On Human Nature

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a de-moralized explanatory framework for human behavior. Core thesis: the foundational driving force of human nature is neither good nor evil, but desire — biological survival desire encoded at the DNA level. Desire is the input of the human behavioral system: the starting point and sustained driving force of all action.

V1 constructed a complete framework with an X-Y dual-axis behavioral coordinate system (Animal Desire and Social Desire), a dynamic model using “fast reflex arcs” and “slow reflex arcs” as response mechanisms, and a lifecycle attenuation curve of the hormonal system as the temporal evolution dimension.

V2 completes four theoretical upgrades: (1) Triangulation — distinguishing the Western ontological perspective (what is desire?), the Eastern governance perspective (how should desire be managed?), and this paper’s systems-theoretic perspective (what function does desire serve?), defining desire as a system input rather than an ontological entity or a moral governance target; (2) Coupling Band Theory — correcting the orthogonality assumption of the X-Y axes, demonstrating the causal chain by which animal desire inevitably triggers social desire, and proposing a parent-system/child-system genetic model; (3) Methodological Declaration — this framework does not apply Popperian falsificationism; its validity test is explanatory power competition, not experimental falsification; (4) East-West conceptual divergence of “desire” — Western desire/cupiditas is a neutral explanatory concept, Eastern “欲” (yù) is a governance concept laden with moral prejudgment, and this paper’s “desire” is a de-moralized systems-functional concept.

What Lies Beneath Human Nature?

Is human nature fundamentally good or fundamentally evil? This question has haunted human philosophy for two and a half millennia. In the East, there is the debate between Mencius’s theory of innate goodness and Xunzi’s theory of innate evil. In the West, the contest between Hobbes’s pessimism and Rousseau’s optimism. Christianity defines human nature through original sin, Buddhism reveals the potential for enlightenment through Buddha-nature, and Islam emphasizes humanity’s innate inclination toward good through fitrah.

Yet all of these accounts share an unexamined presupposition: that good and evil constitute a valid scale for measuring human nature. This paper’s starting point is that this ruler itself is human-made, subjective, and variable across cultures and eras. Measuring an object with an unstable ruler inevitably produces unstable conclusions. The reason this debate has remained unresolved for two and a half millennia is not that the question is too difficult, but that the instrument is unsuitable.

This paper’s core thesis: In the beginning, humans are born with desire. The foundational driving force of all human behavior is biological survival desire encoded in human DNA. Desire is the input of the human behavioral system — the starting point and sustained driving force of all action. Just as an AI system produces no computational process without input, humans produce no behavior without desire. Good and evil are merely the external evaluative labels applied to desire’s outputs under varying conditions — they are not intrinsic properties of desire itself.

Three Perspectives: Ontology · Governance · Systems Theory

The history of human thought on “desire” can be distilled into three fundamentally different entry points. This chapter establishes the paper’s position among them, preventing readers from misreading this paper’s “desire” as carrying the meaning of any existing tradition.

The West treats desire as an ontological entity to be understood — this is gazing at the input as an ontological object. The East treats desire as a problem to be controlled — this is tracing back from unsatisfactory results at the output end to the input end, attempting to cut off the signal source. Neither approach perceives the true functional position of desire within the system.

The “desire” in this paper is not Spinoza’s cupiditas (ontological entity), not Zhu Xi’s “human desire” (moral governance target), not Buddhism’s “craving” (cause of suffering to be eliminated). It is a de-moralized systems-functional concept: the startup signal and sustained driving force of the human behavioral system. Input itself has no moral valence — moral judgment occurs at the output end, at the point where the results of behavior are evaluated by external observers, not at the input end.

Desire ≠ 欲: Conceptual Archaeology of Two Words

In Western philosophy, desire (Latin: cupiditas/appetitus) was from the outset studied as the prime mover of human behavior. Spinoza defined cupiditas as “the very essence of man” — the striving (conatus) by which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being. Hume declared that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” Aquinas held that all things naturally possess a natural inclination or appetite: to preserve themselves and reproduce. The common thread: desire is a neutral explanatory concept, pre-loaded with no moral judgment.

