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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 57 (Unpublished):

Govern a country with justice.
Address conflict with surprise.
Conquer the world with patience.

How do I know this?
From experience.

Without excessive rules,
people become honest.
Without feeding desire,
greed does not take hold.
Without imposed belief,
people return to what they know.

Let go of what is forced.
What is steady does not require grand displays. 

In what is simple, there is enough.
In what is enough, there is abundance.

—

There are chapters of the Tao Te Ching that feel clever, even funny. And then there are the ones that feel like they’ve been waiting your whole life to find you—not to comfort you, but to name what you’ve been unable to say.

Chapter 57 is one of those. It’s personal. And right now, it’s urgent.

I founded the Polarities of Democracy Institute in 2017, together with Dr. Bill Benet and Barry Johnson, because I was living with a fear I couldn’t shake. At the time, I would have had trouble proving it to anyone who wanted footnotes, but I knew something in me was sounding an alarm. What I intuited was that democracy was not simply under pressure, but vulnerable to being hollowed out from the inside. Not always with tanks in the street or some cinematic overthrow, but through something slower and more familiar: the weakening of the habits, values, and tensions that let a people govern themselves at all.

That fear was not imaginary.

And for me, this has never been an abstract interest. It is tied to why I write, why I coach, why I consult, why I convene retreats at Kayser Ridge, and why I keep returning to the Tao Te Ching. There is a red thread that runs through all of it. I haven’t always had the cleanest language for that thread, but I know it when I feel it. It has something to do with helping people reconnect to what is essential before the noise of life, work, power, technology, ideology, and fear pulls them too far from center. Chapter 57, aside from Chapter 1, may be the clearest expression of that thread I know.

Govern a country with justice. Address conflict with surprise. Conquer the world with patience.

That is not a strategy memo. It is not campaign advice. It is not a pundit’s take. It is deeper and, in this moment, more radical than any of those.

Because democracy, in its base essence, is a conversation. By the people and for the people. Not a monologue. Not a sermon. Not a command. Not a performance. A conversation. Which means democracy depends on something far more fragile and far more durable than procedure alone. It depends on whether people can remain in relationship with one another and with reality long enough to work tensions that do not go away.

That is why the Polarities of Democracy framework, developed by Dr. Bill Benet, has mattered so much to me. It names something most of us feel but struggle to hold: democracy is not secured by choosing the right value, but by leveraging a set of interdependent values over time. Freedom AND Authority. Justice AND Due Process. Diversity AND Equality. Human Rights AND Communal Obligations. Participation AND Representation.

Each pair holds a necessary tension. Each depends on the others. And when one is overemphasized to the neglect of its partner, the system doesn’t correct—it distorts.

Freedom without Authority fragments. Authority without Freedom constrains. Justice without Due Process overreaches. Due Process without Justice stalls.

These are not problems to solve. They are polarities we live inside and leverage more or less well. And when they’re not held well, the conversation that is democracy begins to break down—not all at once, but in predictable ways.

That is the pattern.

And Chapter 57 points to the same pattern from another direction.

Without excessive rules, people become honest. Without feeding desire, greed does not take hold. Without imposed belief, people return to what they know.

That lands hard right now because we are living in an age in which almost every system seems tempted to substitute force for relationship, volume for legitimacy, speed for reflection, and certainty for conversation. We are told, in a thousand ways, that if we can just get the right people in charge, the right technology deployed, the right enemies named, the right narratives amplified, then order will follow. It is an old fantasy. It keeps returning in new clothes.

None of that impresses the Tao.

It does not say that order imposed from above is the same thing as justice lived from within. It does not say that the loudest certainty is the same thing as truth. It does not say that compliance is the same thing as trust. It points us back to a subtler and more demanding reality: what is forced may look strong for a season, but what endures is what has been cultivated deeply enough that it can be lived, not merely enforced.

This is where Trust enters first.

