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The timber from which no straight plank is made

One does not remake man at will: certain bents, fear, envy, the preference for one's own, reappear in all cultures, whatever education is given.

Objects to Moral plasticity

Kant · Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim · 1784

1. Plasticity bets that education and institutions can shape man almost without limit, for the better.
2. But certain traits recur everywhere, in every age and under every culture: the fear of death, the attachment to one's own against the stranger, envy, the thirst for status. This constant bedrock resists every education.
3. And the attempts to manufacture a 'new man', by remaking mores from top to bottom, have produced not angels but, often, terror: the timber of humanity is too crooked for any straight plank ever to be cut from it.

Therefore So malleability has bounds: education can discipline this depth, not abolish it. To count on a limitless plasticity is to court its return, all the more violent for having been denied.