The Eastern concept of “欲” (yù) took an entirely different path. Xunzi stated “humans are born with desire,” acknowledging desire as innate and natural. But the “what to do about it” level immediately summoned a moral framework: the Book of Rites states “food, drink, and sexual relations — therein lies humanity’s great desire,” immediately followed by a discussion of how to restrain it. The tendency of material desire toward unchecked expansion led to the label “greed” (贪欲); Zhu Xi termed it “selfish desire” (私欲). “Heavenly principle and human desire cannot coexist” became a core proposition of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism.

Yet a commonly overlooked fact: in original Confucianism, “欲” was not entirely pejorative. Confucius said, “Wishing to establish oneself, one establishes others; wishing to advance oneself, one advances others” and “If I desire humaneness, humaneness is at hand” — here “desire” (欲) points toward the active pursuit of moral rationality, what scholars call “humane desire” (仁欲). Mencius stated, “What is desirable is called good.” Original Confucianism’s “欲” contained a duality of material desire and humane desire; it was only the later Neo-Confucian tradition that selectively amplified the pejorative dimension of material desire.

The Dual-Axis Desire Model

All driving forces of human behavior can be decomposed into two dimensions — Animal Desire (X-axis) and Social Desire (Y-axis). Any specific behavior is the resultant of these two forces acting in combination.

The X-Y Axes Are Not Orthogonal: Causal Coupling and Parent-Child System Genesis

V1 presented animal desire and social desire as two independent dimensions. V2 introduces a critical correction: in humans — a social species — a causal coupling band exists between the X-axis and Y-axis. Every emission of animal desire can automatically trigger a social desire response.

Sexual desire is the most primal and clearest case of this causal chain. A male adolescent’s testosterone surge produces sexual impulse — this is pure animal desire, driven by the biochemical signals of the endocrine system. But the instant this signal is emitted, it cannot complete its loop within a purely animal channel, because the object of sexual satisfaction is another human individual. The animal signal is thus forced into the social channel — I need to observe the other person, interpret their signals, and adjust my own behavior to elicit their response.

A boy in the throes of desire and a girl awakening to desire are both manifestations of reciprocal animal-drive interaction. The boy is the active party; the girl is the party in passive anticipation. The sexual desire between a boy and a girl alone constitutes the simplest and most fundamental social relationship. The man observes the girl’s responses; the girl observes the boy’s active behavior; then both parties assess each other’s social and biological desires. In this process, both are simultaneously running two systems — the animal system evaluating the other’s biological fitness (appearance, physique, health signals) and the social system evaluating the other’s social fitness (demeanor, social status, reliability signals).

Purely X-axis behavior (purely animal output that bypasses the social channel entirely) appears only under extreme conditions — the fear response in life-or-death moments. Purely Y-axis behavior (purely social output triggered by no animal desire) is equally rare — only highly ritualized social etiquette approaches this extreme. The vast majority of human daily behavior falls within the coupling band.

Fast and Slow Reflex Arcs

What determines the final landing point of human behavior is not only the balance of power between the X-axis and Y-axis, but also the speed of external stimuli. Stimulus speed determines which processing system the brain engages.

Good and Evil as External Subjective Constructs

Good and evil are not intrinsic properties of behavior but an external social evaluation system. A dual subjectivity structure is at work: the actor’s behavior is driven by internal desire (first layer of subjectivity), while the observer’s moral judgment is itself determined by the observer’s own cultural background, moral training, and interest position (second layer of subjectivity). Once these two layers are stacked, “objective good and evil” does not exist.

Abortion is “killing a life” in conservative eyes, “bodily autonomy” in progressive eyes. Both sides believe they stand on the morally correct side, yet both judgments rest on their respective cultural presuppositions. No Archimedean fulcrum allows either side to stand in a position of pure objectivity and render a verdict. Moral judgment itself is a social behavior; its function is not to discover truth but to maintain group order, delineate boundaries, and establish identity. The act of defining good and evil is an extension of human social interaction.

