If mankind started out without any negative traits that like greed, ego, anger etc., how would it shape our civilization up to this date? Would we have created the perfect utopia or made ourselves extinct long ago? Are our flaws holding us down or are they the reason our society made it to this point?

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
    ·
    1 year ago

    Flaws are just variation. Variation begets adaptation. Adaptation begets survival of the species. Without flaws, evolution wouldn't exist and life wouldn't exist.

    And if somehow we overcame all these "flaws" everything would be so incredibly boring.

  • Gadg8eer@lemmy.zip
    ·
    1 year ago

    https://newreal.miraheze.org/

    Apologies in advance if the wiki is not 100% working, still in the process of migrating from Fandom.

    The New Real is a near-utopian artificial afterlife created by the Descendants of Mankind in my speculative fiction setting, but perfection is boring and complacency is best kept at bay just short of an uncorrupted world.

    Please keep in mind a few things...

    1. Bread backs currency, or rather the energy used to produce one loaf of bread is pegged at 100 Common Objective Inflationless Negotiables.

    2. The only reason Hitler was even eligible for resurrection is because it was realized 3 million years in advance of his resurrection that denying resurrection to literally anyone is a slippery slope that opens way too many floodgates. Of course, he's barred from politics outright and barely mentioned (he doesn't even get a wiki page, because I'm not willing to risk some fucking Neo Nazis trying to use my site to bolster their ideology) in the story.

    3. Every member of the Homo genus who ever died has been resurrected, every injury can be fixed and every mental issue managed. You are not going to end up in a wheelchair for eternity, you can have your arm back or even have it replaced with a cybernetic limb, Autism can be made managable without being "cured", psychopathy can be trained out of people via neuromagnetic therapy, and pedophilia can be managed by turning off sex drive or through the legalization of fictional portrayals (the latter is controversial, yes, and even I'm squicked out by it, but I haven't seen any reports of rises in child molestation or other sexual assault against children in Japan and Colombia where they legalized only fictional portrayals, so facts seem to go against current prevailing views; besides, perma-killing a child in fiction is not illegal yet I think it should be). In short, this wasn't rushed in-universe; the Gaian Holocenic Preserve in the New Real was meticulously planned in as unbiased a manner as possible.

    4. While crimes committed in the Old Real are null and void, things like hate crimes are taken seriously in the New Real. Since death only ever results in respawning like a video game character, if Hitler or whatever other nasty individual from history doesn't smarten up real fast, they can end up not only being charged for repeating history, but the crimes they committed in the Old Real can be reinstated to make it clear just how much that shit will not fly on Gaia. Same goes for anyone who was on death row for murder, especially for murdering a child.

    Sorry for self-promoting this, but I honestly am considering abandoning the New Real because everyone seems to think that it's too optimistic. God, I am so fucking sick of Solarpunk, with its winegrowing robotic farm communes and "being more responsible with the environment" when 75% of the climate crisis is the fault of five oil companies. I don't WANT to give up my lifestyle, and I don't own a car so the only change I'm morally-obligated to make only applies if my city would provide my neighborhood with some goddamn bus service, which I would gladly do.

  • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Without flaws, we would all have achieved nirvana, and would be freed from the cycle of birth and rebirth. There would be no people and no society, because we would no longer be chained to the flawed and impermanent material world. Simple as.

  • muddi [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Think of it dialectically, not in a polar way. So called "good" and "bad" have to come together in one for one to be able to surpass the apparent duality. Any enlightenment, individual or social, should come from the stage after good/bad

    This is what the sages will say, on the individual level: it's not so much good vs bad as useful or not useful (to some end). We need to understand and maybe learn to control what this "end" is. Similar thing with socialism: it's not class war for the sake of one class winning, but rather abolishing class as a system altogether

  • roo@lemmy.one
    ·
    1 year ago

    Strangely, these stupid religions had a really successful path of delivering some of the most ideal traits possible. Modern, people despise religions, and feel malicious towards good intentions. But, the post-theist world - knock on wood - really knows not to use nuclear weapons. It's amazing that these religious nuts became such epic scientists, and the recipients of their awesome powers somehow maintained the insanely creditworthy ability to hang onto integrity despite whatever storm.

    And weirdly, despite the storm being cult-mania mass-suicide level idiocy they were not even pushed over by a handful of demagogues coming to power in the recent right wing push.

    A lot of that stuff is a freakish coincidence in a world that could have delivered it's own extinction a million times over or more already.

    And there are just as many people earnestly working on removing further blights to humanity - including that of itself and the sins of its development past. Most rational people would have already killed a few million more people a year, but the religious nuts really set up a world that cherishes human life. (Probably a shame they weren't all more interested in wildlife protection)

    It's eroding, obviously, as people leave religion. But they did get it to a level that's been pretty intense considering we live in a world that's normally an absolute warpath of idiot animals.