Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Forget about knowledge and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times better off.
Throw away charity and righteousness,
and people will return to brotherly love.
Throw away profit and greed,
and there won’t be any thieves.

These three are superficial and aren’t enough
to keep us at the center of the circle, so we must also:

Embrace simplicity.
Put others first.
Desire little.

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I do not consider myself to be a materialistic person not because I want to believe myself to be a detached person from such issues but because I know (for a fact) that I do not pursue money to have more than what I deem to be necessary to satisfy my basic necessities. I do not know whether my lack of interest in making a huge amount of money makes me a virtuous person, but I think this is a good thing because it at least prevented me from such gambling as bitcoins. Of course, if I had lots of money, things would be quite better. I wouldn’t have to live in this shitty house and can move somewhere better and no longer listen to, against my will, all the noise from these residents living next doors. (My neighbors are my enemies because my mood and life cycle are disrupted because of their noise .I am resentful of the fact that they are not considerate enough for me and cause me stress. I, on the other hand, am careful not to make any noise because I do not want them to be aware of how I live. There is a reason why Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”)

Or maybe I was wrong. I like money. I remember skipping meals on a few occasions at college because my parents could not afford to send me money. I had several part time jobs from time to time, but could not earn very much because I worked only on weekends due to class schedules. In addition, I would not certainly have had to borrow government loans for tuition if I had had lots of money.

And if I had lots of money now, I think I would have went to graduate school in the US and studied analytical/mathematical philosophy.

I personally believe that humans are born with some fixed personalities. If some of these fixed characters are bad, it takes a big effort to compensate for these flaws. Your deficiencies or immaturity never goes away entirely. They always stay with you till the day you die. Therefore, I can only believe in “fake it until you make it.”

Regarding the appetite for money as well, I believe that people are simply born differently. Even though people mostly want to have lots of money and strive for wealth, there are some of those that are not so keen in the idea of working too hard for only money.

I do not think that if we “throw away profit and greed,” then there won’t be any thieves.  There will always be thieves. I hate to tell you this, but there will always be rapes, murders, and a lot of other felonies. In that sense, I believe that the descriptions in the above chapter simply represent Laozi’s wishful thinking.

Therefore, instead of trying hard in vain to educate people to learn contentment by having less, the authorities must make strategic use of limited resources on reducing the number of such crimes – e.g., hiring more police officers, strengthening law enforcement, and providing rehabilitation programs . This idea can be best represented by the principle of economics. We must find on a graph an ideal point at which a maximum utility value is achieved by properly allocating limited human power resources and budgets in regard to the efforts to reduce crimes.