There is an assumption in Western nations that liberty and limited government are “Western ideas,” that don’t appear in African or Asian societies. On the surface this thought process makes sense. After all, in Europe the ideas of liberty, freedom, and limited government (or no government altogether) all directly emerged out of Christianity. The assumption then is that liberty is intrinsically connected to Christianity and cannot emerge without it. Since neither Asia nor Africa are majority Christian continents, the argument therefore goes, they could not develop ideas of Christianity and such ideas had to be imported into their nations. It was these beliefs that justified European colonialism as the work to “civilize the savage” – that is to Europeanize and Christianize Africa and Asia.
In parallel to this argument, many Westerners have argued that because Africans and Asians don’t value liberty they have always embraced authoritarianism and totalitarianism, first with kings and today through dictatorships and Socialism. The tendency in both continents is towards strong arm rule because their cultures have never had a history of liberty or placed any value on the individual.
But these assumptions are nonsense.
To work backwards for a moment, it is true that modern Africa has a history of dictatorships. But these dictatorships are a direct result of the political, social, moral, and economic chaos caused by European colonialism. Before being conquered by European imperialists, most African peoples either had kings with small kingdoms or had chiefs with limited powers. Dictatorship was imported into Africa by Europeans. Likewise with the Socialist dictatorships of Asia. Socialism is not an Asian invention. Socialism is a European invention. Karl Marx was a German living in France when he wrote The Communist Manifesto. The first Socialist nation was a European one – Russia, an up to then intensely Christian nation. It was from European and Christian Russia that Socialism was exported to Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. When Mao was murdering 45 million people and claiming the absolute authoritarian power that still defines Chinese politics he was following a distinctly European program and adopting a distinctly European ideology. And, to tie it all back to Africa, Mao then exported Socialism to Africa where it became the basis for most of the dictatorships there.
So, no, the ideologies supporting totalitarianism in African and Asian are neither African nor Asian in nature or history. They’re European. Not only is Socialist totalitarianism an imported ideology, but Africa and Asia both have their own periods from which the ideals of liberty developed and grew. Out of a concern for space and time, in this article I want to focus on Asia specifically because it has the oldest references to liberty, freedom, free markets, and limited (or no) government that exist in human history in the sayings of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.
The Old Master
Lao Tzu, born sometime around 550 BC, lived during the Warring States Period of Chinese history, a time of intense civil war between seven different Chinese kingdoms for total supremacy over the entire land. Living in the middle of this time of brutality and slaughter, Lao Tzu “was one of the curators at the Royal Library in the state of Chu and was known as a philosopher. He advocated a deep, connective empathy between people as the means to peace and harmony and claimed that such empathy was possible through recognition of the cosmic force of the Tao [or Dao, meaning the “Way”] which had created all things, bound all things, moved all things, and finally loosed all things back into their original state. Aligning one’s self with the Tao, according to Lao-Tzu, brought one into harmony with the universe and enriched one’s life; opposition to the Tao only brought frustration, unhappiness, and anger which resulted in bad behavior.” (Mark) All conflict, including war, Lao Tzu taught, was a product of violating the Tao and peace would return once people lived in harmony with the Tao.
His ideas on the way to live in harmony with the Tao are recorded in the text known today as the Tao Te Ching or The Book of the Way and of How It Manifests Itself in the World in English. Each chapter of the book consists of a few stanzas of writing which sum up a bit of wisdom that the Old Master gained through his lifetime. Yet as simple as they are, each chapter contains layers and layers of insights and truths that can take one a lifetime to understand. Chinese historian and philosopher Lin Yutang described Lao Tzu’s theory of society by saying it, “was a philosophy of laissez faire in government and naturalism in ethics. For he believed in a ‘government which does nothing’ as the ideal government. What man needed was to be let alone in his state of primitive freedom.” (pdf pg. 128)
American historian and economist Murray Rothbard described Lao Tzu’s teachings this way:
For Lao-tzu the individual and his happiness was the key unit and goal of society. If social institutions hampered the individual’s flowering and his happiness, then those institutions should be reduced or abolished altogether. To the individualist Lao-tzu, government, with its “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox,” was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and “more to be feared than fierce tigers.”
Selections from the Tao Te Ching
Having talked about how Lao Tzu’s ideas were focused on freedom, liberty, and limited government (even, perhaps, none at all), I know want to provide some examples of these ideas by quoting sections of the Tao Te Ching. After each quotation, I will dissect the quotation in order to explore its application to the ideals of liberty.
