See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17 (Unpublished):
The best leaders,
Dependence disappears.
The next best leaders,
Are praised.
The next,
Are feared.
The worst,
Are despised.
Leaders who respect the people
Earn respect in return.
By giving trust,
They receive trust.
They do not impose the way forward,
Yet the way appears.
And when the work is done,
The people say,
“We did this ourselves.”
—
When I sit with this chapter and then look at leadership in American politics today, I don’t reach for analysis. I find myself holding my head in my hands. There’s disgust in there. Some anger. And something deeper that feels like grief. Not just for what is happening, but for what we are starting to accept as normal. That last part is what stays with me, because what we’re witnessing isn’t simply poor leadership. It’s a drift in how power is held, exercised, and justified over time.
For me, this chapter lives inside a polarity that shows up everywhere, from individuals to entire nations: Claiming Power AND Sharing Power (See Chapter 22 of And Volume 1, Foundations – pdf at the end!). Every leader claims power. That’s unavoidable. Decisions need to be made, direction needs to be set, responsibility needs to land somewhere. But the leaders this chapter points to don’t stop there. They share it. Not as a symbolic act, but as a way of operating. And when that polarity is leveraged well, something subtle but profound happens. People don’t become dependent. They become engaged. Ownership doesn’t need to be assigned. It emerges. The work shifts from belonging to the leader to belonging to the people.
That dynamic is not separate from democracy. It is embedded within it. In the language of Polarities of Democracy, Claiming Power AND Sharing Power lives inside Participation AND Representation. Representation requires leaders to claim power on behalf of others. Participation requires that power to be shared, so people remain engaged in shaping what affects them. When those two are leveraged together, democracy functions as intended. When they drift apart, the system begins to strain.
The challenge is that Claiming Power to the neglect of Sharing Power has a predictable drift. It rarely announces itself. It normalizes. Control starts to feel efficient. Certainty feels like strength. Speed feels necessary. And because nothing breaks right away, the boundary stretches. Then stretches again. Over time, what once felt off begins to feel acceptable. Not because it is right, but because it is repeated. This is how normalization of deviance takes hold—not through dramatic failure, but through gradual adjustment. We adapt to what we once would have questioned, and eventually we stop noticing the drips and dribbles.
And it shapes culture. Not culture as something abstract or secondary, but culture as the lived reality of how power actually moves through systems. When Claiming Power AND Sharing Power are leveraged well, culture becomes a container that can hold tension, invite participation, and sustain trust. When they’re not, culture becomes brittle, performative, or extractive. And that culture doesn’t stay contained. It ripples outward—from individuals to close personal relationships, from families to teams, from communities to nations, and eventually to the systems that shape our shared world.
Our individual and collective capacity to leverage this polarity matters at every level. It affects individual well-being. It affects whether relationships can hold difference without fracturing. It affects whether teams can make decisions that people actually trust and follow. It affects whether communities can navigate conflict without hardening into factions. It affects whether nations can govern themselves without eroding the conditions that make self-governance possible.
You can hear it in moments when leadership shifts from shared responsibility to singular authority. When a leader says, “I alone can fix it,” it lands with a certain clarity. Even reassurance. It can make sense in the moment, especially when things feel uncertain or broken. But it is also a set-up. A predictable move toward Claiming Power to the neglect of Sharing Power. The only real question at that point is not whether drift will occur, but how far it will go. History offers no shortage of answers. It all makes sense…until it doesn’t.
You can see similar patterns in the structures that are meant to hold power in balance. When separation of powers weakens—when one branch defers, enables, or becomes complicit with another—the system doesn’t fail all at once. It adjusts. It rationalizes. It absorbs the shift. The same pattern shows up when the relationship between Church AND State begins to blur. Church AND State function as distinct and necessary parts within a larger whole—a thriving nation and vibrant faith communities. When that distinction is respected, both can contribute without one dominating the other. When it erodes, even with good intentions, power begins to concentrate, participation narrows, and something meant to be shared becomes something that is held. And when that concentration of power becomes reinforced with moral or divine certainty—when what is “right” is no longer open to question but backed by something absolute—the drift accelerates. What began as conviction hardens into position. What could have remained in relationship becomes something to defend.
And yet, even in systems under strain, something else remains available.
The ability to claim power.
Not abstractly. Not symbolically. But concretely.
In a democracy, that shows up in one of the simplest and most powerful acts available to people: voting. Senator Raphael Warnock described democracy as “the political enactment of a spiritual idea: the sacred worth of all human beings.” If that’s true, then voting is more than a process. It is an expression of that worth. A way of claiming power that, at its best, reinforces the shared nature of it. So, a call to action if you have your head in your hands is – VOTE.
We’ve seen moments, even recently (Hungary), where systems have been bent or constrained in ways that raised real questions about fairness. And still, people showed up. In overwhelming numbers. Not because everything was working perfectly, but because something deeper was at stake. The act itself became a signal. A refusal to disengage. A way of saying, this still belongs to us.
Because the health of a system is not just reflected in how power is exercised at the top, but in whether people continue to claim it at every level.
This is where the discipline comes in. Not as theory, but as practice. The ability to notice early warning signs before they become normalized patterns. When fewer voices are heard. When disagreement carries more risk. When decisions move faster but involve fewer perspectives. These are not inconveniences. They are indicators to help us mitigate risk. If we miss them, the system doesn’t correct. It compounds. When I think about what could compound when these ignored risks are combined with the power of AI – it’s easy for me to go down the “game over” rabbit hole. We’re not there, fortunately. Yet.
This is the part I’ve had to wrestle with personally. If I lose trust in people’s capacity to see that drift and to interrupt it, I’m no longer working the polarity—I’m reacting from one side of it. Claiming Power without Sharing Power becomes control. Sharing Power without Claiming Power becomes abdication. A vicious cycle that doesn’t resolve—it compounds. Staying in the tension is not comfortable, but it is necessary if anything is going to shift.
There are signs, uneven and imperfect, that something else is still at work. People showing up. Speaking up. Choosing participation over withdrawal. These aren’t perfect expressions. But they matter. Recent global protests—some of the largest in history—suggest people are still willing to show up.
By giving trust, they receive trust. That line may be the most quoted from the Tao Te Ching. I’ve seen it in leadership books for decades, long before I ever picked up a copy myself. It shows up because people recognize it immediately, even if they rarely experience it in practice.
But it’s not a sentiment. It’s a transfer of power. And it only works when that trust is grounded in truth. Trust without truth can be manipulated. Truth without trust gets rejected. But when both are present, power can be shared without being lost.
And maybe that’s what leadership looks like right now—not holding on tighter, but being willing to share more than feels comfortable. Creating conditions where people don’t just follow, but participate. Where they don’t just comply, but contribute.
So that, someday, the work can still belong to the people.
And they can say, without hesitation or performance,
“We did this ourselves.”
Here’s the interior of a Polarity Map for Claim Power And Share Power:
INVITATIONS:
And_V1_PEEK_C22, “Claiming Power And Sharing Power” from And, Volume 1, Foundations.
To use an “AI-trained Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
