The Politics of Being Like Water: Flow and Stillness in a Changing World
Martial artist Bruce Lee offered many philosophical insights into everyday life, his wisdom influenced by a lifetime of experience training and fighting. Among his most famous proverbs is “be like water.” Although this saying has frequently been applied in the sports world and as a stoic approach to the ever-evolving world around us, its implications in the political realm are underexplored.
Defenders of tradition and liberty often see it as their duty to keep their movements, and society at large, unwavering in the face of the winds of change. Failure to conserve that which forged civilization and its prosperity will lead to its undoing, they contend. However, this can come into conflict with Lee’s instruction to be like water, the adaptability of which he hailed in particular.
So, how ought people reconcile the need to maintain core principles — to safeguard goodness itself — with the need to maintain adaptability in a world built on complex systems? Lee’s wisdom offers insight into how patrons of tradition and liberty can advance their causes in a world that constantly threatens to crush or abandon the inflexible. Indeed, like water, principles maintain their stillness by flowing with the complexities of being.
“Be like water; water has form and yet it has no form. It is the softest element on earth, yet it penetrates the hardest rock… Please observe the adaptability of water.”
Left undisturbed, principled and disciplined people could maintain a life of remarkable stillness, like a calm mountain pond. This is the homesteader fantasy. The problem, of course, is that people and their lives are under constant disturbance. In fact, people tend to disturb their own lives without adequate levels of outside disturbance. Nature sends ripples throughout its pond with its own winds and rainstorms.
The nature of complexity is disturbance. Oftentimes, that disturbance takes the form of direct confrontation, in which Lee was well versed. Lee did not encourage people under attack to lock down and harden in the face of change or conflict, but to flow and adapt.
When principles and traditions come under attack, so too must they avoid petrifying; rather, they must maintain their stillness by fitting to emerging circumstances.
“To change with change is the changeless state… The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness, only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.”
Conservation of principles and tradition comes not from reversion or resistance in the face of tension, but adaptation. This is not to say that the principles and traditions themselves change, but that people adapt the way in which they are applied and safeguarded. Water will flow when poured from a kettle into a cup, taking a new shape, not because it has itself changed, but because it maintains itself and restores stillness despite changes. Structures like the family, the church, and civil society will persist not by calcifying and allowing themselves to be chipped away, but by maintaining fluidity. Truth and beauty maintain themselves wherever they end up.
“Water may seem to move in contradiction, even uphill, but it chooses any way open to it so that it may reach the sea. It may flow swiftly or it may flow slowly, but its purpose is inexorable, its destiny is sure.”
To maintain liberty and tradition in a world of increasingly imposing and hostile authorities, people must conserve it — and spread it — wherever they can, not necessarily where they would like to. The “flames” of liberty may be extinguished with a strong gust or stomp, whereas their waters may continue to cycle and flow with the changing world.
If even the most principled and disciplined among us attempt to stand firmly in the way of change and complexity, they will inevitably be crushed. Instead, they must attempt to ride the circumstances in a constant and adaptable pursuit of their principles.
“Wisdom does not consist in trying to wrest the good from the evil but in learning to ‘ride’ them as a cork adapts itself to the crests and the troughs of the waves… The oak tree is mighty, yet it will be destroyed by a mighty wind because it resists the elements; the bamboo bends with the wind, and by bending, survives.”
The benefits of adaptability become apparent with patience. Many people would love nothing more than to burn down the institutions that most threaten tradition and liberty, but such an action rarely results in anything but more tyranny and suffering. The most effective anarchist does not seek to throw a bomb at their ruler, but to let him dig his own grave and persist in the rubble of his empire.
Tyrannical institutions prove themselves far more inflexible than those rooted in individual agency and responsibility. Individuals and small communities are better suited to adapt to complexity than large, overbearing structures. So, the goal for defenders of liberty and tradition ought to be to survive and outlast, to prove themselves right in the end, and not in immediacy.
Traditions and principles survive with people in the cracks and on the peripheries of a decaying society, and even embedded in the institutions they wish to see unraveled. They grow and observe without hasty and haught action to impose themselves, not because they believe themselves wrong, but because they know themselves to be right. Their causes would only be harmed by a heavy-handed approach.
“There was a fine butcher who used the same knife year after year, yet it never lost its delicate, precise edge… When asked how he had preserved his knife’s fine edge, he said, ‘I follow the line of the hard bone. I do not attempt to cut it, nor to smash it, nor to contend with it in any way. That would only destroy my knife.’ In daily living, one must follow the course of the barrier. To try to assail it will only destroy the instrument.”
People must be careful not to dull and malform principles and tradition by using them as instruments of force. Their sharpness is kept by careful and fluid application. Better a knife be stored in a drawer during a famine than brought out to murder a neighbor for his food.
Lee noted that you cannot clear muddied water with your hand. The water will become clear itself with time. As we find ourselves in the muddied waters of the modern world, we must be careful not to begin thrashing about in an effort to return clarity. Instead, one must wait for the muck to settle and the clarity to emerge again in the stillness of the water.
While I do believe there are redlines that cannot be crossed without acting firmly in response, they are exceptional and often avoidable. Fluidity is almost always the preferable approach.
So, liberty and tradition will be kept alive not by people who cement themselves into destructible objects, but by those who dissolve themselves into part of a fluid network, capable of flowing and maintaining itself in the hectic complexities of our world.
The “pure” stillness of liberty and tradition is an ideal that nature keeps elusive, but we only further disturb the waters and harm ourselves by becoming the rock between us and a hard place.
“The inability to adapt brings destruction.”
