 On this point the Zhuangzi often sounds a much more skeptical note. In the second (“Equalizing All Things”) chapter of that text, the following questions go unanswered: “How do I know that to take pleasure in life is not a delusion? How do I know that we who hate death are not exiles since childhood who have forgotten the way home?” (translation from Graham, 1989, 59; see also the translation from Ziporyn, 2009). The human pretension to know what is true and important is lampooned by comparing it to the pretension of the cicada and turtle dove to know by their own experiences of flight the possibilities of how high creatures can fly. There is no vision of a primitivist utopia here either. Rather, the dominant attitude towards the possibility of large-scale social change for the better is pessimism. It is a dangerous task for the idealist to undertake, and one that will probably end badly for the idealist because rulers don’t like to be lectured on their failings. On this matter, the Zhuangzi not only diverges from the primitivist Utopian strain in the Daodejing but also more forcefully from the earnest and ever-striving idealism of the Confucians. In the fourth(“The Human World”) chapter, a pessimistic Confucius (who here seems to be speaking on behalf of Zhuangzi) tells his idealistic student Yan Hui that he will probably get himself killed trying to change the ways of a callous and violent ruler. Further, some passages in this story can be read as implying that Yan Hui’s deeper motivation is to gain praise for his own virtue. That Yan Hui might be characterized in this way is especially significant, because the Confucian tradition regards his motivations as being especially pure. The implication might be that the Confucian idealistic project is continually and inevitably self-undermining: people can sense the self-aggrandizing motivations behind the noble talk and react negatively (see Chong, 2016). 