Chapter 57
If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.Therefore the Master says:
pdf pg. 34
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.
What makes a good leader? One who follows the Tao. How do great leaders follow the Tao? By abandoning all centralized planning, by refusing to try and control others. In other words, great leaders give up the State. Great leaders abandon all pretense of what most people would even consider a pretense of government by refusing to try to control other by making laws. After all, is the law not merely the process by which the government tries to control society by rewarding those who obey its commands and punishing those who do not?
And what is the outcome of completely abandoning the government made and controlled legal system?
Chaos?
The world governs itself. The result of the loss of the government is not disorder. Instead true order, spontaneous order, order emerging not out of the violent hand of those in power but order that emerges naturally as people seek to fulfill their wants and needs. Here Lao Tzu’s teaching about leadership reminds me of that expressed American religious leader Joseph Smith taught, “I teach them correct principles and they govern themselves.” True leaders espouse true principles that through their righteousness, goodness, and truth draw people to them. False leaders enforce upon the mass chaos masquerading as order, a form not of social cohesion but of compulsion that constantly chafes at the minds and souls of the public, stirring them up to hatred, resistance, and rebellion whenever they get a chance, great or small. The illusion of order is maintained when in fact disorder, rioting, and destruction are the results.
This is because those who maintain power through force fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of law. True law liberates men, helping us to realize, magnify, and live our natural born rights. False law is based on an elaborate set of demands with each demand having an attached reward or punishment for obeying or breaking. Making more laws will not prevent the behavior you dislike, it will only create more lawbreakers, more criminals, and encourage the waste of more resources trying to police the masses and punish the criminals. Take, fore example, the War on Drugs. After a century of drug prohibition and ever severe drug laws, illegal drug use has only increased and violent gangs have only grown rich off of the illegal drug trade. Contrary to the expectations of many, it has been nations that have decriminalized drug use that have seen declines in drug abuse and violence tied to the drug trade.
It is an axiom that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Whether that be with guns, swords, knives, bombs, poison, clubs, or their bare hands. Lao Tzu’s suggestion here is, I do not think, some facile statement about the dangers of the mere possession of weapons. He wasn’t a pacifist. Rather, he is talking about the kind of culture that weapons exist within. A culture that fetishizes weapons will fetishize the use of those weapons. A culture that glorifies the use of violence will justify the use of violence as much as possible in order to appear glorious. The nature result of this will not be a safe or secure society, but a dangerous one where “peace” is only maintained at the barrel of a gun. This, in turn, lays the foundation for the psychological conditions that justifies the State as it is based entirely on the assumption that only mass overwhelming violence (or the constant threat of it) could ever bring order to society. In such a society no one’s life, liberty, or property are safe from expropriation, extortion, and theft from those in power for the “common good.”
Related to the commentary here on weapons, Chapters 30 and 31 of the Tao Te Ching record Lao Tzu’s insights into both domestic leadership and war. Lao Tzu clearly understand war and conflict as evil. He taught that the objective of every decent man is peace, that weapons are tools of fear and therefore every decent person detests them. War was not the answer because violence only breeds more violence. The use of violence against others returns to you as your violence turns others into your enemies who seek to harm you for harming them, their loved ones, and/or their property. If battle happens then victory is not to be rejoiced in. Rather it is to be mourned like a funeral because our enemies aren’t monsters, they’re people and not through the slaughter of war they have been lost to the world. Standing armies cause problems and suffering wherever they exist, a danger to everyone and everything around them. A good leader is in harmony with the Tao, meaning he doesn’t try and dominate events or rule through compulsion and force. Instead he allows people the freedom to live how they choose and society is better for it because they will thereby come closer to the Tao. (Mitchell translation and Pine translation)
Returning to Chapter 57, over 2,500 years ago Lao Tzu already knew the danger of government welfare subsidies. Simply put, when you give people money for doing something then you give them a reason to continue to do that thing. Give people money not to work and they won’t work. Give people money to not get married and they won’t get married. Give money to people in poverty and they will stay poor. Give money to people to have children out of wedlock and they will have more children out of wedlock. Give money to people to be disabled and more people will be disabled. People will do what you may them to do. This is the moral hazard of the government, problems are either created or exacerbated by the government programs supposedly designed to lessen them. But it does make them vote for you. After all, who is likely to get the most stuff – the person promising to give you more stuff or the one vowing to take stuff from you? Here Lao Tzu understood the truth of politics, especially government politics, thousands of years before anyone today – government subsidies create dependency on those in power, which is what they want. A dependent people will not even conceive of rebellion.
