Cui Qu asked Laozi, “If you do not govern the world, how can you make men’s minds good?”

“Take care
lest you intervene
and disturb men’s minds,”
replied Laozi.

“The mind, if pushed down becomes despondent;
if pulled up, elated.

Now elated, now despondent,
here it is a captive, and there
it is a raging fury.

It is compliant and yielding
to what is hard and firm,
or it is so sharp that it can carve and chisel.

Now it is as hot as a burning flame,
then as cold as ice.

It is so swift that while one glances up and down,
it shall twice have enfolded all
beyond the four seas.

When resting,
it is as still as a deep precipice.
When moving,
it rises up to the heavens.

Resolute and high-spirited,
it cannot be bound – this is the mind of man.”

Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou trans. by Hyun Hochmann, Yang Guorong, Letting Be and Letting Stand

What do all of us have in common? I propose every human desires to make every other human “good”.

If I could I would cause feelings of resentment, of avarice, of racism, of hatred, and of servility – to vanish. Naturally I am wont to believe if I simply had enough power to engineer society, I would train everyone to be “good”. Even if the change required several generations worth of time, a revamped education system, a different economy that weighted environmental health, and social well-being on par with profit… I hasten to note that I’d incline education toward the classic liberal arts…

How curious that it is common to want to make someone else “good”. You could call this the savior complex, a compulsion to help, to rescue another who in my judgment is “worse off” than myself. Perhaps you know of a family member or a friend who “needs saving?” And you muse to yourself about what they ought to do, to “solve” their problematic life.

Reflection upon this “game” that we play causes one to suspect this is a silly game indeed. Lao Tsu was asked once whether having absolute power over the entire world would put one in a position to make men “good”. Lao Tsu was not optimistic.

I just finished Hightown, a Netflix or Apple TV streaming series which is set in the Cape Cod Massachusetts area. A main character, Jackie Quiñones (Monica Raymund), is a hard-partying National Marine Fisheries agent in Provincetown, MA. Jackie is lesbian, alcoholic, drug addicted and a compassionate human being. The character development in this series is excellent and Jackie is complicated. She is persistently oblivious to her own condition of mind and life, – all the while she does what ever she can to “save” individuals perceived to be worse off than she. Jackie is shaken more than once when her empathic hopes for another’s well-being are shattered, ended by violent death. In the end Jackie finds redemption for herself and makes the wry comment that she is no longer in thrall to a “save a Ho” compulsion.

This is the crux of the argument advanced by the Zhuangzi. Human nature is complex. Human nature is  wild, with an insistence upon personal autonomy that resists any and all impositions of “goodness”.

The lesson to be learned: one may attend to one and only one individual – yourself.

*prostitute, streetwalker, courtesan, whore, night butterfly, sex worker, fallen woman, etc., etc..