Tao of Plato

“Govern a large country,” says the sixtieth verse of the Tao Te Ching, “as you would cook a small fish.” A small fish falls apart if it’s poked and turned too often. One way to read the line is as advice to rulers to leave things alone, but it carries a second warning, about the cook who flips the fish because the last cook didn’t.

After nearly twelve years in which American politics has turned on one man, from the escalator in 2015 to the wipeout of last Tuesday, the country is about to flip the fish hard. Whatever Trump touched is headed for the bin, and the people doing the sorting are in no mood to sort. A lot of healthy babies are going to go out with the bathwater.

Two old philosophers, from opposite ends of the ancient world, spent a good deal of thought on exactly this situation: what a government is for, what it teaches the people who live under it, and how a society tells its passing opinions from what is actually so. Plato and Lao Tzu start from different places and disagree about much, but on these questions they overlap more than either tradition usually admits.

Shadows on both walls

Plato’s word for what everyone believes is doxa, opinion, and he set it against episteme, knowledge. In the Republic’s cave, prisoners chained since birth watch shadows on a wall and take them for the world. They build a whole society around interpreting the shadows, with honors for whoever predicts the next one best, and when one of them gets free, sees the sun and comes back down to tell them, they laugh at him and would kill him if they could. The cave isn’t a story about stupid people. Its prisoners are skilled and attentive, and their mistake is shared, which is what makes it hard to see.

The last twelve years filled both walls of the cave. On one, the federal workforce was parasites, the courts were rigged and every election lost was stolen. On the other, every question Trump’s people raised was asked in bad faith, so it never had to be answered.

The first wall is coming down now. The risk is that the second one goes up in its place, and that “Trump did it” becomes a reason to reject a policy the way “the elites want it” was a reason to reject one before. Both are doxa, opinion settled by who holds it. Neither tells anyone whether a fixed-price contract builds rockets more cheaply than a cost-plus one, or whether a given agency does what it says it does.

Lao Tzu puts it differently and, in one respect, more sharply. “The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful,” the second chapter begins, “yet this is only the ugly.” Opposites power each other, and a society that defines itself by rejecting one thing becomes shaped by it. A party that rebuilds itself as everything Trump was not has let Trump draw its outline. The fifty-eighth chapter adds the other half: “It is on disaster that good fortune perches; it is beneath good fortune that disaster crouches.” A wipeout is the moment the winners are most likely to overreach, and the overreach is where the next swing starts.

Every law teaches

Plato didn’t think the cure for doxa was a better set of opinions handed down from above. In the Republic he toyed with a “noble lie,” a founding myth the rulers would teach so citizens would accept their places, and it has haunted his reputation ever since. His last and longest work, the Laws, goes another way, and its most practical idea has been almost entirely forgotten.

There are two kinds of doctor, an Athenian in the Laws explains. One, a slave who treats slaves, rushes from patient to patient, gives orders “like a tyrant,” and moves on without a word about the illness. The other, a free man treating free men, asks about the patient’s life, explains the disease, and doesn’t prescribe until he has persuaded. Lawmakers, Plato said, should be the second kind. Every law should open with a preamble, a prooimion, setting out its reasons, so that citizens obey because they understand, and the penalty at the end is for those few whom reasons don’t reach.

A law teaches whether its makers mean it to or not. A rule against bribery teaches that office is a trust. A regulation that runs to four hundred pages teaches that only lawyers can know what’s allowed. A tax on buildings teaches that improving a lot is something to be punished, and a tax on the land under them teaches that holding a lot idle costs something, the lesson Transitioning to LVT traced.

A government is always educating its people, through the incentives its laws set and the conduct its officials show, long before it says a word in a classroom.

By that measure the last twelve years taught a good deal. They taught that loyalty to a person can stand in for competence in an office, that cruelty can be a policy, as when a budget director said he wanted federal workers “traumatically affected,” that a public building is a stage for its occupant, and that a rule binds only the other side. Those lessons won’t disappear because a party lost an election. And the other side has its own debased preambles. California’s housing bills each open with a declaration that housing is “a matter of statewide concern and not a municipal affair,” a formula written to win a lawsuit, not to persuade anyone who has to live under the law. Plato’s free doctor explained. That declaration only prescribes.

The ruler they barely know

Lao Tzu’s answer to how a government shapes its people starts from restraint. “The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects,” says verse seventeen. Next come the ruler people love and praise, then the one they fear, and last the one they despise. Of the best: “When his task is accomplished and his work done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally.’” Verse fifty-seven goes further: “The more taboos there are in the empire, the poorer the people; the better known the laws and edicts, the more thieves and robbers there are.”

A people governed by a thousand commands learns to need commands, and loses the judgment the commands were meant to stand in for.

