Art & Creativity Quote by Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi is taking a scalpel to the moral-industrial complex of his day: the idea that you can cure human restlessness by dressing it up in pageantry. Ceremonies, music, public charity, conspicuous devotion - these aren’t attacked because they’re ugly, but because they’re persuasive. They soothe, synchronize, and flatter people into feeling aligned with “the good,” while quietly training them to outsource their own judgment.

The verb “hampering” does the real work. Ritual is not presented as guidance but as a constraint, a kind of soft handcuff that turns the mind from a living, improvising thing into a compliant instrument. Zhuangzi’s Daoist suspicion is that when society gets anxious about disorder, it responds by aestheticizing control: make obedience beautiful, make hierarchy feel holy, make moral performance feel like inner peace.

“Lost their original nature” is the knife twist. He’s not accusing them of mere hypocrisy; he’s saying they’ve become alien to themselves. In the Warring States context - a world of competing courts, philosophers vying for patronage, and Confucian ritualism rising as a political technology - this reads as a warning about governance by vibes. The elites can’t manufacture genuine clarity by staging virtue. You can only create the appearance of harmony, and the cost is spiritual: people forget what it feels like to move freely, to perceive directly, to be uncoerced by the soundtrack of righteousness.