Most people hear “seek truth from facts” and think it means “be honest.” That is the most harmless, yet useless reading of the phrase.
When Mao Zedong inscribed it as the motto of the Party School in Yan’an, he wasn’t preaching moral virtue. He was declaring war on a specific enemy: dogmatism—the belief that ideas should dominate reality, rather than serve it.
In his 1941 essay Reform Our Study, Mao broke down the phrase with surgical precision:
“‘Facts’ are all the things that exist objectively, ’truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws governing them, and ’to seek’ means to study.”
This definition is exact. “Facts” aren’t just data points; they are objective reality. “Truth” isn’t opinion; it is the underlying law governing how things work. And “seek” isn’t passive observation; it is active investigation through practice.
In his earlier 1937 essay On Practice, Mao wrote:
“Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge is acquired through practice and must then return to practice… The active function of knowledge manifests itself not only in the active leap from perceptual to rational knowledge, but also, and more importantly, it must be manifested in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice.”
Strip away the Marxist vocabulary, and what remains is a brutal logic: Your ideas don’t matter until reality validates them. When reality contradicts your ideas, reality wins.
This isn’t about honesty. It’s about letting reality rewrite your beliefs, continuously and without mercy.
The Map Is Not The Territory
Most of us inherit a set of values from school, family, and society, and then spend our lives expecting reality to conform to them. When reality doesn’t cooperate, we rarely update our values. We complain. We retreat into ideology. We double down on beliefs that stopped working years ago.
“Study hard and you’ll get a good job.” “Be loyal and the company will take care of you.” “Follow the rules and you’ll be rewarded.”
These were once accurate maps of reality. In a specific era, they worked. But the map is not the territory. When the territory changes, the map becomes a lie.
The pain most people experience comes from this source: they try to force the territory to fit their old map, instead of drawing a new one. Mao called this “subjectivism” and “dogmatism”—the disease of letting theory dominate practice, of letting Ego dominate Ground Truth.
Two and a half millennia before Mao, Laozi said the same thing in the Daodejing, just in a different key.
The Dao Doesn’t Care About Your Ego
In Chapter 25 of the Daodejing, Laozi writes:
“Man follows Earth. Earth follows Heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows what is natural.”
The Dao is not a moral code. It is the underlying operating system of reality—the way things actually work, beneath the surface of human opinion and social consensus. And De, often mistranslated as “virtue,” isn’t about being good. It’s about efficacy. It is about aligning your actions with the Dao—moving with the grain of reality, not against it.
Chapter 2 explains how:
“Therefore the sage acts through non-action (wu wei) and teaches without words.”
Wu wei is the most misunderstood concept in Chinese philosophy. It doesn’t mean “do nothing.” It means acting without ego. It means not forcing, not trying to impose your subjective will on a universe that doesn’t care about you.
When you let go of ego, you stop fighting reality. And when you stop fighting reality, reality stops fighting you. The logic is simple. The less you let your ego distort your perception of reality, the more effective your actions become.
Conversely, what happens when you try to force reality to submit to your will? Reality doesn’t obey. It deforms. It camouflages. It gives you the illusion of control while collapsing underneath.
The Paradox of Control
Chapter 58 of the Daodejing records reality’s ruthless mockery of forced control:
“When the country is ruled with a light hand, the people are simple. When the country is ruled with severity, the people are cunning.”
When you try to manage with a microscope, you don’t get order; you get cunning. Because reality is an organism. When you try to “correct” it against its grain, it generates antibodies.
This pattern is everywhere. The more a society emphasizes honesty, the more it signals a lack of trust. The more a company emphasizes values, the more it suggests those values are missing. The more a culture enforces specific rhetoric, the deeper the conflict it tries to hide.
When a system is healthy, you don’t need to loudly proclaim its principles. When principles are proclaimed loudly, it is often a symptom of a broken system. As Laozi noted in Chapter 18:
“When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and piety appear. When the body’s intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge appear… When the country is confused and chaotic, loyal ministers appear.”
Values are not always signs of health. They are often patches on a broken system.
Macro vs. Micro: The Scale of Action
Mao and Laozi seem to contradict each other. Laozi says “Let go of ego, follow the Dao.” Mao says “Understand reality so you can transform it.” But they aren’t contradictory. They are operating at different scales.
Think of it like classical physics versus quantum mechanics.
In classical physics (macroscopic scale), you are an observer outside the system. You can’t change the laws of thermodynamics. You can’t bend the universe. At the scale of planets, human agency is negligible. This is where Laozi applies—you can’t bend the universe, so don’t try.
But in quantum mechanics (microscopic scale), the observer is part of the system. Your observation collapses the wave function. Your presence changes the outcome. At this scale, the distinction between “observing reality” and “shaping reality” dissolves.
This is the scale where Mao’s On Practice applies. In social systems—organizations, companies, relationships—you are not an outside observer. You are a participant. Your cognition and actions reshape the system itself.
When you realize you’re part of the system, “understanding reality” and “changing reality” become the same act. This is why dialectical materialism isn’t just about passive observation. It is about practice as the place where knowledge and transformation meet.
You test your ideas in reality (practice). Reality corrects you (feedback). You update your ideas (dialectics). You act again. The spiral continues. This isn’t “forcing your will on the world.” It is letting the world teach you how to work with it.
Ego: Obstacle or Engine?
So is ego always the problem? No. Ego is only a problem when it disconnects you from reality.
Consider Elon Musk. His ego is massive. “Humans must become multiplanetary.” “Electric cars are the future.” These are not neutral observations. These are strong personal convictions imposed on the world.
