If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the Tao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself. The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be. The more subsidies you have, the less self-reliant people will be. Therefore the Master says: I let go of the law, and people become honest. I let go of economics, and people become prosperous. I let go of religion, and people become serene. I let go of all desire for the common good, and the good becomes common as grass.
- Tao Te Ching (Mitchell translation), Chapter 57
They say everything is invented and we just keep rediscovering things, and there is some true to this as proven by the Tao. The last sentence is the one that I liked more.
I want to tell you a true story about a day care center. There was a day care center, where the parents routinely were routinely picking up the children too tate, so the people working there started making parents pay a small fee every time they were late. However this only exacerbated the problem: people were later than ever.
The explanation I heard is that since the parents payed a fee, they felt absolved from bad conscience.
Upon seeing that the fee didn't work as a deterrent, it was removed. The tardiness however did not improve. The bad conscience could not be restored so easily.
I think that in our society of rapid changes according to what works, the time the restoration would take is never allowed to happen. Instead, we continue raising the fees.
