Asklemmy

A human with no ability to feel unpleasant feelings would die of malnutrition or exposure. A community where everyone has the exact same needs and therefore could only act in ways that were beneficial to everyone would inevitably die out when those needs couldn’t be met.

I think viewing any of these situations or feelings as good or bad ignores the inherent chaos of our existence. And I mean chaos in the sense that slight changes to initial conditions can wildly change a system’s outcome.

I also think viewing “bad” characteristics as inevitable is often used as a way to dismiss change which is clearly a massive net positive. And looking at society’s problems as simply the aggregate of individual people being greedy or angry ignores the nature of systemic problems and suggests individualistic solutions that are doomed to fail

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.

Without greed, we don’t have a drive to be better and improve our selves. Without ego, we lack a self to care about in the first place. And without anger, we lose a strong emotional response to the unjust treatment of our peers.

Even though you can come up with a million negative things they also bring, at least in moderation, these flaws are probably just as you say the reason our society made it to this point!

That's an interesting question that has been been asked a lot in philosophy / theology.

My take is basically is, that the premise is already flawed. Negative traits are not binary. When does industriousness become greed, assertiveness become ego, etc...? Everything lives on a scale. So where is the cut off? Is there an objective cut off? Isn't rather someones industriousness someone else greed? Then wouldn't the absence of all greed also kill all industriousness? In that case @treadful@lemmy.zip would probably be right, civilisation would have a hard time existing.

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.

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.

This is roughly the premise of The Giver butis probably not a new concept as mentioned by others like @ISOmorph

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.

Probably really boring.

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

Like those cities in the memes that say "If [blank] was the default [blank]."

I'm guessing we would still be hunter-gatherers with very Zen Buddhist attitude towards life.

Have you ever seen the movie Logan’s Run? It’s not a bad representation.

ID be so boring i and probably others would kill someone or themselves just for some excitement