REFLECTIONS ON A "PERFECT" WORLD

In the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, which is also the most widely translated book after the Bible, it is written:

"The world is continually changing, yet constantly perfect: It cannot be improved with your small efforts; with larger efforts it can be destroyed."

Few are those who look around us and conclude that the world is perfect. How can a world with so much violence and suffering be perfect? It certainly looks imperfect to most people I know. But, here is a radical thought: maybe it is not the world, but rather our distorted vision, that is imperfect.

When an individual incurs a traumatic brain injury she is given numerous tests to assess the damage. One of these, the Bender-Gestalt Test, requires individuals to copy simple shapes, including a perfect circle. However, for those with certain types of brain damage, a perfect circle does not appear perfect: it appears distorted. From a Taoist perspective, the world is a perfect circle and those of us who see it as imperfect are similar to those whose injuries distort their perceptions and draw a misshapen circle when asked to copy a perfect one.

This phenomenon is described in allegorical form in an excerpt from the classic book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (by Dan Millman):

“There was once a beloved king... He was so popular that the nearby townspeople sent him gifts daily, and his birthday celebration was enjoyed throughout the kingdom. The people loved him for his renowned wisdom and fair judgments.

One day, tragedy struck the town. The water supply was polluted, and every man, woman, and child went insane. Only the king, who had a private spring, was spared. Soon after the tragedy, the mad townspeople began speaking of how the king was acting “strangely” and how his judgments were poor and his wisdom a sham. Many even went so far as to say that the king had gone crazy. His popularity soon vanished. No longer did the people bring him gifts or celebrate his birthday.

The lonely king, high on the hill, had no company at all. One day he decided to leave the hill and pay a visit to the town. It was a warm day, and so he drank from the village fountain. That night there was a great celebration. The people rejoiced, for their beloved king had ‘regained his sanity.’”

Regardless of what I might say, the notion that our world is perfect is a bridge too far for most people – particularly those of us in the West. To us, the world is not only imperfect, but must be changed by us to be improved. Even if I were to concede this point, there’s one major problem: there has never in history been agreement on what changes should be made to improve the world. In fact, most of the conflicts in the world today are a direct result of disagreements about how to make the world a better place. Indeed, a century ago a charismatic German leader thought the world would be permanently improved by removing an entire race of people, and his plan was so popular in his country that an entire nation of people fought to implement it.

Too often, people see problems around them and immediately try to “change the world” before solving their own problems. Though well-intended, the reason why most people ignore their own problems and instead focus their efforts on changing the world is because changing oneself is extremely hard and takes a very long time to accomplish… even when the self-improvements we hope to make involve changes we desperately want, like losing weight and quitting smoking. As a psychologist, I know firsthand how many months and years it takes, in challenging psychotherapy, for people to change even the smallest things about themselves.

But when we seek to change the world what we really mean is that we want to force changes on other people that they don’t want because WE believe it will make the world a better place. If it is extremely hard to make changes in ourselves that we desperately want to make – like losing weight – how much harder is it for us to make changes that are forced upon us by other people? For this reason, Jesus said to his followers “first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye (Matthew 7:5).” Furthermore, while the changes we seek to make in the world might be well-intended, the road to hell, as the popular idiom goes, is paved with good intentions.

In closing, it is important to understand that even in the unlikely event that we succeed in changing the world in the ways that we seek, the changes we impose on the world are rarely permanent. No matter what law is created or war is fought to bring greater justice, time and again we see that laws are rewritten in a subsequent generation and new wars must be fought to re-establish justice in the same places they were fought so many times before (does Iraq ring bell?).

Would the world be a better place if we all heeded the words of the Tao Te Ching and chose to refrain from trying to change the world? Could it be made any worse? To me, the implied message of the Tao Te Ching passage referenced above is not that we should sit idly by and allow suffering to happen in the world, but rather that we direct our change at the person staring back at us in the mirror and NOT at the world at large.