What would you identify as humanity's worst faults / sins and what are your ideas for characters made from them?

[Flaviosky]

Mmmm, there should be a sort of mix of attributes to render the characters interesting, so it doesn't end like a wicked adaptation of the seven dwarves where all of them are just exaggerated versions of the ideas they embody.

Therefore, the main attributes on the characters should be something to make the characters active and clash between one another. Lazyness, Gluttony, Ignorance are fine sins for humanity, but I doubt some interesting characters can be made from those unless they have something more.

By the contrary, arrogance, narcissism, apathy, bigotry, racism, etc, are sins that end in active characters. If you ask my opinion, cruelty and sadism are the worst of them, because suffering becomes the goal of their actions, instead of just a consequence.

 

[Bick]

Money is often said to be the root of all evil and I agree. Once you get a bit of money you start developing a sense of superiority and that leads to a power trip where you’ll sacrifice everything just to make more money.

Money isn't the root of all evil. It's the wish to have more money that provides the problem. Plenty of financially comfortable (or wealthy) people are lovely.

 

[Bick]

If you ask my opinion, cruelty and sadism are the worst of them, because suffering becomes the goal of their actions, instead of just a consequence.

Like Wackford Squeers.

 

[Alextrax52]

Money isn't the root of all evil. It's the wish to have more money that provides the problem. Plenty of financially comfortable (or wealthy) people are lovely.

That’s what I meant. Once someone makes a big fortune once the desire to make more of it consumes them.

 

[sknox]

Our greatest fault is when we are certain. I reference here Jacob Bronowski's unforgettable demonstration of the principle in the final episode of The Ascent of Man.

 

[atsouthorn]

Inequality, especially considering we're all sacks of the same meat and bone! Strip a man of all possessions and what are we left with.

So, is being selfish natural? I suppose families of gorillas, lions, etc. are only concerned with their own survival and the survival of their young. Don't remember seeing many unrelated lions helping each other out. In fact, I'm pretty sure they eat other cubs. So would we argue that animal intelligence should go hand in hand with selflessness?

If we were to encounter an alien species whose intelligence far outweighed ours, I usually picture them as a model society of peace and contentment. Or is more likely that there's an alien Jeff Bezos out there with enough slave labour children to build an entire planet from scratch and ship it across the galaxy to you, next day delivery?

 

[Flaviosky]

Our greatest fault is when we are certain. I reference here Jacob Bronowski's unforgettable demonstration of the principle in the final episode of The Ascent of Man.

This may serve a fine character: Someone obsessed with certainty, but with the power to actually lever things to some degree, considering that without that power you just end up with just a normal person consumed by anxiety XD

 

[Flaviosky]

Inequality, especially considering we're all sacks of the same meat and bone! Strip a man of all possessions and what are we left with.

So, is being selfish natural? I suppose families of gorillas, lions, etc. are only concerned with their own survival and the survival of their young. Don't remember seeing many unrelated lions helping each other out. In fact, I'm pretty sure they eat other cubs. So would we argue that animal intelligence should go hand in hand with selflessness?

If we were to encounter an alien species whose intelligence far outweighed ours, I usually picture them as a model society of peace and contentment. Or is more likely that there's an alien Jeff Bezos out there with enough slave labour children to build an entire planet from scratch and ship it across the galaxy to you, next day delivery?

Being selfish is natural, is a matter of survival. We are selfish not with ourselves individually, but with our inner circles of people whose behaviour we can predict. That's what culture and society is all about; We don't share resources with people we don't trust, and we only trust people that do things that make sense to us, whatever it might be.

So inequality fall out of the box, as it's not a moral issue, but a byproduct of human creative endeavour. Strip a man of everything he has and we all end up the same way: Dead. Creative endeavour is meant to reduce the probability of death low enough so at some point we can worry about other things apart from not dying.