But here’s the key: Musk’s strategic ego is built on tactical first-principles reasoning.
When he decided to build reusable rockets, he didn’t accept the industry consensus that “rockets are expensive.” He went to the ground truth: What are rockets made of? Aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. What do those materials cost? A tiny fraction of the rocket’s price. He bypassed the shared narrative (expensive rockets) and went straight to physical reality (material costs).
Musk calls this the “Idiot Index”—the ratio between a part’s cost and the cost of its raw materials. If the index is too high, someone is being lazy or exploitative. This pattern of cutting through conventional thinking to physical reality repeats throughout his work. This is wu wei in practice: letting go of industry ego (consensus) and aligning with ground truth (materials, physics, economics).
The same applies to Steve Jobs. His legendary ego—his insistence on perfect design and control—wasn’t just arbitrary preference. It was grounded in deep observation of how humans interact with objects.
Jobs understood this deeply. When asked about his role at Apple after his return, he emphasized collaboration over control. He wanted the company to maintain startup-like agility while operating at scale. This is the essence of Founder Mode: presence, not absence.
Jobs didn’t micromanage. He participated. He asked questions. He challenged assumptions. He ensured everyone rowed in the same direction—not by dictating how to hold the paddle, but by being present, guiding alignment, and keeping the team focused on the vision. This is wu wei at scale: act without imposing, guide without controlling, influence without forcing.
No Investigation, No Right to Speak
Mao understood this principle early on. In his 1930 essay Oppose Book Worship, written long before he held power, he laid down his most enduring maxim:
“No investigation, no right to speak.”
The full quote is sharper:
“Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak on it. Is this too harsh? Not in the least. When you have not probed into a problem… whatever you say about it will undoubtedly be nonsense.”
He drives it home:
“To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it. Conclusions invariably come after investigation, and not before.”
Ground truth comes first. Theory comes second. If your theory contradicts ground truth, your theory is worthless.
This is why Musk goes to the factory floor. This is why Jobs obsessed over details. This is why Chesky talks about “presence.”
No investigation, no right to speak. Not because of moral authority, but because without ground truth, your opinions are noise. Reality doesn’t care about your theories. It only cares whether you’ve done the work to understand it.
The Narrative Trap
But humans cannot escape narrative.
As Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, humans rule the planet because we can believe in shared fictions. Nations, corporations, money, laws—these don’t exist in physical reality. They are collective stories.
This is both our superpower and our curse.
Superpower: We can coordinate millions of people around abstract goals. Curse: We mistake the story for reality. We cling to outdated narratives long after they’ve stopped working.
“Get a degree and you’ll be safe.” “Work hard and you’ll be promoted.” “Loyalty pays off.”
These stories once aligned with reality. But the territory has changed. The map is now a lie. Yet, people keep using the old map and wonder why they’re lost.
The solution isn’t to abandon narrative. That’s impossible. The solution is to constantly update your narrative to match reality. This is what “seek truth from facts” really means: Don’t let your beliefs become dogma. Let reality continuously correct you.
The Upward Spiral
Reality and values aren’t opponents. They are dialectical partners.
Mao called this process a spiral ascent, governed by the negation of the negation.
- Thesis: You hold a belief. (“Hard work leads to success.”)
- Negation: Reality contradicts it. (You work hard but fail.)
- Negation of the Negation: You don’t abandon the belief. You sublate it—keeping the truth (effort matters) while discarding the error (effort is enough). You reach a higher understanding: “Strategic work in high-leverage areas leads to success.”
This isn’t a circle. You don’t return to where you started. You return to a higher level of the same question.
In On Practice, Mao wrote:
“Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level.”
Practice → Theory → Practice. The second “practice” is smarter than the first.
This is exactly what Laozi means by “Dao generates De, De returns to Dao.” Your understanding of reality generates effective action. That action deepens your understanding of reality.
Both are saying: Your cognition must be tethered to reality, and reality will reward you.
The difference is scale. Laozi operates at the macro scale (nature); you align with it. Mao operates at the micro scale (society); you engage with it. But the principle is the same: Ego aligned with reality = power. Ego fighting reality = pain.
The Most Dangerous Illusion
The most dangerous illusion isn’t “I don’t have values.” It is “My values are correct, and reality just hasn’t caught up.”
This mindset keeps people stuck.
- “The company should recognize me.” (But they don’t.)
- “Hard work should work.” (But it doesn’t.)
- “People should be fair.” (But they aren’t.)
When reality contradicts your values, you have two choices:
- Blame reality. Complain, become bitter, wait for the world to change.
- Update your values. Recognize your map is wrong, redraw it, and navigate better.
Most people choose option 1. They cling to values as if they were sacred, as if letting go were moral surrender. But values aren’t truths. Values are tools. When a tool breaks, you don’t pray for the nail to change. You get a better tool.
Epistemic Humility
“Seek truth from facts” is not a call to honesty. It is a call to epistemic humility.
It means:
- Your beliefs are provisional.
- Reality is the arbiter, not your preference.
- When your model fails, the model is wrong—not the world.
This is brutal. It means admitting error. It means killing your darlings. It means accepting that your inherited values might be obsolete. But it is also liberating.
Values should serve reality, not the other way around.
When your beliefs align with reality, action becomes effortless. You stop rowing upstream. You find the path of least resistance. You act through wu wei, and through non-forcing, nothing is left undone.
When reality contradicts your values, reality wins.
The only question is: how long will you take to learn the lesson?