The Theory of Self-Good Desires A Foundational Theory of Human Nature from Life Adaptation to Civilizational Order

This paper proposes the theoretical category of "self-good desires" to address the underlying driving force of human action and how individual desires evolve into social cooperation and civilizational conflict. The core thesis is that human action originates from the inherent tendency of living subjects to maintain, improve, and develop their existence in environmental feedback, manifesting in consciousness as self-good desires. These are not narrow selfish desires but a fundamental desire structure oriented toward self-nourishment and development. Originating from the adaptive mechanisms of self-organizing life and internalized through bodily survival logic, they form eleven root desires—self-preservation, self-concern, self-enrichment, self-beautification, self-joy, self-compassion, self-reflection, self-confidence, self-strengthening, self-esteem, and freedom—centered on "life integrity." Desires themselves are neutral; good and evil depend on whether the means of realization are nourishing. The judgment of good and evil takes the subject's first-person experience as its origin, but this is a rights claim (who has the authority to judge harm), not a metaphysical claim (what is objectively good). Projecting this standard onto others generates public good and public evil; social relations are essentially processes of coordination, exchange, and conflict among self-good desires. On this basis, the paper proposes the laws of need–desire transformation, threshold escalation, desire alienation, and civilizational spiral development, offering a unified framework linking individual, relational, and civilizational levels. The methodological foundation is materialist: self-good desires are a higher-level manifestation in human consciousness of the adaptive mechanisms of living systems. Methodologically, the paper combines conceptual analysis, genetic deduction, and phenomenological introspection in a triangulating design. Its theoretical contribution lies in proposing "self-good desires" as a unified explanatory framework that connects the three scales of individual psychology, interpersonal relations, and civilizational evolution under the core concept of "life integrity," providing a testable analytical instrument for understanding the underlying logic of human motivation, social cooperation, and conflict.