Chapter 57

The chapter contains the book's most systematic political argument, and it is built as a list of four policies each of which is said to produce the opposite of its intention.

The more taboos there are in the world, the poorer the people. The more sharp instruments the people have, the more the state is confused. The more skill and contrivance there are, the more strange things appear. The more laws and orders are displayed, the more thieves and bandits there are.

Each is a claim about a specific instrument of government and each is stated as a correlation rather than as a moral objection. Prohibitions restrict activity and activity is what a population lives on. Effective implements in many hands multiply the ways a situation can go. Ingenuity generates novelty faster than a society can absorb it. And the fourth is the sharpest: publishing the law does not reduce crime but defines and therefore creates it, since an act becomes theft when a rule names it so.

The last of the four is the one that has kept the chapter alive, and it is a genuine argument rather than a paradox, though it is not the only possible account of the correlation it asserts.

The chapter opens with a rule of thumb about domains: govern a state by what is straight, use arms by what is crooked, take the world by not meddling. Straightforwardness for administration, deception for war, and neither for the largest scale. It concedes that a general may need to mislead, and denies that the same skill is transferable upward.

The chapter closes with four sentences attributed to the sage, and they are the fullest statement in the book of what non-action produces when a ruler practises it.

I do nothing, and the people transform themselves. I love stillness, and the people straighten themselves. I do not meddle, and the people prosper by themselves. I have no craving, and the people become the uncut block by themselves.

The construction is identical in all four: a negative or quiet disposition in the ruler, and then an outcome the people reach on their own. The word rendered by themselves or of their own accord is the same term that chapter twenty-five puts at the summit of its ladder, and its repetition here four times is the point. Nothing in the list is done to the people. Each result is described as something they arrive at once the pressure is removed.

Two features of the passage are easy to miss. The first is that the ruler is not absent. He has a disposition, four of them, and they are stated in the first person as things he does and loves. Non-action here is a way of occupying the office, not a vacancy in it.

The second is that the outcomes are the outcomes any government of the period would have claimed to want: a transformed, orderly, prosperous and unpretentious population. The chapter does not propose different ends. It proposes that the standard ends are unreachable by the standard means, which is why the four correlations earlier in the chapter had to come first.