Subjective Definitions of the Subjective

All human definitions of subjective viewpoints are themselves subjective definitions of the subjective. There is no objective anchor that can be aligned with the physical world. The physical world does exist — gravity does not change because of subjective judgment. But all human understanding, description, and naming of the physical world has already passed through sensory filtering, neural encoding, and linguistic construction; everything is a product of subjective processing.

Sensibility Serves Animality; Rationality Serves Sociality

Sensibility and rationality are not two independent, opposing faculties but expressions of the same desire system through two different axes. Sensibility is desire’s output through the animal channel; rationality is desire’s output through the social channel.

There is no such thing as “a sensible person” or “a rational person” — there are only individuals whose two channels have been calibrated to different default priorities by their particular environments. Education does not eliminate desire or elevate rationality; education merely redistributes the bandwidth priority between the two channels.

Morality: From Analytical Tool to Object of Analysis

Traditional theories of human nature discuss human nature from within a moral framework. This paper removes the moral framework itself from the analytical toolkit. This paper’s measurement system has only two dimensions — animal desire and social desire — plus one moderating variable: the speed of external stimuli. Every component of this system can be mapped to observable biological reality and operates without relying on any cultural presupposition.

The entirety of humanity’s moral architecture is a subjective act of social-desire valuation. All of it. Morality is no longer the lens through which human nature is analyzed — morality itself becomes one of the social phenomena that this framework’s desire-reflex-arc model must explain.

Animal Decline, Social Ascent, and Parent-Child System Differentiation

An individual’s animal desire declines continuously across the lifespan. Social desire rises inversely. The two opposing curves cross at some point in life.

V2 adds a genetic-developmental dimension: social desire originally differentiated as a child system from animal desire when it encountered social constraints (e.g., sexual desire triggering courtship behavior), and gradually acquired operational autonomy over time. In old age, animal signal sources attenuate, but the social channel has been running independently for decades, developing its own inertia — it no longer needs animal triggers to sustain output. This is the systemic mechanism behind elderly people’s pursuit of fame, fortune, and social recognition.

The “midlife crisis” is system oscillation in the crossover zone of the two curves — two signal systems competing for control at roughly equal strength. It is not the “self” getting lost; it is two systems fighting inside the same body.

Changes in a person’s values, life philosophy, and worldview follow the shifting weights across the lifecycle. Adolescents, especially those in puberty, represent the absolute hormonal peak of animality — this is not “rebellion” but the inevitable expression of the biological cycle. The prefrontal cortex does not fully mature until approximately age 25. The establishment of romantic relationships and the founding of a family are the true triggers that massively activate social desire. There is a Korean saying: “An unmarried person never has philosophy; only a married person possesses philosophy.”

The “Three Views” as Social Desire Training Products

The “Three Views” (values, life philosophy, worldview) can be traced to their conceptual origins: Weltanschauung (worldview) was a term first coined by Kant in 1790; values (Wertvorstellungen) originated from the 19th-century German Neo-Kantian school; life philosophy (Lebensanschauung) grew out of the Lebensphilosophie tradition. Their integration into the unified “Three Views” system is a distinctive product of the Chinese Marxist philosophical education system.

The original European philosophical definitions were open-ended — exploratory, acknowledging plurality and historical limitations. The Chinese-context adaptation was convergent — transforming “the world can be understood this way or that” into “you should understand the world this way.”

The Family: Smallest Unit of Moral Production

The family is the first social desire training ground that a human individual encounters. Infants learn which behaviors are accepted and which rejected through parents’ facial expressions, tone of voice, and physical contact — this training almost entirely bypasses the conscious level, writing directly into neural circuits. The power of family moral training is so immense not because its content is correct, but because its timing is irreplaceable — it occurs during the window of maximum brain plasticity, during the phase when the individual is entirely dependent on caregivers for survival. Pleasing one’s parents equals staying alive.

The powerful psychological force of “returning to one’s roots” is not, at its foundation, the romance of nostalgia but the signal still being emitted decades later by family moral training. The essence of intergenerational conflict is not a clash of values but incompatibility between two sets of social reflex-arc parameters calibrated under different environmental conditions.