Lao Tzu finished up Chapter 57 by describing his ideal government – one where the government has entirely abandoned lawmaking, one where economics and business are not centrally controlled by the government in any way, where religion is not state enforced and people have the right to exercise their freedom of conscience to live how they choose. Long before Locke or Jefferson, we see Lao Tzu elucidate the same rights we find enunciated in classical liberal tradition: liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. But Lao Tzu goes even farther. Whereas Locke and Jefferson could not see their way to the most logical conclusion of their arguments – the dissolution of the state entire – Lao Tzu does. He sees that the only way to have a just society is by having a government without any ability to compel obedience and a society that is daily dedicated to achieving its own wants and needs – a process that will lead to the most natural and beneficial solutions to society’s problems.
Chapter 75
The reason people are hungry
pdf pg. 170
is that those above levy so many taxes
this is why they are hungry
The reason people are hard to rule
is that those above are so forceful
this is why they are hard to rule
The reason people think little of death
is that those above think so much of life
this is why they think little of death
Meanwhile those who do nothing to live
are more esteemed than those who love life
Lao Tzu understood that taxes create or worsen poverty and the higher taxes create more poverty. The most obvious way is the fact that taxes take money out of the pockets of people, forcing them to purchase everything they need with even less money than they normally would have. The end result of this is that they can only buy less of what they need to survive and what they want to thrive. But the damage goes even deeper than this obvious result. Taxation is tied directly to employment, with raises in payroll taxes increase unemployment. This means that taxes make it harder for the poor to find work, trapping them in poverty, and harming them and generations of their descendants. Likewise, sales taxes have been linked to hunger and food insecurity. The higher the taxes, the less food you have to eat. This same logic applies to everything else you buy. A poor person spending more money on food cannot buy the new clothes she wanted, afford higher payments for a better car, or purchase the afford the games she wanted for her family. Taxes forcibly lower the standard of living for the middle classes and poor, making their lives nastier, meaner, and shorter.
Lao Tzu’s next point about force is something that I’ve written about previously. In the name of securing the “general welfare” a system of control is organized that uses blunt force violence to control the populace through outright force and terror. The levers of power, always exercised by the social and aristocratical elites, are used to secure and increase the wealth and power of those elites through “legalized” theft and extortion (taxes and fines). In order to ensure their power and wealth extract is maintained the elites in power use their stolen money to hire domestic military and foreign military forces (the police and the armed forces) to force people at home and abroad to comply with the dictates of those in power or suffer. This is why over a thousand people are killed by police every year, why over 250,000 are injured by police every year, and why over 72% of all people in prison are imprisoned for nonviolent “crimes.” That is why the State has given its policing agents -the police, the cops- near carte blanche to do as they please and face little to no legal consequences. The State can be summed up simply: “Comply or Die.“
Being subject to such violence and compulsion breeds within those subject to it hatred for those who they feel are the ones imposing their ideals through the violence of the government. The statist (state-ist) system itself is never the target, after all it merely represents “the people.” So people end up hating not the system which allows authoritarianism, totalitarianism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and all other forms of oppression to exist and function; instead their hatred is re-directed against some other target group -a Them– and the goal becomes assuming the reigns of power to punish Them. Therefore the actual system of oppression, the cause of the hatred and anger, escapes being held accountable. Instead its existence is strengthened as it becomes the goal of all groups to seize control of it so that they can escape its oppression and use its tools to oppress others. The result of this is that the State, through its very function, creates an unending war between the parts of society over the power and plunder to be gained by controlling the reins of power, all justified by the ideology of the State. The result is social chaos where hatred is increased as political limits narrow and everyone who isn’t aligned with you is your enemy trying to destroy you- an Endless War of All Against All where the only victors are the politicians in power and their politically connected friends.
