Education Quote by Xun Kuang

Xun Kuang doesn`t dabble in flattering anthropology. He opens with a provocation - human nature is bad - then builds a whole political and cultural program on top of it. The line isn`t just pessimism; it`s scaffolding. If people are naturally crooked, the most important technology a society can invent isn`t the plow or the sword, it`s training: teachers, ritual, moral principles. In other words, civilization is an act of deliberate engineering, not an organic blossoming of innate goodness.

The intent is polemical. Xun Kuang is writing in the Warring States period, when collapse and competition made the costs of disorder brutally visible. Against more optimistic rivals (most famously Mencius, who argued people are born with moral sprouts), Xun insists morality is not a birthright. It`s a hard-won achievement produced by institutions. That framing shifts virtue away from private feeling and toward public practice: ritual (li) isn`t decorative etiquette, it`s a behavioral operating system that turns volatile desire into predictable social life.

The subtext is also political: if goodness requires cultivation, then authority - teachers, codes, hierarchies - becomes morally justified. Not because rulers are saints, but because structure is the only thing standing between appetites and chaos. There`s a sober, almost modern realism here: left to impulse, humans don`t drift toward harmony. They drift toward advantage. Xun Kuang`s bet is that disciplined habits can outmuscle instinct, and that culture is less a mirror of who we are than a corrective for what we`d be without it.