Mohism

Society is violently fractured into dozens of rival states all vying for supremacy.

You've got armies marching, economies collapsing, and amidst all this rubble, you have these distinct factions, the Confucians, the Taoists, the Mohists, the Legalists.

Right, and they are fiercely debating in public.

They are pitching their rival visions for how to put the world back together.

Confucius proposed rigorous social order, clear hierarchies, defined duties, rituals that bound society together.

The legalists proposed ruthless statecraft, strict laws, severe punishments, the subordination of every individual interest to the interest of the state.

The Mohists proposed universal love combined with military defense.

Everyone had a plan.

Everyone’s plan involved more—more order, more control, more defense, more organizing of human behavior toward practical ends.

It is difficult to imagine a set of conditions better designed to produce anxiety about the future, and the philosophical activity of the period reflects it.

This was the era that Chinese tradition remembers as the Hundred Schools of Thought, when an extraordinary number of competing answers were proposed to a single practical question: How should a person live when the world is unstable and cannot be relied upon? The Confucians answered with ritual, learning, and the careful cultivation of relationships and virtue, arguing that a properly ordered human world could be built even amid disorder.

The Mohists answered with universal care and rigorous utility.

And this whole period is a real, it's a birthplace for all of these different, you know, philosophies and political traditions.

I mean, Confucianism, Moism, Taoism, even, you know, I remember studying about legalism, which is, you know, a much more harsh, heavy-handed political philosophy, but a philosophy nonetheless.

Right.

I mean, what was it about this period that kind of makes it this kind of breeding ground for all of these new ideas?