Lao Tzu also clearly understood the way the system the political elites put into place indoctrinates people into a system of human sacrifice where the common people will waste their lives in pursuit of goals which are presented as noble but which only protect the money and power of the political elites and their sycophantic corporate courtiers. In short, all forms of the state, including modern “liberal democracies,” are built on human sacrifice. When you talk about soldiers and families sacrificing their liberty and their lives for the common good all you’re saying is that you believe in sacrificing human lives for the nation – you are defending, promoting, and honoring human sacrifice. And on a massive scale far bloodier and destructive than anything the ancient Aztecs ever accomplished because this doesn’t even account for the millions of humans sacrifices made when the nation’s military oppresses, bombs, and slaughters others outside the country. Not only are you saying you are willing to sacrifice your own children to the Gods of War when you “support the troops/the military/the nation/the government,” you’re saying you’re okay sacrificing the children of complete strangers on the Altars of War. No wonder Boyd K. Packer compared war to sacrificing people to the bloodthirsty idol Moloch.
But it is not only in war that nations and the people living within them demand human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is the very basis of the law and legal system in a nation-state. Don’t believe me? Just ask Eric Garner, throttled to death by plains cloths police for the dastardly and civilization threatening crime of selling individual cigarettes. Ask George Floyd, throttled to death in the gutter like a mangy rat for the unbearable crime of falling over while stepping off a curb. Ask Philando Castile, murdered like a rabid dog in front of his girlfriend and daughter for putting his hands up. Ask Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man who suffocated because the police beat him so severely it caved in his chest all because he was incapable of remaining absolutely still. Ask Ryan Whittaker, shot down in cold blood while kneeling in his door way in front of the police. Ask Breonna Taylor, who was brutally murdered in her own home by police bursting through the door in the middle of the nigh. The list of people killed by the police is endless.
The list of human sacrifices to the God of the Legal System is innumerable and endless. And make no mistake. When you suggest that it is acceptable for anyone to kill another human in order to enforce the artificially constructed thing that is man-made law then you are saying you are okay sacrificing human lives to support it. By saying the sacrifice of human lives is worth what you think the end result is then you are literally engaging in human sacrifice. Just because you aren’t pulling the trigger or locking people in cages personally is irrelevant when you take part in the system that justifies it and does it in your name. Most of the Mexica never swung the sacrificial dagger either. That doesn’t mean they were exempt for their part in the system of human sacrifice. Neither are you.
In the final lines of Chapter 75, Lao Tzu points the reader towards the better way, towards a better, freer, and more prosperous society. His words here remind me of the words of Jesus Christ when He taught, “If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” (Matt. 16:25) The greatest life, the exemplary life worthy of emulation by all people, is not that of the politician, who spends all his days endlessly grasping for popularity and power, whose every move is calculated as an act of public relations designed to lull the masses into a subservient compliance, whose existence and wealth is built upon the tax monies extorted from the public at the point of the sword (or gun.) The only worthy life is one of self-sacrifice, one where the person has given up the awards, praises, and rewards of the world in order to dedicate himself and herself to the loving service of his or her fellowman. In short, the only people worthy of notice and following are those who have given their lives up for others.
Final Thoughts
Think of it. Someone nearly two-thousand and five hundred years ago understood the failures of the state, the evils of war, the importance of property rights, the power of free markets, and the meaning of liberty in ways that people today still struggle to accept. And unlike all other ancient writers, whose ideas of liberty was limited to their own tribal groups or nationalities, Lao Tzu’s ideas of liberty were universally applied to all people. This makes Lao Tzu the first person that I know of to recognize the inalienable human rights.
I know some may dismiss these revelations of ancient liberty by pointing out that China has always been ruled by a king, emperor, or dictatorship – meaning that however true it is that Lao Tzu foresaw the modern ideas of liberty they never took. But to dismiss Lao Tzu’s contributions simply because they were never fully embraced is like rejecting John Locke because no Western nation has ever truly practiced the consent of the governed and has violated the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. It is myopic, blinding people to a wealth of insights from one of history’s greatest philosophers.
To say that the simplicity of Lao Tzu’s writings bely the depth of their ideas is an understatement. Just look at the above. I have quoted two chapters of the Tao Te Ching and exactly 194 of the Old Master’s words. I then wrote 2,562 words of commentary on those short 194 words, exploring their meaning and providing examples of what they warned about happening in order to prove they were correct. The Tao Te Ching is not a book, it is an ocean with depths of meaning waiting to be plumbed. A deep study of its philosophies will provide great insights into the nature of the world, the rights of individuals, and the function of good government to every person who undertakes the challenge.