Leadership: A Lao Tzu Perspective

Welcome to From Insults To Respect.

From time to time, many of us find ourselves in a position of leadership. This may come about because we are a parent, or asked to plan a trip with some friends, or hired to be a supervisor in some business, or elected to some political office. Each time we take on the role of a leader, we also take on the risk, will we end up being respected or insulted. What are some suggestions for guiding us through the possibility of such turbulent waters? Perhaps I can find some sound advice by flipping through my copy of the Tao Te Ching.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Tao Te Ching, the title can be translated as The Book of the Way and Its Virtues. It’s designed to teach inner strength and integrity. The author is thought to be Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of philosophical and religious Taoism.

Although I draw upon this book from time to time, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m a strict adherent to that way of thinking or to any of the isms for that matter. Whenever I have a concern, or others ask me to address their concerns, I draw upon a variety of wisdom traditions, and the Tao Te Ching is certainly among the greatest of these.

As I personally deal with a concern, all of the wisdom traditions that I have learned about tend to get all mixed together as if they were in a multi-ingredient soup. Then, I throw into the pot a dash of my own creativity, and voila, I come up with my own unique concoction.

As I flip through the book’s pages, one of the poems catches my interest:

To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer.

What does this mean,
to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear?
Favor debases:
we fear to lose it,
fear to win it.
So to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.

I think I’ll stop here for a minute even though there are still two other stanzas to the poem. I want to mull over what I had just read.

A few minutes pass. I think I’m beginning to catch its meaning. To be in favor, is kind of like what I mean when I refer to a person as being respected. And when I think about why someone who is respected might have some fear about being respected, I think about an old saying–“People like to cut down the tallest bamboo tree.”

When a person becomes respected, some people compare themselves to the respected person. If, in this comparison, they come to believe they are not as respected, this may ignite feelings of envy. Some of these people may seek to act in ways that harm the respected person in an effort to bring her or him down to a lower, less threatening, level. I wonder if President John F. Kennedy might have been assassinated because of this type of motivation.

Initially, it was hard for me to see what point Lao Tzu was trying to make here because I often admire people who are respected and try to learn from them. Of course, there are some exceptions to this. Apparently Hitler was respected by many in Germany many years ago. Despite that, I doubt that I would have respected him.

In contrast to my difficulty understanding why to be respected is to live in fear, I have no difficulty understanding why living in disgrace is to live in fear. Bernie Madoff, the former investment advisor who became disgraced for carrying out a massive Ponzi scheme, comes to mind. His disgrace led to him currently serving a lengthy federal prison sentence. People who act in a manner that leads to their disgrace certainly have good reason to fear some bad things will be the result.

Anyway, I guess I’m ready to move on to the next stanza of the poem:

What does that mean,
to take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer?
I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?

That stanza reminds me of the first noble truth of Buddhism. Life is not ideal: it frequently fails to live up to our expectations. Human beings are subject to desires and cravings, but even when we are able to satisfy these desires, the satisfaction is only temporary. Birth brings about suffering, as does aging, illness, the approaching of death, union with what is displeasing, separation from what is pleasing, not to get what one wants, etc.

With this understanding, I guess I’ll move on to the final stanza of this poem to see what insight it might provide regarding leadership.

So people who set their bodily good
before the public good
could be entrusted with the commonwealth,
and people who treated the body politic
as gently as their own body
would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

Hmmm? Well, I guess there are a few ways to interpret all of this. Here’s my take, and I would love to hear from others about their takes as well.

Upon finishing the whole poem, I remembered three additional relevant passages from the Tao Te Ching.  The first says,

If my mind’s modest,
I walk the great way.
Arrogance
is all I fear.

The second phrase says,

He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who is self-righteous is not respected.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.

Accept disgrace willingly.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.
Surrender yourself humbly; then you can be trusted to care for all things.
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things

The Third one says,

Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
This is the Primal Virtue.

As I include these phrases with the poem, I find myself thinking that major virtues of the Tao Te Ching are to be kind, compassionate, and helpful. These are essential qualities, from the Tao Te Ching perspective, when we seek to do something virtuous for the public good. But, we must first take care to learn to care for our own body, noticing the fear, and then to act to deal effectively with this aspect of our body.

To be aware that to be arrogant, or to seek to be more in favor than others, can be risky. At the same time, awareness that if we do act in ways that could lead to our disgrace, this too can be risky. Such awareness encourages the virtuous person to be humble, and this includes being humble when we make mistakes that lead people to view us as being disgraced.

How to utilize effectively the fear that comes from being in favor, or in disgrace? The virtuous person has learned that to be effective under this set of circumstances is to avoid being domineering and a braggart. By fully and deeply understanding this, he or she becomes worthy to be a leader of the commonwealth.                

There are far more subtle lessons in the Tao Te Ching regarding being virtuous, but this is what came out of my recent visit with its thoughtful pages. I hope you find something nourishing to take away from it.

Before leaving you today, allow me to humbly express the hope that we all remain well as we deal with this wild and crazy world we find ourselves living in these days.

My Best,
Jeff

———————————-

Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on.  This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.

arroganceDisgracefearleadershiprespectsufferingTao Te Ching