 The Zhuangzi history, where we find this account of Shen Dao’s doctrine, criticizes Shen Dao’s position along these lines. Still, it places Shen Dao in the dialectic just before Laozi, who directly precedes Zhuangzi. Laozi has a different line of reasoning to “abandon knowledge.” He avoids the fatalist implications—and, with it implicitly, the concept of great dao as a guide (though he keeps tiannature’s dao). We can view the Laozi persona as combining Song Xing and Shen Dao. His reason to “abandon knowledge” is that knowledge is a form of social control that instills unnatural desires, stimulates unnatural action thus it constrains and distorts natural spontaneity. The Zhuangzi ordering is theoretically informative, though chronologically inaccurate.