The Three Treasures are compassion, frugality, and not presuming to be first in the world, and Laozi says he holds them and keeps them. The third is the strangest and the most Taoist: deliberately declining the lead position, on the grounds that whoever stands out becomes the target and that yielding outlasts contending. The ethics are not altruistic in the Western sense — they are argued from what actually endures, which is the tradition's characteristic way of reasoning.