Justice & Law Quote by Xun Kuang

Xun Kuang (Xunzi) doesn’t flatter human nature; he puts it on trial. The line lands like a diagnosis delivered without anesthesia: envy and hate aren’t aberrations, they’re defaults. That severity is the point. In the Warring States period, when states rose and fell on the strength of discipline and administrative order, “people are basically good” wasn’t just naive, it was politically dangerous. Xunzi writes as if a society is always one bad impulse away from collapse.

The intent is not despair but architecture. By describing envy and hate as inborn, he clears space for the real hero of his philosophy: cultivation. If the raw materials of the self skew toward rivalry and resentment, then morality can’t be a spontaneous bloom; it has to be built through ritual (li), education, and deliberate habituation. The subtext is pragmatic and a little grim: trust isn’t a natural resource, it’s a manufactured one. “Loyalty and good faith” don’t vanish because people suddenly become monsters; they erode because, unchecked, emotions reorganize a person’s incentives until promises feel optional and other people become obstacles.

Notice the causal chain: emotion -> permission -> action -> social breakdown. “If he gives way to them” quietly shifts blame from having ugly feelings to indulging them, which lets Xunzi sound tough without sounding fatalistic. He’s warning rulers and citizens alike that virtue requires external scaffolding - norms, institutions, and practices strong enough to restrain what comes standard. In a time of endemic war and faction, that’s less philosophy-as-self-help than philosophy as survival manual.