Institutions as Slow-Environment Engineering

A good social institution is not “teaching people to be good” but artificially creating slow environments — extending decision-making time through legal deterrence, strengthening the social reflex arc’s response speed through educational training, and reducing emergency stimuli that trigger animal desire through stable life security. A collapsing society (war, famine, upheaval) is manufacturing fast stimuli everywhere. “Troubled times produce evil people” is not a moral judgment but an inevitable systemic response.

Systematic Comparison with Existing Frameworks

This framework’s uniqueness lies in treating desire as a system input rather than an ontological entity or moral target; its multi-dimensional integration of dual axes + coupling band + fast/slow reflex arcs + lifecycle curve; and its epistemological self-referential closure. It has family members, but no twins.

Biochemical Unfolding of the Double Barrier

This paper extends from Chapter 10 of the LEECHO Research Lab’s “Cognition · Metacognition · Global Metacognition” V3 — the “Double Barrier” theory. That paper defined the dual barriers preventing humans from reaching global metacognition: the first barrier is animal attributes; the second barrier is social attributes. This paper provides the biochemical mechanism unfolding and the lifecycle temporal unfolding for that theory.

The lifecycle curve further explains why 85–95% of people remain at Layer 1 — most people’s lives consist of a smooth transition from animal-desire dominance to social-desire dominance, with never a single moment where both are simultaneously seen through. When young, animal desire is too strong to see through; when old, social desire is too strong to see through; the crossover period in between produces not awakening but the system oscillation of a midlife crisis.

Why This Framework Does Not Set Falsification Criteria

This framework does not apply Popper’s falsificationism. The reason lies in the logical structure of its core proposition: a framework that claims “all statements about human nature are subjective definitions of the subjective” would be logically self-contradictory if it then set “objective falsification criteria” for itself. It would be like a person who has just finished proving “no absolutely straight ruler exists in the world” and then says, “Now let me use an absolutely straight ruler to measure the precision of my proof.”

Falsification criteria are meaningful in the natural sciences because the natural sciences deal with repeatable, observable physical phenomena — experiments can be designed, variables controlled, and results replicated by third parties. But a theory of human nature does not deal with physical phenomena; it deals with subjective experience and social construction. The falsifier and the object of falsification are components of the same system.

The validity test for this framework is not “can it be falsified?” but “can it explain a broader range of human behavioral phenomena more self-consistently than existing frameworks?” — this is explanatory power competition, not experimental falsification. The same person who donates to charity in the morning and punches another driver in an afternoon road-rage incident: neither the innate-goodness theory nor the innate-evil theory can self-consistently explain this. This framework handles it without difficulty: the morning was social-desire-dominated output in a slow environment; the afternoon was animal-desire-dominated output under fast stimuli — different responses from the same system under different input conditions.

A De-Moralized Panorama of Human Nature · V2

This paper has proposed and argued for a de-moralized behavioral dynamics model. The core argumentative chain:

First, the foundational driving force of all human behavior is DNA-encoded survival desire — desire is the input of the human behavioral system. Second, desire divides into animal desire (X-axis) and social desire (Y-axis); the latter is a child system that differentiated from the former upon encountering social constraints. Third, external stimulus speed determines which reflex arc is invoked. Fourth, good and evil are not intrinsic properties of behavior but post-hoc evaluations by external observers based on their own subjective standards. Fifth, morality is an institutionalized product of social desire; the family is the smallest unit of moral production and transmission. Sixth, the two desire curves follow inverse trajectories across the lifecycle; social desire grows from a parasitic system into an autonomous one. Seventh, sensibility and rationality are outputs of the same desire system through two different channels. Eighth, the “Three Views” are not a priori cognitive dimensions but social-desire calibration tools arising from specific cultural transmission pathways. Ninth, this paper adopts a systems-theoretic perspective, distinguished from Western ontology and Eastern governance theory. Tenth, all statements about human nature, including the nine points above, are subjective constructions of the subjective; no objective final adjudication exists. This framework’s validity test is explanatory power competition, not experimental falsification.

The power of this framework lies not in being “correct” but in being “honest” — it is one of the few theories of human nature that does not pretend to stand at God’s vantage point.

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