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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 3 (Unpublished):
Avoid overpraise of the praiseworthy,
And people will not act resentfully.
Avoid overvaluing what can be possessed,
And people will not act covetously nor feel distressed.
Leaders who are steady
Keep hearts open and bodies fed.
They quiet comparison
Before it takes root or spreads.
They lead without claiming the spotlight,
And follow without falling behind.
They loosen the grip of what’s expected,
And leave forced outcomes aside.
By not doing what need not be done,
What is natural can align.
What is done from not doing
Holds order without design—
And accomplishes more than striving can find.
—
There’s something about this chapter that feels increasingly difficult to ignore right now. We live in a civilization advanced enough to build artificial intelligence, map the human genome, and communicate globally in real time—and one of the highest-status identities in that same civilization is now “Influencer.”
The Tao isn’t describing abstract spirituality here. It’s describing what happens to human systems when amplification overtakes awareness, when influence loses relationship with restraint, and when leadership becomes organized around attention, stimulation, certainty, status, and emotional activation.
Which feels painfully contemporary.
We’re living in a time where praise gets industrialized. Attention gets monetized. Status becomes algorithmically amplified. Conflict spreads faster than discernment. Emotional activation outcompetes reflection almost everywhere you look. Systems designed to hold democratic tension together increasingly reward outrage, humiliation, performance, tribal identity, and perpetual reaction.
And the consequences are becoming harder to miss.
The Tao’s warning about overpraise and overvaluing lands differently when entire economies now depend on keeping people psychologically activated. AI systems learn what captures attention and feed it back continuously. Influence no longer moves only through human interaction. It moves through recommendation systems, outrage loops, media ecosystems, identity signaling, political branding, and algorithms optimized for engagement rather than maturity.
What gets amplified begins shaping what people desire, fear, resent, imitate, and eventually become.
And somewhere inside all that amplification, Allowing becomes harder to access.
That polarity—Influence AND Allowing—has deepened more for me every time I’ve revisited this chapter — especially in the last 10 years. We are always influencing something. What we reward matters. What we elevate matters. What we react to matters. What we repeatedly place attention on slowly reorganizes the system around it. Leadership can never be neutral because influence itself shapes conditions whether we intend it or not.
The Tao seems less concerned with influence itself than with what happens when influence loses relationship with wisdom, restraint, humility, and awareness.
That’s where things become dangerous.
Because over time, systems begin reorganizing themselves around signal instead of substance. Visibility starts replacing credibility. Dominance starts replacing maturity. Performance starts replacing leadership. Emotional certainty starts replacing discernment. People increasingly learn that outrage spreads faster than steadiness and that humiliation often generates more influence than wisdom.
And eventually entire cultures begin drifting toward developmental gravity downward instead of upward.
Adult ego development theory helps illuminate something important here. Earlier developmental structures are not failures. They bring necessary strengths. Self-centric structures often bring courage, disruption, decisive action, survival instinct, willingness to challenge stagnation, and capacity to move forcefully when systems freeze. Group-centric structures often bring loyalty, cohesion, belonging, social responsibility, care for others, and willingness to subordinate self-interest for collective stability.
Under enough fear and amplification pressure, though, those same structures can distort.
Self-centric distortion often expresses itself through domination, humiliation, reactive certainty, image management, impulsivity, and win/lose identity conflict.
Group-centric distortion often expresses itself through conformity, tribal fusion, fear of exclusion, suppression of difficult truth, and loyalty tests that override discernment.
Modern amplification systems increasingly reward both simultaneously.
That may be part of why so much public leadership now feels emotionally exhausting even when it appears successful on the surface. We watch adults with extraordinary institutional power behave in ways that often resemble unintegrated emotional systems competing for validation, visibility, dominance, and psychological safety inside environments specifically designed to reward emotional escalation.
And because the systems themselves amplify the behavior, the cycle reinforces itself.
That dynamic shows up clearly through the Dreaded Drama Triangle described by Karpman decades ago. Victim. Persecutor. Rescuer. The roles rotate continuously through politics, organizations, media ecosystems, social movements, online identity groups, and leadership cultures. One group experiences itself as endangered. Another mobilizes around attack, blame, humiliation, ridicule, or domination. Another rushes in attempting to rescue, defend, correct, or save. Everyone experiences themselves as justified. Everyone experiences themselves as threatened.
The system feeds on the energy.
And what increasingly disappears is the capacity to remain present enough to choose how to respond rather than simply react.
That’s one reason the democratic idea of “loyal opposition” feels so important to revisit right now. The concept assumed something remarkably mature: that people could disagree fiercely while still remaining loyal to the constitutional structure holding the larger system together. Opposition was intended to function as accountability rather than annihilation. Adversaries were expected to challenge one another vigorously while still recognizing shared participation in something larger than themselves.
That developmental capacity feels increasingly strained. To say the least.
Somewhere along the way, disagreement started mutating into moral contamination. Political opposition increasingly became interpreted as existential threat. Losing elections became psychologically intolerable for many people regardless of ideology. Institutional trust deteriorated. Shared reality fragmented. And despite astonishing technological sophistication, we now routinely struggle to count votes, sustain trust in electoral outcomes, or maintain confidence in processes that democratic societies once considered foundational.
Which raises an uncomfortable question:
How did civilizations capable of extraordinary scientific and technological advancement become so emotionally fragile?
The Tao keeps pulling attention toward the possibility that intelligence without developmental maturity becomes destabilizing over time.
“Leaders who are steady
Keep hearts open and bodies fed.
They quiet comparison
Before it takes root or spreads.”
That feels almost radical now.
Especially because so many systems surrounding us continuously intensify comparison, resentment, envy, fear, outrage, and identity attachment. The Tao’s concern appears deeply practical. Once comparison takes root and spreads, systems gradually reorganize around emotional scarcity rather than shared participation.
And emotionally activated populations become increasingly easy to manipulate.
This is where Wu Wei (effortless action) starts feeling less philosophical and more operationally essential.
Wu Wei is often misunderstood as passivity or disengagement. What this chapter keeps reminding about is something much more difficult: the capacity to influence without compulsively over-shaping, to guide without psychologically possessing outcomes, and to remain aware enough to discern when intervention serves the situation and when intervention distorts it.
That discernment matters enormously.
Because many modern systems reward perpetual intervention. Constant commentary. Immediate certainty. Rapid escalation. Endless emotional positioning. Leaders increasingly operate inside environments where stillness itself can begin feeling threatening because visibility and movement are continuously rewarded.
The result is that intervention begins feeling synonymous with leadership itself. Over time, the capacity to refrain, observe, allow, or remain present without immediately shaping outcomes starts looking weak, passive, naive, or irrelevant.
The Tao points somewhere very different.
“What is done from not doing
Holds order without design—
And accomplishes more than striving can find.”
That line feels increasingly difficult to hear inside modern systems organized around amplification.
Yet much of what currently exhausts our institutions, organizations, democracies, and relationships appears connected to leadership cultures unable to distinguish between necessary influence and compulsive over-shaping.
The chapter keeps inviting me to ask a deeper question:
Can we remain human enough to participate in powerful systems without becoming psychologically captured by them?
That feels increasingly central to the moment we’re living through.
We became extraordinarily powerful.
And somewhere along the way, many of our systems lost relationship with wisdom strong enough to hold that power responsibly.
Here’s an interior Polarity Map for Influence And Allow:
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.
