Daily Inspiration Quote by Xun Kuang

A blunt rebuttal like this is less a polite footnote to Mencius than a declaration of ideological war inside early Confucianism. Xun Kuang (Xunzi) names his rival, states the thesis, and snaps it in half. The spareness is the point: he refuses the comforting premise that morality naturally wells up from within. In an age of political fragmentation and routine violence, insisting on innate goodness could read as either naive or dangerously complacent. Xunzi’s line is calibrated to puncture that complacency.

The subtext is institutional. If people are naturally good, moral cultivation is mainly a matter of nurturing what’s already there; government can afford to be lighter, leaning on exemplars and gentle persuasion. Xunzi’s “I disagree” smuggles in a whole program: morality must be engineered. Ritual (li), education, and clear standards aren’t ornamental traditions but technologies for turning raw desire into social order. Human impulses, in his view, are not evil in a comic-book sense; they’re self-interested, short-term, and competitive. Left unshaped, they don’t magically harmonize.

It also works as a rhetorical flex. By invoking Mencius, Xunzi positions himself inside the Confucian project while attacking its most optimistic wing. He’s not rejecting ethics; he’s raising the stakes. The implicit claim is that good governance depends on sober anthropology. You don’t build stable institutions on wishful thinking about people; you build them on rules, rituals, and the hard, unglamorous work of making virtue possible.