Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Lao Tzu on Douchism


The great Chinese philosopher and father of Taoism, Lao Tzu once asked us the following:

What is man’s life for? What pleasure is there in it? Is it for beauty and riches? Is it for sound and colour? But there comes a time when beauty and riches no longer answer the needs of the heart, and when a surfeit of sound and colour becomes a weariness to the eyes and a ringing in the ears.

The men of old knew that life comes without warning, and as suddenly goes. They denied none of their natural inclinations, and repressed none of their bodily desires. They never felt the spur of fame. They sauntered through life gathering its pleasures as the impulse moved them. Since they cared nothing for fame after death, they were beyond the law. For name and praise, sooner or later, a long life or short one, they cared not at all.

As I contemplate those words, two thoughts come to me.

One, I want to party with Lao. That dude must be off the hook.

And two, did Lao Tzu anticipate the emergence of douche-scrote in a media saturated global simulacrum? And would Lao approve of the Yin-Yang polarity of authentic meaning found in the illogic of douche-hott dialectic that forces deconstruction by the very nature of its wrongness?

I’d argue that he would.

# posted by douchebag1

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