Trust is what allows people to remain in the conversation. Trust in self. Trust in others. Trust in systems. Trust that the process, while frustrating, is not fake. Trust that voice matters. Trust that disagreement does not automatically make the other side evil. Trust that law is more than an instrument for one faction to bludgeon another. Trust that our institutions, however imperfect, are still capable of serving something larger than whoever happens to be holding power.

Without that, democracy becomes performance art with some celebrated paperwork we point to, but means nothing.

I’ve watched this erosion happen in real time. Not just in polling data or news cycles, but in conversations that used to be possible and now aren’t. In relationships that used to hold tension and now fracture at the first friction. In systems that used to self-correct and now just calcify.

And Trust, while so important, isn’t enough.

Just writing that line sounds strange even to me. For years I have written and worked on the multarity of Trust (see my piece on Trust in the Wiser Decisions Series) and I still believe it is one of the great issues of our time. But Trust, on its own, can fairly easily be misdirected. It can be manipulated. It can be built around charisma, tribe, grievance, fear, or shared fantasy. People can trust what is false. Entire movements can be bonded by trust in a lie. Or lots of them strung together in conspiracies everyone agrees to hold. And promote. With cult-like fervor. It happens at the extremes of the political spectrum, in faith communities, in the debates about whether AI will kill us or save us, about taking care of the planet that takes care of all of us.

Which is why this chapter presses me. And why I believe the next turn in my own work—maybe the most important turn—has to center the relationship between Truth AND Trust.

Not as one polarity among many.

As the foundational polarity that sits underneath all the others.

Truth without Trust is rejected, resisted, or weaponized.

Trust without Truth is misplaced, manipulated, or unstable.

A thriving humanity requires both.

Not one after the other.

Not one instead of the other.

Both.

This, underneath the polarity of Either/Or-thinking AND Both/And-thinking—may be the central polarity of our time.

Truth AND Trust in democracy, because people cannot govern themselves if reality itself becomes a partisan possession. Truth AND Trust in the environment, because no amount of data will matter if institutions are not trusted enough to translate it into shared action, and no amount of trust will save us if it is detached from what is actually happening to the planet. Truth AND Trust in Human AND AI, because what these systems can generate is expanding faster than our moral and civic capacity to discern what deserves confidence. Truth AND Trust in religion, because faith cut loose from truth becomes fanaticism, while truth stripped of trust becomes sterile, arrogant, and socially inert. Truth AND Trust in families, in teams, in organizations, in communities, in nations, because every one of them depends on the same miracle: people remaining in relationship with one another and with reality long enough to build something worth inhabiting together.

That is why this chapter feels so incredibly personal. I have had tears in my eyes in the process of writing this post.

I did not participate in the founding of the Polarities of Democracy Institute because I wanted another project to add to my already unsustainable list. I founded it because I was scared. I was feeling that if we lost the conversation, we would lose far more than elections. We would lose the conditions that make shared quality of life on the planet possible. We would lose the ability to hold Freedom AND Authority together, Justice AND Due Process together, Diversity AND Equality together, Human Rights AND Communal Obligations together, Participation AND Representation together. We would lose the discipline of seeing the other not as expendable, but as part of the very Whole we claim to defend.

And once that starts, the damage does not remain in politics. It reaches outward and inward at the same time. Families strain. Teams harden. Organizations drift into factions. Communities sort themselves into suspicion. Nations begin speaking to themselves instead of to each other. Humanity narrows. The environment pays the price. Truth becomes negotiable. Trust becomes tribal. AI accelerates everything. And all of it gets sold to us as strength. All these have happened for me. All this has escalated in my view. All this is coming to the brink. And I’m more scared these days, not less.

We seem to no longer know what strength actually is.

And there’s a likelihood of lots of suffering when the conversation is abandoned.

So, Chapter 57. It matters to me. It reminds me that what ends up holding isn’t what grabs attention on social media. It reminds me that justice is not the same thing as domination. It reminds me that governing well requires more than getting your way. It requires the patience to let what is true move outward from a rooted center.

I love the Tao because it refuses to flatter our appetite for forcing and power, for power’s sake.

