Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away
Ancient Chinese Proverb Applied Today
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic attempts to recenter our day-to-day lives in the things that matter as the political climate has been particularly contentious recently, especially if you live in the US. To hear tell, we are one step away from the end of the world as we know it. It might feel that way online but there are important steps we can take to ground ourselves in a healthier reality. Let’s find out how.1
天高皇帝远, Tiān gāo, huángdì yuan, is an ancient Chinese proverb that translates to “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
I first learned this phrase from a friend and fellow Mixed Mental Artist Isaiah Gooley who shared: “This phrase came about in China in the 14th century. Like most things during the period, it was related to the Mongols. The ruling Song Dynasty was conquered by Kublai Khan in 1260, and the Mongol Yuan dynasty ruled over China for the next 100 years. However, despite the removal of the ethnic Han rulers, life for most Chinese didn’t change.”2
It’s easy to forget this when we are immersed in our social media bubbles, plugged into information overload through 24-hour news feeds, and constantly bombarded with the fear of what others tell us are existential threats. The fear of the future is very real and it makes sense. The past can never kill us no matter how bad it was; only the future can. It’s a topic we explored in Apocalypse Always on how we are biased for negativity and personalize any threat more intimately than may be appropriate. Therefore, let’s take this Chinese proverb and put things back into perspective
Heaven is High
Social media and television have collapsed heaven into a living hell for many of us. If there’s no crime in your city, you can find crime somewhere. Should education improve for women in the US, we can always find a country where it hasn’t. If your state elects the party you support into power, the state next door votes the opposition. No matter how good something is where you are, you can quickly find the bad. Finding the bad is exceptionally easy and can blind us to reality.
But heaven is high. There’s a lot of great stuff going on just outside your doors. You are surrounded by exceptional humanity expressed every day in things as simple as the traffic flowing with general order, people being kind and friendly when you go to the store, and if you look around you’ll see strangers smiling and appreciating your young children’s antics.
Even better, there’s a lot of opportunity to add your own positive energy to that mix. You can strike up a conversation at the grocery store, or you can help someone find a product. You can bend down and pick up trash in the road, you can volunteer, you can lead, you can be involved in the world around you. No one has to mandate that you do this. No one is telling you not to do this. The power is in your hands.
When you step away from the addiction-inducing world of artificial media and allow yourself to be bored from the quick hit dopamine and outrage/fear porn for a minute, you’ll see there are many opportunities to be engaged in the real world. You’ll find that heaven is here, it can be improved, and it really is higher than we thought.
The Emperor is Far Away
This is the most counterintuitive and hardest part for most people to get their minds around; the emperor is far away. Whether it’s mean tweets, awkward interviews, bumbling speeches, or the rhetoric of politicians, just step away and really, and I mean really think about whether that affects anything you can see right now.
It’s easy to quickly point to things like COVID mandates, changes in the law, abortion mandates, taxes, crime, etc. ad nauseam, and you’re right, those do have impacts. But look at them again.3 How much do they affect you because you allowed it to? How many of the threats are hypothetical, ‘what ifs’, or ‘coulds,’ even ‘somewheres,’ and ‘maybes,’ and how many are actually having a personal effect, and if so, why?
This is where the powerful concepts of Stoicism come into stark relief. One quote I love from Marcus Aurelius reads:
“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.”
What this means is that our perception of events, more than the events themselves, determines our experience. This can even include physical pain as anyone who has done mixed martial arts can attest. I can take a punch to my nose and shake it off while that same punch might drop someone else to the floor. The thing is, we can literally choose how much pain we allow ourselves to feel. Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed is incredibly empowering when we accept this simple truth.
I want to impress that quote on my children’s minds when they overreact to something their siblings do. I ask them why they are allowing someone else to have control over their emotions instead of controlling themselves. It’s easy to take personal offense; it’s hard to master control over ourselves.
This challenge is clearly evident in the response online over the past eight years. You’d think every tweet and gaffe were arrows striking to the very core of people’s self-identity. Recently, many people couldn’t even celebrate the Space X rocket success without dragging national politics into the mix as if Elon Musk’s opinions were personally affecting their lives and casting a shadow on the technological breakthrough.
