The empire is administered with righteousness; the army is directed by craft; the people are captivated by non-diplomacy. How do I know it is so? By this same Tao.
Among people the more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer they become. The more people have weapons, the more the state is in confusion. The more people are artful and cunning the more abnormal things occur. The more laws and orders are issued the more thieves and robbers abound.
Therefore the wise man says: If a ruler practices wu wei the people will reform of themselves. If I love quietude the people will of themselves become righteous. If I avoid profit-making the people will of themselves become prosperous. If I limit my desires the people will of themselves become simple.
Translation: Dwight Goddard, 1919 (public domain)
Sit With This
In the small state of yourself, which law has created the most outlaws — and what would govern that territory better: another rule, or more stillness?
A Practice
Find one rule of yours that you keep breaking — a diet, a schedule, a resolution grown teeth. This week, repeal it, and replace it with one quiet condition that makes the good thing easy. Govern by climate for seven days, then count the outlaws again.
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Western Commentary
The verse grants that a state can be held by correction and a war won by craft — then quietly takes the grant back: the world itself is only ever won by wanting nothing from it. Its evidence, gathered from the turbulent age it was written in, runs all one direction. Every tightening of control purchases more of the exact disorder it was meant to prevent: ban more and people grow poorer and more cunning; issue more law and you manufacture more to punish. Forcing is the thing that produces its own failure, column after column.
That was an observation about ancient governments, and it is wiser used closer to home — because each of us runs a small state, the self under management, and its legislature never sleeps. The rule you cannot stop breaking is the proof of the law: every prohibition breeds its own outlaw, and it does so in the republic of the self first. The stricter the ban, the more ingenious the evasion — and the lawmaker and the smuggler are the same person, you.
The sage's reply is not a better law but its near-absence: act without forcing, keep quiet, take no profit, want little — and people, the verse says, come right on their own. This is government by climate rather than decree; the atmosphere a person is does more ordering than the rules they post, in a household or a team as surely as in a state. It is not an argument for no rules — some fences hold real cliffs at bay — but for asking, before drafting the next one, what the rules already in force are quietly breeding. Stillness turns out to be the strictest discipline there is, and the only one nobody fights.