Not sufficient folks speak about Anthony Albanese being the primary practising Daoist to carry the workplace of prime minister. A lot has been made from his mastery of the turntable and semi-human speech, however his dedication to Daoist rules reminiscent of Wu wei stays largely ignored and underappreciated. And because the newest polls make one factor clear: Albanese is a grasp Daoshi.
What’s Wu wei, I hear you ask? Nicely, we are able to’t all be as enlightened because the wonks and politicos. For the uninformed, the famend sinologist Herrlee G. Creel thought of the 2 contradictory forks of Wu wei, as discovered within the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, to imply two various things:
- an “angle of real non-action, motivated by a scarcity of need to take part in human affairs”;
- a “approach by the use of which the one who practises it might achieve enhanced management of human affairs”.
It’s apparent to me, your common armchair Laozi fan, that Albanese is dedicated to Wu wei with the identical degree of enthusiasm his predecessor had for nihilism and delicate curry. The place some see a main minister listlessly drifting in the direction of electoral annihilation, borne on the winds of smugness, apathy and cynicism, I see a noble monk, self-immolating on the steps of Parliament Home in his religious quest in the direction of nirvana.
Latest polls counsel that the typical voter isn’t as within the teachings of Laozi as you or I or the prime minister. Unable to grasp the artwork of detachment, voters stay caught on weak-willed mortal issues, reminiscent of having a roof over their heads and/or consuming. These vices are all effectively and good, however it’s an unenlightened man’s thought of what a Labor authorities’s holy function is: to show us endurance, or else.
We have to be affected person if we wish to condemn genocide, for instance. We have to be affected person if we need motion on local weather change. We have to be affected person if we would like to maneuver away from fossil fuels. We have to be affected person if we wish to elevate the Jobseeker charge. We have to be affected person if we would like to deal with the housing disaster. We have to be affected person if we would like progressive tax reform. We have to be affected person if we would like a lower in pointless army spending. We have to be affected person if we wish to sort out the hovering price of dwelling. We have to be affected person and lie down on the mattress of nails till it begins to really feel good.
One key determine steering the prime minister’s guided meditations is Tim Gartrell, his chief of workers and high strategist, a person articles like to describe as a mastermind. A “mastermind”, on this context, is somebody who has mastered the artwork of minding out for progress, motion, management and equally ineffective tosh in favour of “small targets”.
Gartrell is your traditional neo-Labor ultra-wonk: a lab-bred consultatron5000 dedicated to a giant image so huge (and clean) you can also make it out from house. The wunderkind behind Kevin ‘07 and *cough* Mark Latham *cough*, Gartrell is a champion of the aww shucks method to governing that has outlined each Labor PM since Rudd (the mere try of which drove Latham criminally insane).
Right here, the Wu wei technique has been interpreted as a kind of gnostic apoliticism — an odd logic to arm your self with once you purport to work in politics. As an alternative of a Labor that had permission to tear the throat out of its enemies and go away them bleeding out on a mountain cross, now we have a celebration that determined it has to reply to all exterior, inner and everlasting occasions with the passivity of roadkill.
Of their 10 years in electoral exile, Labor’s biggest minds milled in regards to the woods and wastelands of focus teams and assume tanks till they stumbled upon a common reality: they’re ineffective. As an alternative of rejecting this realisation like Christ rejecting Devil within the Judean desert, they selected to embrace it, and made it the cornerstone of their publish Rudd/Gillard/Rudd/Different resurrection.
What Gartrell and his followers understood then, and now, is that “the sunshine on the hill” is a basically flawed thought, because it requires a) a light-weight, b) a hill, and c) somebody to screw in a brand new bulb at any time when mentioned gentle goes out. Their radical reconfiguration of the ALP did away with the sunshine and the pesky hill altogether, and changed them with a low-sensory plain of nothingness. Atop that dimly lit plain, a “small goal” can appear to be a mountain, and the enactment of your opponent’s deeply unpopular tax reforms can appear to be integrity.
This “nothing” is on the core of the teachings of the brand new true believers, who actually imagine they’re on to one thing. So when ballot after ballot comes again suggesting they might be improper, one has to chortle. There isn’t any proper, there is no such thing as a improper, there may be solely what’s and what will likely be.
The citizens’s impatience with what it sees as uninspired laziness is a take a look at that they should fail if they’re to realize the identical degree of awakening (typically mistaken for apathy by the ignorant) because the prime minister and his acolytes. It’s fundamental zen and the artwork of Newspoll upkeep: do or don’t, why even attempt?
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