This is a very similar behavior to our inability to measure risk where we overemphasize the novel, ignore the mundane but dangerous, and generally are challenged to properly contextualize risk. Only in this case, applied to politics. What makes this difficult is that it’s true. It is personally affecting your life because you are allowing it to.
It will always affect you when you pull heaven down and lean forward to center the emperor in your life. It doesn’t matter which party is in power or which side you’re on. You’ve ceded agency and are now personally affected by it. But heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.
Taking Action
You don’t have to let politics dictate your life by bringing the emperor into your home. You don’t have to collapse heaven with the hellscape of social media. You have agency to take control of both.
Before we get into a few actionable steps, let’s remember that we are biologically coded for negativity bias. Bad things can harm us so we over-index on them. Finding things that can kill you is easy. It’ll take some extra adjustments but stop looking for the negatives and instead, look for the things that make humans flourish. That will allow us to take the next two steps.
First, lift heaven back up. Get out. Get involved in your local communities, churches, or clubs. Heck, just get out and go for a walk, go to a music show, grab a drink at a brewery, and just sit back and watch normal humans having normal lives. Meet new people, have new conversations, ditch politics and talk about fun things like hobbies, hopes, ideas, and dreams.
Second, push the Emperor far away. I’m now talking about any leader at any level. Reclaim your agency and push them back to where their squawking and gibbering is background noise. Re-center what matters like your family, your friends, and your community. Recognize that it is easy to accept insult and injury and that you can choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Then when you don’t feel harmed, you haven’t been.
What I found in my own personal experience is that far less in this world actually affects me and when I embrace my own agency, even less can affect me. I’ve found that reclaiming my own space is one of the healthiest things I’ve done.
Heaven can be high and the emperor should be far away.
As an aside, we humans have a desire to follow a benevolant dictator. Whether a God, a president, or a king, you find them everywhere. Bringing the emperor in close is ceding your own agency and control to them. That’s why it’s so important to understand our proclivities and why I recommend pushing the emperor far away.
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I wrote this before the 2024 US National election. I have no idea who will win. This is not written about or for anyone but you, dear reader.
The phrase has shifted a little bit and some uses have it referring to something more like lawlessness but there’s a similar vibe there. It may be illegal to walk on the grass but, heaven is high, and the emperor is far away, so the impact of that law can largely be ignored. I’m channeling the general concept, not any explicit interpretation.
This will be the most contentious point and I just have to say “Get over it and look again.” I don’t mean to be crass or rude but really, really look at it and don’t justify it away. I have my own opinions on politics and I keep reminding myself that Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far away and I find it does wonders for my sanity.
Thanks for this dear Michael.
"You don’t have to let politics dictate your life by bringing the emperor into your home. You don’t have to collapse heaven with the hellscape of social media. You have agency to take control of both." --> This is very true. Sometimes we allow evil to come to our doorstep and consume our mind, our spirit and our environment. We can be happy regardless of who wins this election, or regardless of how we are treated or looked at by some random stranger outside or even inside your environment (e.g. workplace).
The country will survive regardless of who wins in the upcoming weeks or months. Much of the political rhetoric is merely aimed at winning the election, and many proposed ideas will likely never be implemented. There's little point in obsessively reading the media or monitoring polls, as no one can predict the outcome. Instead, consider going for a walk, watching a movie, or reading a book.
The media tends to present more bad news than good because negative stories sell. Additionally, many outlets operate as for-profit entities and often exhibit biases toward one side or another. We need to concentrate on what we can control in our own lives.
As Roy T. Bennett wisely puts it, “Stop giving other people the power to control your happiness, your mind, and your life. If you don't take control of yourself and your own life, someone else is bound to try.”
I believe the Lindy effect is relevant here; it states that the longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to endure. This suggests that while political landscapes may shift, the core societal structures and human connections that have persisted over time will continue to thrive. By focusing on these lasting elements, we can find stability and purpose, even amid uncertainty.