"The negative point is that if a ruler fails to be correct himself but insists on punishing his subjects for being incorrect, he will be setting himself above the law and the common people will be conscious of the injustice [which may culminate, as the French nobility discovered, in violent popular revolution]. The positive point is that the common people always look up to their betters and if those in position of authority set an example this will be imitated even if the people are not ordered to do so. This point comes out clearly in the following passage:
The Master said, 'If a man is correct in his own person, then there will be obedience without orders being given, but if he is not correct in his own person, there will not be obedience even though orders are given.'
Moral example is far more effective than edicts, and where edicts contradict the example, it is the example that the common people will heed rather than the edicts. ...Moral example has an influence which, though imperceptible, is, in fact, irresistible. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance to put the upright in position of authority. In answer to the question put to him by Duke Ali, 'What must I do before the common people will look up to me?' Confucius said,
"Raise the straight and set them over the crooked and the common people will look up to you. Raise the crooked and set them over the straight and the common people will not look up to you. ...The raising of the straight and setting them over the crooked can make the crooked straight." (Analects, pp. 34-35)
What the nation needs, specifically, is for the government to determine. Capitalist planners make these macro decisions for their "sovereign consumers". Chinese gentlemen-rulers need feel no fealty to some imaginary free market and need offer no mindless submission to the invisible hand of its god. Government is necessary, and good government is a Confucian art. Followers of the Tao do not appoint capitalist wolves to manage sheep pastures. Confucian gentlemen figure out how to govern the nation in ways that neither stifle the ambitions of entrepreneurs nor crush the aspirations of workers. Gentlemen are human beings, not animals, neither sheep nor wolves.
Confucius was no democrat. He did not believe in universal Enlightenment that illuminates the minds of the masses with the universal truths of enlightened reason. In his 1996 book, Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, Donald N. Wood observes that the ideals of the Enlightenment have never been realized. The hearts and minds of humanity have not been illuminated with rational understanding. We are the same old creatures described by philosophers and prophets and social reformers since antiquity, grappling with the same social realities and problems. Certainly there have been enlightened individuals throughout the ages: Siddhartha, Confucius, Jesus come to mind. But there has been nothing like a universal enlightenment of humanity despite the plaintive exhortations of history's lonely enlightened few.
Confucius was a humanist, a social and political realist. The social realities that he saw with his eyes and heard with his ears were confirmed by the sages whose wisdom Confucius studied in books. This is the ongoing reality of the world. Confucius observed,
"The common people can be made to follow a path but not to understand it." Lau adds, "They cannot understand why they are led along a particular path because they never take the trouble to study". Confucius said, "Those who are born with knowledge are the highest. Next come those who attain knowledge through study. Next again come those who turn to study after having been vexed by difficulties. The common people, insofar as they make no effort to study even after having been vexed by difficulties, are the lowest."
Nor did Confucius, applying the Tao to the circumstances of his era, believe in trying to educate the common people. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then a superficially grasped education creates in people's minds the illusion of knowledge, without its substance and without the ability to truly understand it. The political discourse of modern Western democracies consists largely of uninformed opinions loudly argued as certain knowledge. Corporate lawyers, engineers, managers are highly informed professionals running the planning system. The democratic masses do not even know the planning system rules their lives, let alone understand how to make it work "better" for themselves.
Like the politically innocent population of pre-revolutionary France, whose utter lack of experience with government amplified rather than tempered their faith in the perfectibility of man under the various ideal systems of "rational government" that characterized the mentality of the era, politically ignorant masses are in for a very rude awakening if they cast off the chains of their present rulers in the expectation of "improving" their socioeconomic lot in life. Like communist revolutionary workers who seize control of their factory, then discover that none of them knows how to access the farflung supply chains that feed raw materials to the factory, nor how to access the distant markets they must sell their outputs to, the democratic masses are not aware how little they know about the practical realities of government.
The Tao does not include filling the people's heads with ambitions they cannot (or should not) achieve or filling their hearts with desires they cannot, or should not, fulfill. Democracy demands universal education of children, and capitalist advertising creates desires for things the people cannot afford and should not possess. In the Introduction to his 1963 Penguin translation of the Tao Te Ching, Lau notes,
"Desire in a sense is secondary to knowledge on which it is dependent. It is through the knowledge of what is desirable that desire is excited. It is also through knowledge that new objects of desire are devised. It is for this reason that knowledge and the clever come in for constant stricture. If the Taoist philosopher could have visited our society, there is no doubt that he would have considered popular education and mass advertising the twin banes of modern life. The one causes the people to fall from their original state of innocent ignorance; the other creates new desires for objects no one would have missed if they had not been invented." (Lau Tzu: Tao Te Ching p.xxxi)
the Way forward
The consumer economy presents endless shiny objects to fascinate the masses and excite their acquisitive lusts. Western democracy, an impotent charade of "voting", has been the opiate that satisfies the masses' desire for "self-government". Meanwhile capitalism's planning system has operated behind the scenes, entrenching itself as the real government of Western nations. American capitalism is the extreme version: hyper-capitalism populated by true believers in the "market" delusions that are spun as realities. Most Western nations are social democratic, with political governments that still exercise some degree of governing authority over their capitalist corporations, and that are still somewhat responsive to the not-wholly brainwashed will of their democratic electorates.
American capitalists are presently pushing super-national corporate government on these social democratic nations, in the form of "trade deals" like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its Atlantic twin, which elevate the monopoly-seeking and profit-seeking interests of private transnational corporations over the legal authority of national governments. This is the dystopian nightmare version of global government: government by non-human legal constructs whose sole purpose is their own growth at the expense of everybody and everything else.
We began by mystifying money, refusing to see bankers issuing the nations' money, believing money "just exists". By the occult power of money issuance, and the corporate monopolies that bank-issued money finances and nurtures, the people wake up homeless on the planet we all need to live on, to misquote Thomas Jefferson's two centuries old warning against the perils of private money issuance. Now, via transnational trade deals, written by corporate lawyers to serve the planning system that is owned by corporate capitalism and serves to install and glorify itself over the people of the Earth, Jefferson's nightmare is coming to fruition.
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