The chapter isn’t a call for passivity though. It’s a call for being a different kind of serious. The kind that knows excessive legalism does not produce honesty. The kind that knows feeding greed does not produce abundance. The kind that knows imposed righteousness does not produce love. Those are not only spiritual insights. They are civic ones. Leadership ones. Human ones.

The red thread through everything that’s important to me is there. Tao. Polarity. Democracy. The refuge I call Kayser Ridge Retreat and Learning Center. Coaching. Organization development. Writing this stuff not knowing if it will ever be read. They are not separate bodies of work to me. They are all attempts, in different forms, to help people reconnect to what is essential before they are swept away by what is urgent, inflammatory, profitable, efficient, or ideologically convenient. They are all attempts to keep the conversation alive. To help Part AND Whole stay in relationship. To help Truth AND Trust remain connected. To help us make wiser decisions over time that stand the test of time.

Sometimes—more often in recent years—I’ve wondered if what I’m feeling is actual depression or just an honest response to reality. I dip. I rally. I dip again. What keeps me going isn’t certainty that things will get better. It’s the people who keep showing me that coherence is still possible.

It’s my heroes from the past and present who inspire me to keep going. I’ve taken to calling them my “islands of coherence in a sea of chaos”—borrowing from Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry who studied energy in systems, including thermodynamics. Originally from Russia, his family escaped to Germany after the revolution, then had to escape to Belgium after the rise of Nazism in Germany. Let me pause on this, just for a moment:

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium … small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

That’s not wishful thinking. It’s physics. It’s what happens when enough people refuse to let chaos have the final word.

I want this piece to do more than diagnose. I need it to end where I keep finding myself ending lately—not in despair, but in the other pole that holds when reality gets heavy.

Hope.

Not cheap hope. Not decorative hope. Not hope as denial.

Hope as discipline.

My sister, Lori, founded an organization called Team Tony Foundation to support people who have been diagnosed with cancer. She lives in the space of people confronting end of life questions and the actual end of life. She has every right in the world to be sentimental if she wanted to be. She isn’t. She’s fierce and practical and full of love. Sometimes too full and if that sounds impossible—meet her and see for yourself. And she centers her work in one word: HOPE.

I’m wearing one of her Team Tony wrist bracelets right now. On it is inscribed: I am not alone. We are stronger together. What is your mission / Why? Create your plan. Believe in yourself.

That bracelet has outlasted every polished strategic plan I’ve ever written. Because it’s not advice. It’s practice. And practice is what hope looks like when it stops being a feeling and becomes a discipline.

That is not a bad civic theology, actually.

If democracy is a conversation, then hope is what keeps people in it when it would be easier to give up, harden, or start worshiping the strongman du jour. If Truth AND Trust is one of the defining polarities of our time, then hope is what keeps us from reducing either one to a slogan. If Humanity AND AI is now one of our great multarities, then hope is what insists that acceleration does not get the final word. If the environment is to be stewarded rather than consumed, if religion is to reconnect rather than divide, if nations are to remember their humanity, if families and teams and communities are to find their way, hope cannot be a sentimental accessory. It has to become practice.

So here’s what I’m asking—not as theory, but as practice. Not as cheerleading, but as the work itself.

Stay in the conversation.

Tell the truth in ways that build trust. Build trust in ways that can bear truth. Protect democracy not as an abstraction, but as a lived discipline of shared reality and shared humanity. Do not hand over your center to those who profit from panic, grievance, spectacle, or speed. And when you are tempted to believe that humanity has become too fractured, too manipulated, too cynical, too exhausted to find its way, remember Lori’s bracelet.

You are not alone. We are stronger together. Know your mission. Create your plan. Believe in yourself.

And maybe, in this moment, that’s one way of saying what the Tao has been pointing at all along.

From the center, what is true moves outward.

Not someday.

Now.

Here’s my Polarity Map for Truth And Trust:

INVITATIONS:

How do you make decisions under uncertainty, over time? To take a short Polarity Assessment based on the Strength And Flexibility polarity, CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).

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.