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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18 (Unpublished):
When seeing It
Fails to be clear,
Justice and piety
Come by decree.
When rationality
And forced piety endure,
Hypocrisy
Becomes sure.
When family associations
Are absent of conscience,
There come collusions,
Pretense and appearance.
When the shared vision
Is lost by the nation,
Patriotic exploitation
Shows up as division.
—
It’s tempting to think patterns repeat because people don’t learn.
But genocide doesn’t repeat because we forget. It repeats because the conditions that make it possible remain in place.
Barry Johnson used to start teaching polarity thinking with something simple—Activity AND Rest. Not because it’s trivial, but because it’s undeniable. We all live it. We don’t debate it. We don’t build identities around it. We just move with it.
But as systems scale—from individuals to families to nations—the tensions don’t disappear. They become harder to see. And once they become harder to see, they become easier to distort.
That’s where culture enters—not as decoration or tradition, but as the operating system that determines what gets seen and what gets hidden.
Culture doesn’t just reflect shared values. It reinforces preferences. Over time, those preferences harden into identities. And those identities begin to organize around certain poles of multiple polarities—stacked, reinforced, defended. Political parties don’t just argue positions; they orient around combinations of poles and present them as the solution. What gets left out doesn’t go away. It gets projected.
This is what Either/Or-thinking to the neglect of Both/And-thinking produces at scale. When tensions that require holding both poles get reduced to choosing sides, the system doesn’t just simplify—it fractures. And once that fracture hardens into identity, the capacity to see the other completely begins to erode.
That’s when the “in” group forms. And with it, the “out” group.
From there, the system starts feeding itself. Data is gathered. Stories are told. Evidence is selected—not to understand, but to confirm. And almost without noticing, the feared downsides of the other pole become the defining narrative of the other group. Polarization builds, layer by layer, each side becoming more certain, more justified, more convinced that the problem is the other.
And then comes the part history doesn’t hide from us.
When the other is no longer seen completely, they are no longer seen as fully human. From there, the distance required for cruelty closes quickly. Genocide doesn’t begin with violence. It begins with a failure to see.
That’s the part that lands hardest in Chapter 18. Because the compensations it names—imposed morality, enforced righteousness, declared virtue—don’t show up as villains. They show up as corrections. As necessary responses to something that feels like it’s been lost.
And sometimes, they’re carried out in the name of the very institutions we expect to hold the line.
Religion has not been immune to this pattern. At times—and this is painful to acknowledge—it has amplified it. Not because faith itself requires it, but because identity fused with certainty becomes a powerful force—one that can override empathy in the name of purity, protection, or purpose. The Crusades, the Inquisition, modern extremism—they don’t sit outside the pattern. They reveal it.
Which raises the inconvenient question that Yuval Noah Harari often points to:
If we’re so smart, why are we so stupid?
The answer doesn’t seem to be a lack of intelligence. It’s a limitation in seeing.
Because the more complex the system, the more capacity it takes to hold the whole. Self AND Other. My Group AND Their Group. Nation AND Nation. Without reducing one to the enemy or elevating one as the only truth.
When that capacity isn’t there, the polarity doesn’t disappear. It simplifies into Either/Or-thinking to the neglect of Both/And-thinking. And with that shift, interdependent tensions become oppositions. Right vs wrong. Us vs them. Worthy vs unworthy. What once required holding both now demands choosing sides. And once that frame takes hold, the system begins to organize around it—amplifying division, hardening identity, and accelerating the very breakdown it claims to prevent.
Which is why some of the most difficult work any society has ever undertaken comes after the damage is done.
Truth AND Reconciliation. Since the mid-1970s, there have been around 50 national truth and reconciliation commissions established worldwide to address past human rights abuses, dictatorial regimes, and historical injustices. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Canada’s work with Indigenous communities. Rwanda after genocide. Each one an attempt to restore what was lost when the system stopped seeing clearly.
Not as a slogan, but as an attempt to restore what was lost when the system stopped seeing clearly. Truth without reconciliation perpetuates the cycle. Reconciliation without truth erases it. Both are required, not as ideals, but as conditions for something to hold again.
That’s not easy work. It asks people to see what they would rather not see. To face what has been denied. To acknowledge harm without losing the possibility of repair. It doesn’t resolve the polarity. It reintroduces it.
Which brings it back to something much simpler, and much harder to live.
Seeing.
Not partially. Not selectively. Not through preference or fear. But completely enough that the humanity of the other remains intact, even when the differences are real.
Because as Jack Gibb said, and as polarity thinking keeps pointing us back toward: Seeing is loving.
If we were to truly see a person, a group, a nation—completely, not partially—we would love them.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Either/Or-thinking AND Both/And-thinking from And, Volume, 1 Foundations:
INVITATIONS:
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.
