  Mohist political thought begins with a distinctive, fascinating state of nature account of the origin and justification of the state. Unlike Hobbes’s well-known scenario, the Mohist myth depicts violent social disorder as resulting not from individuals’ untrammeled pursuit of self-interest in conditions of scarcity, but from disagreement about values. People’s primary motivation is not self-interest, but their diverse, individual conceptions of yi (morality, righteousness).[11]  Individuals all tend to do what they think is right; the problem is that everyone disagrees about what that is. Since for the Mohists yi is inherently social and shared, each person condemns values different from her own as morally wrong. The plurality of moral standards thus leads to contention, belligerence, and wasted resources. For simplicity, we will quote mainly from the first of the three versions of the theory, which describes the state of primal anarchy in this way: