| Posted by: frank091 (Frank Saunders Jr) | I say: This is not so. From ancient times to the current day, what all those in the empire call good is correct, well-formed, level, and orderly. What they call bad is one-sided, narrow-minded, perverse, and chaotic. This is the distinction between good and bad. If people sincerely take people's spontaneous nature to be originally correct, well-formed, level, and orderly, then what use would the sages be? What use would ritual and duty be? Even if there were sages, ritual, and duty, what would they add in terms of correctness, pattern, evenness, and order? Now, this is not so. People's spontaneous nature is bad. Therefore the ancient sages, because people's spontaneous nature is bad, took them to be onesided, narrow-minded, and uncorrected---perverse, chaotic and disordered. And so, on the people's behalf they set up the authority of the rulers above in order to oversee them. They made clear ritual and duty in order to transform them. They set up models and guidelines in order to order them. They used heavy punishments to restrict them, and so all under Heaven was ordered and united in goodness. This is the order of the sage kings, and the transforming effects of ritual and duty.
If you attempt to expel the authority of the rulers above, lack the transforming effects of ritual and duty, expel the order of models and correctness, lack the punishments which restrain, and, relying on these, observe how the masses proceed together---if you do this, then the strong will harm the week, robbing them. The many will terrorize the few, oppressing them. The empire will become perverse and disorderly, and will together be lost. If we look at it in this way, people's spontaneous nature is clearly bad. Their goodness is artificial. |
