Daoism Gives Me Hope That Communism Will Win
I’m a communist, which is to say I am nearly constantly disappointed and angry.
Even with Donald Trump finally losing the election this past weekend, I have to face the reality that Joe Biden’s presidency will continue the American status quo of favoring corporations over workers, pushing imperialist wars abroad, and prioritizing profit over things like effectively dealing with climate change, COVID-19, and the inherently violent and alienated nature of life under capitalism.
I am part of a local socialist org and very involved in neighborhood organizing, building on-the-ground, one-on-one relationships that are the foundation of actual long-lasting political change. However, in the face of so many large, powerful, and and firmly entrenched enemies and crises, I’ve been going in and out of feelings of burnout and hopelessness. I’ve had to take a short break to nurture my mind and body before the next wave of burnout hit.
I decided to start learning taijiquan, for probably the nerdiest non-anime-related reason to start learning any martial art: since tajiquan is based on Daoism, and the Daoist concept of the 太极 “taiji,” or interaction of opposing forces of yin and yang, is essentially a Hegelian dialectic, that makes taijiquan technically the most Marxist martial art. Feel free to e-mail me to arrange giving me the wedgie I deserve.
When I was a teen, I read up a lot on Buddhism, mostly because it felt like what a lot of western suburban teens get into when they decide they’re unsatisfied with Christianity and still want to have some kind of spiritual framework to guide their thinking that seems exotic and counterculture. As an adult, though, I find even Buddhism unsatisfying, as it seems (in my most probably inaccurate reading) to focus on detaching oneself and escaping the world, which feels like a cop out. It’s easy to absolve oneself of responsibility for what happens to the world and the other people around you if you just go “oh well, everything is an illusion and I am just focused on escaping it.” It reminds me too much of how reactionary political regimes use Christianity to oppress people by getting them to focus on the spiritual afterlife so as to ignore the physical suffering in the current material life, and thus avoid interrogating its causes.
Daoism is not focused on escaping or detaching from the world, but trying to live harmoniously within it, and escaping the things that take us out of a state of harmony. If there is stress and pain, that means that either you are unbalanced and out of harmony with your natural state, or something in the world is out of balance, and being Daoist requires acting virtuously and showing others how to restore that harmony in the larger world. That to me feels like a spiritual framework that won’t make me feel like I’m bailing out and abandoning my friends and comrades.
Of course there are plenty of other religious doctrines and schools of thought that preach acts of service and justice as well. At the beginning of the COVID pandemic I was volunteering regularly with a charity called the Catholic Worker. I know a lot of Sikhs run free food kitchens. I guess neither of those came packaged with a martial art to pique my initial interest, though.
Whatever doctrine brought me to this point, the most important thing is that I actually started meditating in earnest. I used to think meditation was about just quieting one’s mind, and if the mind failed to quiet, I was failing at meditation, and my fear of failure made me avoid it altogether. Some time in the past month I realized that the purpose of meditation isn’t to already arrive with a quiet mind, but to take the time and space to actually sort out the noise of the mind so that way you can work your way towards the quietness that only comes with actually processing your reactions and feelings.
I’ve come to redefine what “thinking” is to me. I used to think I spent a great deal of time thinking. What I actually do is spend most of my time doing is worrying about the future, reacting to the present, and perseverating on the past, which is not the same as actually forming cogent thoughts about any of those three things. You have to actually take time and space to process your feelings and reactions to form thoughts that contextualize your emotions. As old-fogey as this makes me sound, most of our time is spent being kept from thinking, because we are encouraged to just consume and react. Buy and review. Like and subscribe. All these things pack the void that is necessary to turn FEELING and REACTING into THINKING.
It was during meditation that I actually took the time to sort out all the disparate truths and facts and feelings that floated around in my mind like a vigorously shaken snow globe and allow them to settle into one consistent pattern that I could read:
Everything in the universe is impermanent, and that is why it is always natural, logical, and correct, to have hope.
Everything that can be perceived is ephemeral. Everything changes into something else at some point. Even the things that, within our finite lifetime seem infinite, like the sun, have limits. The sun will eventually burn out and go supernova. Most people understand the idea of entropy as the universe always tending to move from order to disorder. That really is only half of it, though, but for some reason it’s the half that everybody remembers and clings to. In reality, there’s a point where disorder reassembles itself into a new order. Within every act of cosmic destruction comes creation. A star goes supernova, the materials that made up that star turn into a nebula, and then the material in that nebula in turn accretes and forms new stars.
In fact, some astrophysicists propose a model of our infinitely expanding universe that eventually stops expanding, then collapses in on itself, and in that collapse builds up so much energy that it will create a new Big Bang. They then extrapolate that the Big Bang that created our universe must have been the result of the collapse of a previous one, and all existence might actually be just an infinite chain of destruction and creation.
The taijitu, or yin-yang symbol, represents that constant interaction of opposing forces that, through their opposition, continuously create each other. This process applies in fractal levels, as true at the point of human interactions as it is at the point of the creation and destruction of the cosmos. The Ming dynasty classic The Romance of The Three Kingdoms begins, “Empires, long divided, tend to unite; long united, tend to divide.” Marx begins the Communist Manifesto with “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” and talks about how history is guided by dialectical struggles of opposing social classes.
Empires form, empires fall. Vanguards form, vanguards disband. Relationships are created and ended. If everything in the universe is impermanent, that means change is REQUIRED by the very nature of existence. Change requires action. You have to act to build the empire, you have to act to overthrow it. You have to act to start a relationship, you have to act to end it. Action cannot be taken without hope that the action will achieve that change. You have to hope you can build power or else you won’t act to do so. You have to hope that the person you love loves you back or you won’t tell them you love them.
That means hope is an inextricable part of the process of existence: Impermanence -> Change -> Action -> Hope
Daoism often invokes the idea of 为无为 “wei wu wei” which can be translated as “to act without acting.” This can be confusing for a lot of people, and I think when Laozi coined the phrase he intentionally meant it to be so. My personal interpretation of 为无为 is to act in accordance with the nature of existence itself, which is impermanence, which means to always act towards change, and thus to always have hope to act. Surrendering to hopelessness is the ultimate act of selfishness, because it’s to assert that your own ego is more important than the mechanisms of the universe itself. The universe doesn’t care ABOUT you, but it’s acting THROUGH you, because your action is an absolutely necessary part of it, no matter the immediate result.
The only thing we really need to detach ourselves from is our individual sense of responsibility to be THE one who makes the specific change that can be named and quantified, so we can claim credit for it and say “this is proof that I am good.” That shifts our focus from the work back to the ego, however good our intentions are. That’s why we get too caught up on building up or tearing down individual leaders or individual organizations or individual election results and use those successes or failures as the only metric of progress towards the change we want.
An individual grain of sand should not feel guilty that it can’t take credit for the entire sandstorm. The person in the desert taking shelter does not do so because they fear an individual grain or a certain prominent clump of sand leading the storm. They know it’s the storm in its entirety that is to be feared and respected.
This has been revelatory for me. It keeps me from hyper-criticizing myself, whether or not I’m doing AS MUCH work as I should be doing or or if I’m doing the RIGHT KIND of work, to the point where I paralyze myself into inaction because I’m more obsessed with how others will perceive my work instead of just acting. I am a communist, which means I value the uplifting of the collective good over the individual, which means I can’t obsess over whether or not someone is going to grade my work on the revolution like it’s a school assignment and decide if I passed or failed. Change will happen, because change is the only permanent truth of the universe, and I must embrace inaction by acting to achieve my hopes.
Revolutionary hope is the Dao.
