Favor and Disgrace Both Bring Fear
Argues that praise and blame are not opposites but the same trap, since both make a person's peace of mind dependent on something outside their own control.
Chapter 13 opens with a claim that sounds counterintuitive until it's unpacked: "favor and disgrace both bring fear." The ordinary assumption is that disgrace is frightening and favor is desirable, but Laozi treats them as functionally the same, because both make one's inner state hostage to someone else's judgment — win favor and you fear losing it, suffer disgrace and you fear it continuing or worsening. Either way, the reference point for one's own well-being has been handed over to external opinion, which the chapter says is exactly "why they are called troubling." The insight generalizes well beyond ancient court politics, where the line was likely first aimed at officials whose status rose and fell at a ruler's whim: any time self-worth is staked on external validation, the resulting emotional state is structurally the same kind of dependency, regardless of whether the day's news happens to be good or bad.
Favor and disgrace both bring fear.
Tao Te Ching
Written about in
- What Taoism says about fear
Praise and blame are treated as one trap rather than two states. Win favour and you fear losing it, lose it and you fear worse — either way your peace is in someone else's keeping.
- What Taoism says about envy and comparison
Chapter 13 treats favour and disgrace as one condition, not two: win favour and you fear losing it, suffer disgrace and you fear it lasting. Envy is what that looks like from underneath, once the reference point for how you are doing has been handed to someone else's judgement.