Daoism and Inauthenticity

Interesting quote from "Acting without Regarding: Daoist Self-cultivation as Education for Non-Dichotomous Thinking" by Joseph de Santa Maria:

"The Daoist thinkers . . .express how uncritical adherence to artificial values tends to lead people to impose such ideas harmfully on others. For example, in the Zhuangzi, the horsemaster Bo Le carelessly imposes human technology on his horses in order to domesticate them. This though results in more than half his horses dying."

This is always the danger of artifice-driven ideology: because of its fundamental inauthenticity and unnaturalness, it must be sustained by coercion and rarely in turn sustains the community or the environment. In other words, it ends up existing for its own sake.