This is wu wei, often translated as non-action, though it means something closer to acting without forcing. Here Lao Tzu and Plato meet. Both wanted a people whose good conduct came from within, from an ordered soul in Plato’s terms, from a life in accord with the Way in Lao Tzu’s, rather than from constant outside compulsion. Both thought a government’s example taught more than its instructions.

They differ on how much a government should try, and Plato’s own life settled the question against him. He sailed to Syracuse twice in the 360s BC to make the young tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher-king, and came home both times a near-prisoner, having learned, as his Seventh Letter tells it, that wisdom can’t be installed in a ruler who doesn’t want it. Plato’s own experiment ended on Lao Tzu’s side.

Wealth follows wisdom, eventually

The fullest test of these ideas ran in China, a century after Plato died. The Han dynasty came to power in 202 BC after the Qin, a state that had governed by exhaustive written law, savage punishment and forced labor on a scale that built the first Great Wall and broke the country in fifteen years. The early Han emperors governed by what came to be called Huang-Lao thought, a school drawn from Lao Tzu. Emperor Wen, who reigned from 180 to 157 BC, halved the land tax to a thirtieth of the harvest and for a stretch of years didn’t collect it at all. In 167 BC a girl named Chunyu Tiying, whose father, a physician, had been sentenced to mutilation, wrote to the emperor offering herself as a government slave to redeem him, since a man who has lost a foot can never grow it back however much he reforms. Wen abolished mutilating punishments that year. His son Emperor Jing kept the light hand.

Neither produced quick wealth. Sixty years on, though, the historian Sima Qian described what the new emperor, Wu, inherited. The granaries of the capital were so full that the old grain spoiled under the new, and the treasury held so much coin for so long that the cords stringing the cash rotted and the coins couldn’t be counted. Horses filled the lanes of the villages. Wu spent it. He fought decades of war against the Xiongnu, made salt and iron state monopolies in 117 BC, and tinkered with the coinage. When he died the treasury was empty, and in 81 BC the court held a public debate on whether to keep the monopolies, with Confucian scholars arguing against the officials who ran them, a debate recorded in the Discourses on Salt and Iron and still being argued in other forms.

Wealth followed wisdom in the early Han, but only eventually, and the word “eventually” does most of the work. Restraint, light taxes and laws that explain themselves pay off over a generation, and politics runs on two-year terms. The quick wealth of extraction and the quick satisfaction of punishing an enemy come in time for the next election. A government that wants to teach patience has to show what patience gets. People don’t change how they think because a philosophy is explained to them. They change when they see a different way produce a better life, in a town they can visit, a school their children attend, a park that’s still there twenty years later.

Keeping the good

Sorting twelve years by episteme rather than doxa would leave a few things standing. The question DOGE raised before it became a purge, whether an agency does what it claims and on what terms it buys its results, is a fair question, and it doesn’t stop being one because its first askers were cruel.

The suspicion of credentialed consensus that ran through the period was often crude, but Plato’s cave applies to experts too, who have their own walls and their own honors for predicting shadows. The impulse to shrink a government’s reach into daily life is the oldest idea in the Tao Te Ching, and it was never Trump’s to own. Federal spending kept climbing through his first term.

What should go is what the period taught by example. That an office belongs to its holder. That loyalty is a qualification. That a rule’s force depends on whom it hits. That the way to win an argument is to make the other side suffer. Those lessons came from the top and were absorbed in many places, including by those who opposed them, and a government that wanted to unteach them would have to do so the way they were taught, by conduct, over years, with explanations attached to its laws and fewer laws to attach them to.

Plato’s free doctor and Lao Tzu’s barely noticed ruler are different men, but they’d recognize the same small fish, lying on the board while each new cook reaches for the spatula.

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Sources

• Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (Penguin, 1963), chapters 2, 17, 57, 58 and 60
• Plato, Republic, Books III (414b–415d, the noble lie) and VII (514a–520a, the cave)
• Plato, Laws, Book IV (719e–723d), on the two doctors and the preambles to laws
• Plato, Seventh Letter, on the journeys to Syracuse
• Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), chapter 30, “Treatise on the Balance of Commerce,” trans. Burton Watson (1961)
• Ban Gu, Book of Han (Hanshu), annals of Emperor Wen and treatise on punishments, on Chunyu Tiying and the abolition of mutilating punishments (167 BC)
• Huan Kuan, Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yantie lun), trans. Esson M. Gale (1931)
• Michael Loewe, Crisis and Conflict in Han China, 104 BC to AD 9 (1974)
• ProPublica, on Russell Vought’s 2023 speech to the Center for Renewing America (October 2024)
• California Senate Bill 79 (2025), legislative findings

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is ours — we chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. We’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.