 

[Hetkey]

To be more specific, I was writing a fantasy story of mine and there was going to be a large group of characters who seem to mostly embody or at least take up the roles of the worst humanity has to offer. While some of them are on the side of the protagonist, the majority of them are all antagonistic forces who serve to not only be a big cause for the state of the world but also the main character's motivation as people who need to be overcome and stopped. There was going to be a multitude because I wanted to see what ideas people may have had for both the being itself and just like a character idea. Humanity is wiped out for the most part in a futuristic society which is why these antagonists that caused their destruction chose to take on titles representing their very worst while also being 'human' themselves in a sense. So far the main ideas I've got are supporting ones being wrath, greed, a different pride, different envy. I'm still thinking over what sort of things would fit overall but it's basically supposed to be a large group of these characters with more antagonistic ones I've decided on representing violence and the other forms of pride and envy.

I always ask people this question: How would the world be different today if no one had ever been cruel to a child. Would you be willing to sacrifice everything we have achieved and attained so far in exchange for that world?

How much evil in the world is due to the mental anguish of abused children.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Worst faults?

Probably Dunbar's number, or the ability to defer gratification and make decisions based on the long term; Our fragile, fleshy bodies; Our rampant ego's; Our inability to comprehend complex systems or the constraints that coincide with our natural tendency to create tribal groups.

Our, probably, worst fault from the planet's perspective is our ability to overcome natural predators, disease and natural disaster.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Being selfish is natural, is a matter of survival.

Individual survival is not necessarily the prime concern of an animal. Many animals, including humans, display altruism to the point of self-sacrifice. The group, or more specifically their genes, may take primacy over the individual.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I think humanity's greatest fault - on an individual level - is the great desire to shrug off any responsibility for our actions onto other people. It's always other people's fault for not adhering to the set of someone else's simplistic ideas that we slavishly agree with. Ideas about how things should be and came to be. ('Agree with' here meaning agree with in principle, and blindly accepting the ideas, our parents' generation indoctrinated us with - as long as we don't actually have to think about or act on them).

 

[Parson]

I would say that tribalism is humanity's greatest fault. As a species we have a very difficult time believing that those who are different are not also worse, dangerous, and unacceptable, sometimes to the point of being sub-human. --- This is clearly an evolutionary positive. If I am willing to sell out for my group, my group will usually be willing to sell out for me. But in our modern world the dangers of this kind of thinking outweigh the benefits.

A character like this could be shown as someone who is always going along with the group and thinks everyone else is just "Stupid!"

---- @JunkMonkey .... I agree, but only up to a point. No one has the time or ability to come to a reasoned position on everything. At some point we have to trust the wisdom of the ages and only modify that as it's deficiencies become clear.

 

[JunkMonkey]

---- @JunkMonkey .... I agree, but only up to a point. No one has the time or ability to come to a reasoned position on everything. At some point we have to trust the wisdom of the ages and only modify that as it's deficiencies become clear.

Interesting things happen when the obvious deficiencies of 'the wisdom of the ages' are, apparently, not obvious to those clinging to them for dear life.

 

[Timebender]

Sloth. I think that, as a whole, people are good and empathetic, just lazy. I believe that if we all saw everything from everyone else's point of view, despite our differences, we could achieve something reasonably close to utopia. But it's hard to have so much empathy and understanding for everyone else when we have plenty of our own problems, and it's hard and time-consuming to educate ourselves about people different from us. I thing the empathy and the decency is there, in most of us, but we shy away from fully exercising it because of the difficulty. So, I would say laziness is humanity's fatal flaw as a whole.

I think there's two ways to go about this with a character, or possibly both: have a character who does have a conscience and empathy for their fellow creatures, but drowns it out with hedonism because that's simpler and more desirable; or someone who employs "bread and circuses" to distract lower beings into complacency, or pits them against each other by preying on their violent short-sighted impulses.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

I believe that if we all saw everything from everyone else's point of view, despite our differences, we could achieve something reasonably close to utopia.

This was one of the early dreams of the internet and social media. Turns out people have a lot of views that others find unpalatable.

 

[Danny McG]

To show that they're outside the normal constraints of society, why not have them eating pizza with pineapple on it?

 

[JunkMonkey]

This was one of the early dreams of the internet and social media. Turns out people have a lot of views that others find unpalatable.

Yep. The slow realisation that 90% of humanity are selfish, irresponsible arseholes and not worth saving has been a great disappointment after the heady days of the early internet. I honestly thought that opening up communication between people/s would breakdown barriers and usher in a whole era of global peace and understanding. How naive.