If you winnow chaff,
and the dust gets into your eyes,
then the places of heaven and earth and
of the four cardinal points are all changed to you.

If mosquitoes or gadflies puncture your skin,
it will keep you all the night from sleeping.

But this painful iteration of benevolence and righteousness
excites my mind and produces in it the greatest confusion.

If you, Sir, would cause men not to lose their natural simplicity,
and if you would also imitate the wind in its (unconstrained) movements,
and stand forth in all the natural attributes belonging to you!
– why must you use so much energy,
and carry a great drum to seek for the son whom you have lost?

The snow-goose does not bathe every day to make itself white,
nor the crow blacken itself every day to make itself black.
The natural simplicity of their black and white
does not afford any ground for controversy;
and the fame and praise which men like to contemplate
do not make them greater than they naturally are.

–Zhuangzi, The Revolution of Heaven, by Zhuang Zhou, trans. James Legge

This is a story of a conversation between Confucius, an icon of the status quo, and Lao Dan who is a stand-in for a Taoist alternative.  The “status quo,” you know the consensus that order is best achieved by rule-keeping, if everyone would just adhere to the Constitution, mind the wisdom of the Founders, especially reverence for the 2nd amendment, limited Federalism, and maximum of local rule, etc. etc.

Perhaps you appreciate that I parody our present condition in these dis-United States.  Things devolve into conflict, fueled by feeling that there are verities which are eternal, as if they were “handed down” by a deity from a mountain top, that an ordered society is a matter of obedience.

One intractable problem with this viewpoint, the adherents have differing interpretations of specifically what is meant by their basket of God-given principles of freedom.  Intra-party conflict is waged to advance one’s interpretation.

And that is not the most grievous fracture in the notion of fixed, cornerstone principles, to which loyalty is morally obligatory.  Space, time, and even the most apparently solid objects are changing, without a steady state, just a matrix of changing relationships.  That is the crux of the matter.

Even the community of scientists, that subculture dedicated to the pursuit of truth, is not immune to being seduced, mesmerized by the illusion of being custodian of what finally counts, of the ultimate “theory.”  The status quo is defended exhausting time, emotional energy, and money.  Thomas Kuhn wrote about this in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

   Why must you use so much energy, and carry a great drum…