Chapter 53

This is the angriest chapter in the book and the only one that comes close to naming a crime.

It sets three facts side by side without comment. The court is swept immaculate. The fields are choked with weeds. The granaries are empty. The juxtaposition is the argument: the resources that produce a spotless court are the resources that are not being spent on the fields, and the empty granary is what the arrangement costs.

Then the picture of the beneficiaries, in four details that are all consumption: embroidered clothes, a sharp sword, being sated with food and drink, and goods and wealth to spare. The chapter calls this the boastfulness of robbery and says flatly that it is not the way.

The phrase is unusual for this book. Elsewhere a fault is described by its consequences, and the reader is told that the violent do not die a natural death or that a strong thing will be cut down. Here a class of people is described in specific terms and the word for theft is applied to them. Chapter seventy-five does something similar when it says the people are hungry because those above eat too much in taxes.

The chapter opens on a quieter note that frames the rest. If I had the smallest scrap of knowledge I would walk on the great way, and my only fear would be of straying. The great way is very level, and yet people love the byways. Having established that the plain road is easy and available, the chapter goes on to show who is on the byways and what it costs everyone else.

The opening image of the chapter is a road, and it is one of the few places where the book uses its central word in something close to its ordinary sense.

Dao is an everyday noun meaning a road, a route or a way of going, and the chapter exploits that. The great way is described as very level, which is the plainest possible recommendation of it: an easy, wide, well-graded road that requires no skill to walk. And yet people love the byways, the small side paths that are harder, longer and more interesting.

What that image proposes is a diagnosis rather than a metaphysics. The difficulty with the way is not that it is hidden or hard, since the chapter says it is neither. The difficulty is that it is dull, and that human beings reliably prefer the interesting detour. Chapter thirty-five had already conceded the same point in different terms when it said that music and food stop a traveller while the way put into words is bland.

The speaker's stated fear is worth noticing too. Walking the great way, my only fear would be of straying. Not of hardship, not of enemies, not of failure, but of wandering off a road that presents no obstacle. The book rarely admits to fear, and the thing feared here is the ordinary drift of attention.

That framing is what makes the second half land. The rulers in embroidered clothes are not villains from outside the argument. They are the same traveller, further along the byway, and the chapter's judgement on them is the judgement it has already passed on a general human preference.