By sagely, what I mean is that there is an oft forgotten set of ethics that are meant to apply to all Taoists, especially the successful ones. It’s a mix of altruism, governance, manipulation, idealism, and pragmatism, and the idea is that each Taoist follower, each potential sage, is supposed to be doing a lot of long-term thinking and supposed to be able to take advantage of prevailing political, social, and cultural conditions to take custody of and responsibility for their people, their land, their world.