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From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 10 (Unpublished):
Do you travel in body, spirit, and soul,
without losing their unity?
Are you as tender in your energy
as a baby?
Is your mirror
clear?
Are you present in such a way
others follow easily?
When you meet anxiety,
can you be simple?
Be useful.
Hold, without possessing.
Act, without controlling.
—
I was halfway up a trail at Kayser Ridge when I came across a doe standing with her fawn. She positioned herself directly between me and her young and held perfectly still. Everything about her posture communicated readiness. Everything about her presence communicated restraint.
She had the capacity to act. She also carried no urgency to force action before it became necessary. I kept walking. She stayed exactly where she was.
The older I get, the more I suspect human beings struggle to hold that kind of integrated presence under pressure.
Power AND Love.
Most people tend to lean harder toward one side when conditions intensify. Some tighten control, dominate space, escalate certainty, push decisions faster, and confuse force with leadership. Others soften excessively, avoid conflict, delay necessary action, over-accommodate dysfunction, and confuse care with the absence of accountability.
Both patterns often emerge from sincere intention.
Both create predictable forms of suffering over time.
Chapter 10 feels remarkably relevant right now because Lao Tzu’s questions are not really about leadership techniques or self-improvement strategies. They are questions about integration. Can strength remain connected to tenderness? Can influence remain connected to humility? Can action remain connected to awareness? Can authority remain connected to relationship? Can human beings hold power without becoming possessed by it?
Those questions feel increasingly consequential in the world we are building.
We are living through a historical moment where humanity is dramatically accelerating its collective capacity for Power while developing emotional maturity, wisdom, restraint, and relational capacity at a much slower pace.
Artificial intelligence is intensifying that gap.
AI can optimize, persuade, predict, scale, monitor, automate, influence, and amplify decisions faster than any human system previously could. It dramatically expands capability. What it does not generate is Love — not sentimental affection, but the deeper developmental capacities required to steward power responsibly: humility, empathy, discernment, moral courage, self-awareness, restraint, and relationship with consequence.
Technology accelerates existing human patterns.
That feels like the deeper concern.
Human beings already struggle to hold Power well. We overidentify with certainty, control, domination, tribal identity, ideological righteousness, and the emotional rewards of being “right.” We build systems rewarding performance while slowly eroding trust, humanity, flexibility, and connection underneath the surface.
Now those same tendencies are scaling algorithmically.
Social media rewards outrage faster than reflection. Political ecosystems reward certainty faster than complexity. Organizational systems often reward visible performance faster than relational trust. AI increasingly amplifies whatever human incentives already dominate the surrounding system.
We are generating Power at AI speed while developing Love at human speed.
The gap matters.
Martin Luther King Jr. described the polarity beautifully decades ago: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
That sentence may describe one of the central developmental challenges of our time.
Power matters because human beings require the capacity to act, protect, intervene, establish boundaries, make decisions, enforce accountability, and interrupt harm. Organizations require it. Democracies require it. Parents require it. Leaders require it.
Love matters because people require dignity, empathy, inclusion, trust, care, psychological safety, and the experience of being treated as human beings rather than variables inside someone else’s system.
The trouble begins when one side starts functioning as though it alone carries the future.
I have worked inside organizations where Power dominated almost completely. Results mattered. Metrics mattered. Performance mattered. Everyone learned quickly what could and could not be said safely. People complied. Few trusted. Creativity narrowed. Fear drifted underground and disguised itself as professionalism.
I have also worked inside systems overcorrecting toward Love while gradually losing relationship with accountability, clarity, standards, and difficult decision-making. People felt heard. Few things improved. Problems became endlessly discussable and increasingly untouched.
Living systems compensate for both forms of imbalance eventually.
Barry Oshry’s (See And_V2_PEEK_C36_OSHRY) work around Power Processes AND Love Processes helped me understand this more deeply years ago. Systems require differentiation and integration simultaneously. Too much force without relationship fractures systems. Too much accommodation without structure weakens systems differently.
Healthy democracies require both too.
The Polarities of Democracy framework identifies tensions such as Freedom AND Authority, Justice AND Due Process, Participation AND Representation, Diversity AND Equality, and Human Rights AND Communal Obligations. Democracies weaken whenever one side begins treating the other as unnecessary.
Authoritarian systems often overdevelop Power to the neglect of Love. Control expands. Dissent narrows. Fear becomes politically useful. Opposition increasingly gets framed as dangerous, disloyal, or illegitimate.
Though democratic systems can drift into imbalance differently as well. Endless accommodation without coherent authority creates fragmentation, distrust, institutional paralysis, and the erosion of shared accountability.
Both destabilize the larger whole.
The doe on the trail embodied something modern culture increasingly struggles to recognize:
integrated power.
Protective capacity without unnecessary escalation.
Presence without passivity.
Strength without domination.
The ancient Taoist metaphor of the infant points toward the same reality. Scholars often describe the “suppleness of an infant” as representing primordial vitality — flexible, responsive, alive, unburdened by rigid identity or egoic hardening. Modern culture tends to mistake hardness for strength. The Tao repeatedly suggests the opposite. Rigidity breaks. Suppleness adapts.
That applies psychologically, organizationally, politically, relationally, and spiritually all at once.
The mirror Lao Tzu references feels equally important now. A clear mirror reflects reality without excessive distortion from ideology, ego, fear, identity possession, tribal loyalty, or certainty. The difficulty, of course, is that human beings are extraordinarily skilled at confusing projection with perception.
Carl Jung spent much of his life warning about this very tendency.
What remains unconscious eventually gets projected outward.
Enemies become containers for disowned fear, rage, weakness, shame, and insecurity. Entire societies can become organized around those projections. The more fragmented people become internally, the easier it becomes for systems to manipulate identity, outrage, fear, and belonging externally.
That danger feels increasingly amplified now.
Especially because modern systems reward emotional escalation extraordinarily well.
The challenge emerging in this era may not simply be whether humanity becomes more technologically capable.
We clearly will.
The deeper challenge is whether human beings develop enough maturity to remain fully human while holding increasingly amplified forms of power.
That feels less like a technology problem and more like a developmental one.
Which may be why Chapter 10 continues circling back toward integration. Fragmented human beings tend to fragment the systems they lead. People disconnected internally often create systems disconnected relationally. Human beings unable to steward Power AND Love simultaneously eventually force others to absorb the consequences of that split.
The work feels less connected to perfection than participation.
Remaining aware enough to notice when strength hardens into domination.
Remaining aware enough to notice when compassion drifts into avoidance.
Remaining integrated enough that Power AND Love stay in relationship with one another rather than splitting apart under pressure.
I get this wrong regularly.
Most of us probably do.
Though I increasingly suspect the future may belong to leaders, organizations, communities, and societies capable of holding both simultaneously:
strong enough to act,
human enough to care,
wise enough to recognize that without Love, Power eventually destroys trust,
and without Power, Love eventually loses the capacity to protect what matters.
That feels less like abstract philosophy these days and more like a survival skill for civilization itself.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Power And Love:
INVITATIONS
If you want to take a quick self-assessment for Power And Love: CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).
Try the AI-trained “Chat w/AI Cliff” for support for Step 1, Seeing Polarities
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Check out our online self-directed Basics, Credentialing, or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge! Certifications and Courses
