Furious At Three In The Morning
If the United Auto Workers strike declared against “the big three” auto companies is not on your mind, it should be. Initially the strike is shutting down three plants. It is doubtful the gap between what the Union is asking and what the companies are offering will be narrowed soon. The picketing is likely to spread. The back story to the strike as well as the position of each side is published widely by many media outlets. There’s no need to go into detail here.
What is the Taoist point of view? No matter the extent of effort a Union or the aggregate of companies is willing to expend to gain what they desire, to reduce a complex globalized reality to one desideratum — what’s real is unitary, undivided. The unitary real is impervious to massaging of public opinion, the opining of law makers and CEOs.
Your slice of compensation and benefit will derive from a totality of given value. Whose slice has to be diminished?
Compromise or conflict? Warfare, scorched-earth or joint cooperation?
The way-of-heaven, or the Tao is to see both sides, walking two roads…
But to wear out your brain
trying to make things into one
without realizing that they are all the same
—this is called “three in the morning.”
What do I mean by “three in the morning”?
When the monkey trainer
was handing out acorns, he said,
“You get three in the morning and four at night.”
This made all the monkeys furious.
“Well, then,” he said,
“you get four in the morning and three at night.”
The monkeys all were delighted.
There was no change in the reality
behind the words,
and yet
the monkeys responded
with joy and anger.
Let them, if they want to.
So the sage harmonizes with both right and wrong
and rests in Heaven the Equalizer.
This is called walking two roads.
—Zhuangzi, chapt 2, Discussion On Making All Things Equal, trans. by Burton Watson
2 thoughts on “Furious At Three In The Morning”
As most of us know, the word, “compromise “ has gained an unfortunate and absolutely negative definition over the past 20 years and even worsened in just the past 8 years. As you noted, it’s a scorched earth approach by all sides with a desire to “win” at any cost. Rational thinking be damned. Man the torpedoes and full steam ahead.
What kind of creature are we?
How fragile, prone to damage is the psyche (soul) of homo sapiens!? Reason works well enough to comprehend and address conditions relevant to our immediate survival. Reason’s utility, effectiveness must be nurtured by community care, by lifelong learning. I wonder if reason is not a special birthright of homo sapiens? Is is possible that we may commit species suicide by trading the well being of our birthright for a “fist-full of dollars?”