Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Weapons are the bearers of bad news;
all people should detest them.

The wise man values the left side,
and in time of war he values the right.
Weapons are meant for destruction,
and thus are avoided by the wise.
Only as a last resort
will a wise person use a deadly weapon.
If peace is her true objective
how can she rejoice in the victory of war?
Those who rejoice in victory
delight in the slaughter of humanity.
Those who resort to violence
will never bring peace to the world.
The left side is a place of honor on happy occasions.
The right side is reserved for mourning at a funeral.
When the lieutenants take the left side to prepare for war,
the general should be on the right side,
because he knows the outcome will be death.
The death of many should be greeted with great sorrow,
and the victory celebration should honor those who have died.

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As Bertrand Russell notes, the Persian kings did not provoke war because they thought they lacked wealth, reputation, or women. They wanted something more like an expansion in their territory or building their legacies in history. They did not care about needless sacrifices or agonies of peasants suffering from war. If conspiracists are right, people in the third world may still be suffering because of the greed of defense industry and related conglomerates.

Despite the technological breakthroughs of our contemporary era, there are unending wars and crimes. I wonder what Laozi would have said if he were still alive and saw all this repeating again and again. True lasting peace never arrived. As one Australian journalist notes, we can achieve true genuine worldwide peace only when we come under attack from extraterrestrials. Then we will know the preciousness of our fellow human beings. Then we will achieve a full oneness of an element in contention with the other in the dynamics of binary opposites.

If a superior intelligent being among the extraterrestrials can pretend to pose a threat to the human world and retreat, and does the same thing over and over again, humans will group into one, scatter, and regroup into one, and scatter again – thereby forever delaying any physical violent confrontations among the humans themselves.

Or if strife is inevitable among the biological equals on earth – namely, humans themselves regardless of their individual intelligence or status – some of whom seek to prove and cement dominance over the others, in order to build lasting peace, we should approach this subject from a different perspective. I hope that one day a group of like-minded genius scientists will invent a technology to genetically manipulate people and completely eradicate every biological element or factor that may cause them to commit evil. What do I mean by “biological element or factor”? According to brain scientists, we have a limbic system at the core of our brains inherited from our primal ancestors which causes aggression. This system should be biologically renovated in order to eliminate aggression itself. When I was a teen – and I still think like a teen now in some respects as you can sense in many of my writings – I found it difficult to understand what motivates soldiers to actually engage in war. For example, why didn’t all of them see the hellish massacre and think “Oh my God, this is madness. We should stop this nonsense all together, both us and them. This is insanity. What are we doing this for?” OK. I can understand that your political leader is instigating a fight because of his political motives, but what is it that causes the individual soldiers to actually fight to their deaths despite witnessing firsthand the hell of the hells that can ever occur on earth? As I grew older, I realized that I shared some of these violent tendencies myself that made me want to physically attack some people whose inexplicably rude and disrespectful behaviors could not be comprehended in my head; I thought they could only be corrected through some enforcement of violence because words, reason and appeasement did not work for them.

There are limitations to improvements through education. The tao te ching fails because even if a ruler acted according to the tao te ching, he would soon discover that he should revert to the Machiavellian ways of ruling his state. There are discrepancies between the practice of wu-wei and actual statesmanship. Make no mistake about it. The world hasn’t improved and had never ever improved at all even for a while despite the spread of the publications of the tao te ching. Exemplary actions of a humble sage alone cannot save the world. We must be saved by a superior being such as God – although there is no God.

Then for what the fuck’s sake am I talking about the tao te ching? Why have I discussed the significance of wu-wei? If Laozi meant to write it as a guidebook for leaders, he should now see (although he is no longer among us) that the book was a failure. Therefore, I am discussing the significance of the book only on an individual level and not in terms of how to rule society. The universe is not a benign place for us. It does not care a shit whether or not you and I are practicing the tao and die today. It is completely indifferent to us.

If aggression was one of the things that we genetically or biologically inherited from our primal ancestors to survive in natural selection, we have to use our superior knowledge of biology and science to biologically reinvent ourselves. Some may be worried about the side effects of the artificial means to change human characters. But if Peter Singer is right, we should do what we can do instead of waiting for nature to work it out, because less pain is ultimately a better thing. If time comes, we may have to reproduce in a way through bioengineering that does not give birth to a child that can commit evil.

Note in one of the above paragraphs that I mentioned that a king holding an idealistic notion of ruling his state based on the tao te ching would soon employ a Machiavellian way of politics. Why is this so? Because he is not a biological superior to his subordinates. If he was some king kong or superman and could physically force people to succumb to him, he would not even need to be a Machiavelli. He will directly use his personal physical force to establish order in society. But this way of controlling society has carries some risks and can easily turn the king into a despot. Therefore, rather than relying on somebody or a group of people having superior physical power, we must eradicate the element of badness itself from the minds of people if it is possible to do so through bioengineering.

We tend to regard only the prison cell inmates as bad and corrupt people. However, if you go to prison and talk with them or even live with them for a while, you will discover they are not much different from ordinary people we encounter in our daily lives (admittedly, there are psychopathic serial killers or uncontrollable rapists and maniacs in prison). Some of them are better people than the usual assholes that we encounter in our daily routines.

As a matter of fact, each one of us can potentially make a huge mistake and pay the price by going to jail. Seeds of evil are already germinated deep in the mind of every one of us. If you haven’t committed a crime serious enough to put you in jail, it simply means that your criminal tendencies haven’t luckily surfaced to the full extent. All of us can potentially commit evil.