The uncarved block's political application, only briefly noted in the main entry's observation that the text's interest in pu is substantially an interest in governing, receives its fullest statement in chapter eighty of the Daodejing, which sketches a small state deliberately kept in something like the block's own undivided condition.
The chapter describes a small country with few people, possessing tools and weapons it does not use, whose inhabitants value their lives too much to travel far, who have boats and carriages but no occasion to ride them, and who return to knotted cords for record-keeping rather than writing, living in simple contentment, near enough to a neighboring state to hear its roosters and dogs yet never travelling there. The passage is not a program for literal implementation so much as a thought experiment: a community that has not been carved into specialized offices and refined culture retains something the text values, the undivided wholeness that specialization, however useful, dissolves piece by piece.
Commentators differ on how to take this. Some read it as genuine primitivism. Others read it as hyperbole making a narrower point, that a ruler should govern with a light hand and resist multiplying laws, since Chapter 57's warning that more prohibitions produce poorer people uses the same logic without recommending the abandonment of writing. Either reading keeps pu's basic argument intact: each act of dividing and specializing has a cost the text insists on naming.