When "Doing Something" Is Worse Than Doing Nothing

The Zhuangzi is a Chinese Daoist text dating to approximately the 3rd century B.C.. It’s full of fantastic stories and parables featuring whimsical characters. It aims to transmit the fundamentals of Daoist philosophy, but it also offers advice on politics. Like most things in the Zhuangzi, the advice is unconventional.

The tale of the praying mantis

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In one of the parables, an official is trying to figure out how to help influence a tyrannical and fickle ruler. The Daoist sage gives him the following advice: “Don’t you know about the praying mantis? It angrily stretches out its arms, to arrest the progress of the carriage, unconscious of its inability for such a task, but showing how much it thinks of its own powers.” Translation: The official is the praying mantis trying to stop a carriage. Flail your arms all you like. The carriage will crush you anyway.

The sage's advice might set off an alarm in our heads. Is Zhuangzi telling us to just give up? What about the adage that little things can make a big difference? Maybe one person alone can’t stop a tyrant, but perhaps the official’s actions can inspire others to act. Surely, we protest, we can’t sit idly by and do nothing. That is to be complicit in the injustice done. We have to try to push things in a positive direction, even though it’s hard. In times of political turmoil, we have to do something.

The story of the praying mantis isn’t about what the official is trying to do. It’s about the official’s attitude. The mantis is completely clueless. He has no real awareness of his situation and so mistakenly thinks he has the power to stop the carriage wheel. Having no idea what he’s up against, the mantis angrily confronts the carriage, totally unaware that waving his arms will do nothing.

Zhuangzi is trying to show the official that his insistence that he has to do something is just as pitiful as the mantis’. What makes it pitiful is that the official is simply refusing to confront the possibility of his own powerlessness. The target of Zhuangzi’s criticism is the urge to do something—no matter how ineffectual or even dangerous it might be.

The urge to do something lies behind a lot of “clicktivism,” the activism we see online. We sign online petitions, but we rarely bother to find out if they are delivered or if they make a difference. We tell ourselves that our pithy, angry social media posts might change someone’s mind, but we have no evidence that such things work. The posts make us feel like we’re doing something, that we’re not sitting idly by while the world burns. But, ultimately, we’re doing all this to make ourselves feel better. We get to tell ourselves that we were the good ones—the resistance fighters who tried to stop the bad guys. And we don’t have to deal with our own feelings of powerlessness.

A Coping Mechanism for Feeling Powerless

Often, our urge to do something in situations where we actually have very little control is a coping mechanism for feeling powerless. No one likes to feel this way. We prefer to scrape together any modicum of control we have rather than confront these feelings. And we’d much rather tell ourselves that anything we can do is better than doing nothing.

Admitting that you feel powerless doesn’t have to mean giving up and just watching things fall apart from the sidelines. Where we can make change, we should. But in situations where we don’t have the power to make change, we shouldn’t lie to ourselves about it just to avoid feeling powerless. The praying mantis isn’t a hero for bravely waving his arms at the carriage. He’s a fool who doesn’t understand his reality. We shouldn’t give ourselves credit for doing something if the reason we’re doing it is just so we can avoid feeling powerless.