A few weeks ago, I had a kitchen experience that offered a profound metaphor on the illusion of power, control, and authority.
One morning, I loaded the dishwasher and pressed Start.
Nothing.
I opened the door, slammed it harder, tried different button combinations, and stood there longer than I’d like to admit. I was convinced that if I just applied enough force and determination, the machine would finally obey me.
Still nothing
Eventually, frustrated and defeated, I walked away. Ten minutes later, to my surprise, the dishwasher suddenly clicked on by itself and quietly went about its work, as if my power struggle with it meant nothing.
I laughed at first before later reflecting on the deeper metaphor embedded in this experience, related to governments, institutions, and authority figures.
As the story goes, we’ve built entire civilizations on the flawed idea that constant intervention equals leadership, more control creates greater order, surveillance equals safety, and that poking, prodding, and regulating everything amounts to good governance.
Here is the deeper message. Sometimes the wisest move is not to force, manipulate, or hover but to allow systems to work best by giving them room to breathe. The experience I had with the dishwasher offers just one example of how avoiding the use of force achieves far more than endless meddling.
Taoist sage Lao Tzu nailed it more than 2,500 years ago in what might be the most politically subversive line he ever wrote:
“Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking.”
In my view, government bureaucrats have been proverbially spoiling fish for a very long time.
The Compulsion That Wears the Mask of Virtue
Many government leaders and bureaucrats are not only addicted to power and control but activity.
Take, for example, emergency measures that are enacted by the government. What often starts as temporary almost never stays that way. Rules pile up. One intervention justifies the next. The regulatory machine grows not because it solves problems, but because it’s gotten really good at making it look like they’re solving them.
Government agencies often multiply like cells dividing endlessly, each one hunting for new corners of life to control. Every failure and unintended consequence becomes fuel for more intervention rather than a reason to pause and rethink a new course.
Prices know things bureaucrats don’t. Communities know things political operatives never will. The spontaneous order that emerges when free people pursue their own lives, trades, and relationships reflects intelligence on a scale that no top-down plan can match.
When you override that intelligence with mandates, you’re not improving the system but insulting it.
This Is Happening to You
Most of us experience the administrative state as bone-deep exhaustion. Like the stack of compliance paperwork just to turn your basement into a home office. Or the forty-seven forms you need for your food truck business before selling your first taco. Then there’s the slow erosion of your savings while experts insist that inflation is transitory.
It’s also the licensing board that blocks a skilled tradesperson from completing a project because they failed to complete the approved classes. The zoning rules that stop a family from building a small backyard accessory dwelling unit (ADU) so grandma could live close by. And let’s not forget the entrepreneur who drowns in red tape before ever reaching a single customer.
All of this is about the fish getting poked, relentlessly, in the name of protection.
And the cruelest part? The poking rarely fixes the original problem. Instead it creates a deeper dependency on the very authority doing the poking. The system doesn’t make people stronger but more tired, more compliant, and more reliant on a machine that was never built to truly serve them.
The Fish Doesn’t Need a Committee
I often think about the mutual aid societies that once thrived in America before bureaucracy crowded them out.
Black fraternal organizations in the Jim Crow South built their own support networks when the wider world shut them out. Immigrant communities created hospitals, insurance pools, and neighborhood groups with their own hands.
Craftsmen’s guilds and benevolent societies took care of medical bills, burials, and family crises without waiting for permission from some distant office.
As opposed to utopian dreams, these were practical, deeply human responses rooted in trust, responsibility, and local accountability. People had skin in the game. So when something went wrong, the consequences were felt immediately, not buried in a government report three layers deep.
These communities were governing themselves long before the clipboard brigades showed up with their rules and endless hunger to manage what had grown naturally.
Milton Friedman understood this deeply. When institutions substitute their own judgment for the voluntary choice of free people, something far greater than efficiency is lost. It’s where humanity itself begins to diminish and citizens become clients. Neighbors are reduced to cases. Communities become little more than data points to be analyzed, managed, and controlled.
The most lively places I’ve ever seen, including right here where I live in Fort Collins, aren’t the ones with the most programs or thickest policy manuals. It is where people still have enough freedom, trust, and breathing room to build something truly real together.
What Wu Wei Actually Looks Like
People often hear the Taoist idea of wu wei being bantered around and imagine passivity — a sage stretched out beneath a tree while the world rushes by.
I have never understood it that way. To me, wu wei is not the absence of action but of unnecessary force. It is the wisdom to stop pushing when trying to exert one’s power only creates resistance. It’s also the discipline to know when to act, when to wait, and when to trust that life is already moving in the direction it needs to go.
In real life, this may look like neighbors in a co-op sharing tools and trading skills without begging a zoning board for permission. Or a homeschooling parent crafting a curriculum that’s more alive and responsive than any standardized system. Maybe even a farmer cultivating soil by listening to nature instead of drowning the land in chemicals and chasing subsidies.
Authoritarian systems often need opposition to validate their machinery. They thrive on outrage, conflict, and endless reaction because every dispute can be used to justify another layer of control. Yet when people stop feeding the spectacle and start building meaningful lives that do not depend on bureaucratic permission, the dynamic shifts. The machine no longer gains power. In fact, it begins to lose relevance.
The Sovereign Individual Is Real
Writer and philosopher Robert Nozick once opined that individuals are ends in themselves, not raw material for social engineers. In other words, the moment the state claims authority over your life for the greater good, you stop being a sovereign person and become someone else’s resource.
The state, however, doesn’t own your judgment, your risks, your relationships, or your vision of a good life. A person who governs themselves with integrity, trades honestly, builds real reciprocity, and owns their failures contributes more to human flourishing than any compliance regime ever could.
The Dishwasher Knows
I keep reflecting about that moment in my kitchen where I sought to exert my control. The dishwasher didn’t need me looming over it, demanding that it run on my schedule because it had its own rhythm. The moment I stopped interfering, it did what it was made to do.
This is really about what happens when people are trusted with their own lives.
A fish damaged by constant poking can’t be healed with more poking. Yet that’s the central delusion of the regulatory class: that failed intervention just needs better intervention.
I believe that the wisest move may be to step back, put down the spatula, and let living communities rediscover their own balance. For that’s ultimately where freedom has the greatest opportunity to prosper.
