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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Discourse on Heaven, the successor to Discuz on Earth?

(Sorry, could not resist...)

More seriously, it's interesting to see the distinctively authoritarian line of thought even in ancient China; certainly explains a few things about their culture and society today.

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I don't think it's peculiar to China: parents towards young children naturally act authoritatively, in part because of the nature of young children. This nature somehow perseveres in adulthood, albeit altered: consider for example Asch's experiments[0], or this antique idea of assimilating rulers to shepherds.

(I'm using "authoritative" in a neutral sense here, free from its usual negative undertone)

Edit: Hm, I was incidentally opening the San Zi Jing[1] a few moments ago. It's a historically important educational Chinese book, and it opens with: "Men at their birth are naturally good."

The character used for "good" is "善" (shàn), which contains in part "羊" (yáng), meaning "goat/sheep".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic

I wouldn't say Xunzi is authoritarian. His school, the Confucians, were explicitly opposed to ruling by force and raw power, and instead thought that a state should rule by creating and following proper rituals for everyone to follow. The rituals would act psychologically to instill a sense of virtue in everyone, and then you would have a harmonious state where the ruler doesn't need to do anything except wear the ritual robes and face south. They thought a state based on naked force (or one based on explicit laws) would be too unstable.

Indeed Confucian thought is not inherently "authoritarian" in the sense that you allude to here, although "authoritarian" is a vague word to begin with, and some of its meanings mesh quite well with Confucian thought. However, Xunzi is uncommonly anti-individualistic even by Confucian standards, and influenced the tyrannic "legalist" tradition of Chinese state theory. Besides, Xun Zi is not at all convinced that a good society can be built through Confucian "ritual" alone - which, by the way, you unwittingly caricature by painting it as some superficial thing (wear robes, face south).

I mean, Plato argued for governance by philosopher-kings, not too different from the Confucian conception of governance.

What's more interesting to me is the skeptical attitude toward omens and the notion of heavenly will. That sounds really remarkably modern, and not at all what I'd expect from someone writing during the third century BCE.

Oh, wait until you read about the so-called Legalists.

FWIW, two of the most famous Legalists, Han Fei and Li Si were Xunzi's students.

In a sense, the Legalists and Confucians had a strange marriage, and they kept the name Confucianism because the credibility of the Legalists proper took a big hit when the Qin dynasty (founded on legalist principles) crumbled within a short period of time.

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