Chapter 65

This is the passage that gets quoted when someone wants to argue that the text is a manual for keeping people in the dark. Those of old who were good at the way did not use it to enlighten the people but to keep them simple. People are hard to govern because they know too much. To govern a state by knowledge is to rob the state, and to govern it without knowledge is a blessing to the state.

The charge is not unfair and the chapter does not make it easy to answer. It says plainly that a population which knows more is harder to govern, and it treats that as a reason to prefer the population that knows less.

Two things can be said without explaining the passage away. The first is that the word rendered simple or unspoiled is the book's standing positive term, the same one applied to the uncut block, and elsewhere it names a condition the ruler is also asked to be in, so it is not straightforwardly a policy of imposed ignorance from above.

The second is what the chapter attacks in the ruler. Governing by knowledge is called robbery, and the target of the sentence is the sovereign's cleverness at least as much as the people's. The complaint runs in both directions, and chapter fifty-seven identifies the same fault with skill, contrivance and published law.

Neither observation removes the difficulty. A book can be read as recommending that subjects be kept unlearned, and this chapter is why. Readers have been arguing about it for a very long time and the words support the hostile reading as well as the sympathetic one.

The chapter ends by naming what it has been describing and by making a large claim for it. To know these two is to know the standard, and always to know the standard is called the dark power, which is deep and far reaching, and turns back with all things, and then reaches the great accord.

The dark power is the same term chapter fifty-one uses for the way's manner of providing without possessing, and chapter ten uses in a similar formula. Applying it here to a ruler is the chapter's way of saying that the government it describes operates in the same manner as the way itself, which is the strongest endorsement the book can give.

The phrase about turning back with all things is the one that repays attention. Chapter forty stated that returning is how the way moves, and here that motion is attributed to a ruler, who is described as going back along with everything else rather than as leading anything forward. A government of that kind is not steering. It is being carried by the same reversal that carries the population, which is why it cannot be exercised by knowledge: knowledge would put the ruler outside the movement, looking at it.

The end point is called the great accord or great following, a term used only here, naming a state in which nothing is out of step with anything.

That closing vision is what makes the chapter difficult to dismiss as simple manipulation. What is described is not a knowing ruler managing an ignorant population but both parties inside the same movement, and the ruler's knowledge is rejected first.