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?
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.
What do you mean by binary in “Negative traits are not binary?” I only know the definition of binary as 1’s and 0’s.
Not binary in this context means, that there isn’t two opposing choices (true or false, black or white, greedy or generous). We’re rather looking at a scale in between opposing concepts.
A scheme in which there are only 2 possible values