taken, and harmony preserved. To me, this is all well and good on an individual level, but the group aspect of this particular saying leads to the "bread and circuses" aspect discussed above.