The chapter closes with four sentences attributed to the sage, and they are the fullest statement in the book of what non-action produces when a ruler practises it.
I do nothing, and the people transform themselves. I love stillness, and the people straighten themselves. I do not meddle, and the people prosper by themselves. I have no craving, and the people become the uncut block by themselves.
The construction is identical in all four: a negative or quiet disposition in the ruler, and then an outcome the people reach on their own. The word rendered by themselves or of their own accord is the same term that chapter twenty-five puts at the summit of its ladder, and its repetition here four times is the point. Nothing in the list is done to the people. Each result is described as something they arrive at once the pressure is removed.
Two features of the passage are easy to miss. The first is that the ruler is not absent. He has a disposition, four of them, and they are stated in the first person as things he does and loves. Non-action here is a way of occupying the office, not a vacancy in it.
The second is that the outcomes are the outcomes any government of the period would have claimed to want: a transformed, orderly, prosperous and unpretentious population. The chapter does not propose different ends. It proposes that the standard ends are unreachable by the standard means, which is why the four correlations earlier in the chapter had to come first.