Tao Te Ching, 17 on True Leaders, Ursula K. Leguin's translation of Lao Tzu's words

[ThreeNoSeep]

True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.

To give no trust
is to get no trust.

When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Action without doing.

“Poets are the unrecognized legislators of the universe.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

[jmbar2]

2. Brilliant!

Needs to be taught in every management class.

[ananda]

3. Steinbeck

“The paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.”

― John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

I would definitely say this is true of today's Republicans.

[Jit423]

6. Great description of today's MAGA GOP

Yep!

[ananda]

7. Steinbeck on politics when asked about McCarthyism

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/28/1132163845/an-unearthed-john-steinbeck-column-probes-the-strength-of-u-s-democracy

The future Nobel Laureate wrote that the practice embodied by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was "simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged."

"It is the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law," Steinbeck continued in a 1954 column for Le Figaro that had rarely been seen until it was reprinted this week in the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. "We have always had this latent thing. All democracies have it. It cannot be wiped out because, by destroying it, democracy would destroy itself."
...
"He stated in the 1960s that the role of an artist was to critique his country," says Susan Shillinglaw, who directs the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

Steinbeck believed that the United States was a force for good and fortunate in its ability to correct itself. He advocated a version of tough love hard to defend now, likening democracy to a child who "must be hurt constantly" to endure and regarding McCarthyism as a passing threat that would strengthen the country in the long run.

"In resisting, we keep our democracy hard and tough and alive, its machinery intact. An organism untested soon goes flabby and weak," he wrote.

[SheltieLover]

4. Pure brilliance

Ty for sharing!

[orthoclad]

5. I miss LeGuin