Daily Inspiration Quote by Xun Kuang

Xun Kuang (better known as Xunzi) is doing something bracingly unsentimental: he’s stripping “human nature” of its halo and treating it like a volatile raw material. The line reads like a warning label. If you “follow this nature” and indulge its shifting appetites, you don’t just become selfish; you become socially radioactive. Quarrels, conflict, then a slide past custom into crime. The escalation is deliberate. Xunzi isn’t merely moralizing about bad behavior; he’s arguing that disorder is the default setting unless something hard and public intervenes.

The subtext is political. Writing in the late Warring States period, Xunzi watched states cannibalize each other while rival schools pitched competing cures. Against Mencius’s comforting claim that humans are innately good, Xunzi makes a darker bet: people are born with desires that collide, and collision produces violence. “Conventions and rules” aren’t bureaucratic annoyances; they’re civilization’s technology, the thin lattice keeping private wants from becoming public ruin.

Notice the rhetorical move: he frames transgression as a predictable outcome, not an exception. That’s strategic because it legitimizes institutions - ritual (li), law, education, hierarchy - as necessary engineering rather than arbitrary oppression. If nature tends toward conflict, then restraint becomes a collective achievement, not a personal vibe.

Read now, it’s a provocative rebuke to any politics of authenticity that treats impulse as truth. Xunzi’s edge is that he doesn’t trust spontaneity; he trusts cultivation, precisely because he’s seen what “natural” looks like when a society is under strain.