Just finished Stephens West's excellent podcasts on Confucious and Lao Tzu. It is remarkable that two such influential and diametrically opposed thinkers should emerge from the same period in Chinese history, the Warring States era. Lao Tzu championed The Way, a life of inaction, of going with the flow. Confucious lionized a so-called golden era (the Zhou Dynasty), creating a conservative system of obligation and ritual down to the last detail. Of course, I hugely abbreviate the work of these two giants but that is not the point of this post. Both men considered the chaos around them, the fragmentation of China into warlord fiefdom's, and the subsequent uncertainty and hardship, and reached entirely different conclusions.

Today we see a not dissimilar process at work, though perhaps less extreme than the example above. In the West, political parties stake out positions at various points on the ideological spectrum. In Australia as elsewhere, conservatives think that less government and more freedom in the private sector are the best way of promoting growth in an economy, though the actual means of achieving this is contested. On the left, the role of government is more expansive, the goals less distinct. Is growth the most important task of government, or just one of many areas of challenge? Getting a balance right from any point of view is not easy, made even more so by the question of what a government should do.

Lao Tzu wanted as little government as possible, seeing it as an impediment to growing into wisdom, whilst Confucious wanted rulers who were virtuous and wise, according to a rigorous system of obligation and obeisance, society-wide. The two apparently met on one occasion, a meeting that any Chinese fly on a wall would have loved to overhear.