What is humanity's biggest mistake? And weakness?

V h o

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Greatest mistake? Probably the usage of nuclear weapons, they bring nothing but destruction; usually more than desired with all types of negative effects on the environment.

Weakness? Greed probably, or the desire to gain something by any means. Usually wars, genocide, slavery, robbery, and all other types of atrocities are committed for self interest-self interest that outweighs morals.
 

Floydical

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Our biggest mistake is not learning from the past. Certain important lessons can easily be lost with time.

I'd say our biggest weakness is corruption. People are so easily influenced in countless ways, it can be quite dangerous.
 

Transcendence

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I might be going on a huge tangent by saying this, but I think they're both LOVE. Sounds weird at first, but it does make some sense. Our greatest asset besides being able to think logically and have curiosity move us forward is our ability to feel. Love itself is objectively the strongest emotion and branches off into multiple other emotions/personality traits (like one's relative compassion). Love itself is so strong that it gives a reason for people to live in many cases. It's the reason some people continue what they do. And I don't mean just the love for another person/being. It can be the love of a job (yes there are people who love their jobs), the love of a sport (you've seen how people are when they're really into sports) and many other things. But at the same time it can be a huge weakness. Love being so strong can also cause people to think without logic involved and go off purely their bias for whatever they love (Example; traveling hours to watch your team play even though the weather doesn't really permit it. Game end up cancelled and roads practically impossible to drive on, so you're forced to stay in a hotel and wait for the weather to subside). I think the movie Interstellar perfectly sums it up in one of the parts where the female main character wants to go to the planet of her lover even though at face value it doesn't look like his findings were that special. They went the other way but they got deceived by the readings and her lovers planet's readings turned out to be true, and if they chose to go there instead of where they did, purely based off her love bias, they would have been in a completely different predicament than they ended up getting in to later in the movie.
 

Multiply

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I might be going on a huge tangent by saying this, but I think they're both LOVE. Sounds weird at first, but it does make some sense. Our greatest asset besides being able to think logically and have curiosity move us forward is our ability to feel. Love itself is objectively the strongest emotion and branches off into multiple other emotions/personality traits (like one's relative compassion). Love itself is so strong that it gives a reason for people to live in many cases. It's the reason some people continue what they do. And I don't mean just the love for another person/being. It can be the love of a job (yes there are people who love their jobs), the love of a sport (you've seen how people are when they're really into sports) and many other things. But at the same time it can be a huge weakness. Love being so strong can also cause people to think without logic involved and go off purely their bias for whatever they love (Example; traveling hours to watch your team play even though the weather doesn't really permit it. Game end up cancelled and roads practically impossible to drive on, so you're forced to stay in a hotel and wait for the weather to subside). I think the movie Interstellar perfectly sums it up in one of the parts where the female main character wants to go to the planet of her lover even though at face value it doesn't look like his findings were that special. They went the other way but they got deceived by the readings and her lovers planet's readings turned out to be true, and if they chose to go there instead of where they did, purely based off her love bias, they would have been in a completely different predicament than they ended up getting in to later in the movie.
This so much.
 

BrillyMac

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Our biggest mistake is not staying on the right path. The right path that our self conscious and self accusing spirit tells us to go on. You really do not need a law to tell you not to murder because you naturally should already know that. Peoples biggest mistake is going against their nature and then going against the laws of the world.
 

Ldude

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Our biggest mistake is not staying on the right path. The right path that our self conscious and self accusing spirit tells us to go on. You really do not need a law to tell you not to murder because you naturally should already know that. Peoples biggest mistake is going against their nature and then going against the laws of the world.
The purpose of the law is not to inform people against murdering. It's so that when someone commits crimes that society deems harmful, those people can be dealt with systematically. And you'd be surprised. Murder is acceptable. It depends who kills whom and who can hire a better lawyer. It's never about morality.
 

BrillyMac

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The purpose of the law is not to inform people against murdering. It's so that when someone commits crimes that society deems harmful, those people can be dealt with systematically. And you'd be surprised. Murder is acceptable. It depends who kills whom and who can hire a better lawyer. It's never about morality.
You have a point. Even if you have a better lawyer though, theres always going to be someone who doesnt accept it
 

Ldude

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You have a point. Even if you have a better lawyer though, theres always going to be someone who doesnt accept it
The murderer doesn't need everyone to accept them. No matter who you are, there will be someone who has a problem with you. It doesn't matter if you're a murderer, ugly, famous, gay, decrepit, illiterate, transgender, or have a particular taste in fashion. Judging other people is a characteristic of humans, and not all people perceive the same instances in the same ways. To some people, a murderer is a martyr who ought to be glorified. See the guy in my avatar? There are hundreds of people who glorify him for it. :| It's really a curious topic.

In other cases people are just sympathetic to murderers. Take the Bathtub Girls for example. They were minors who drowned their mother. But, boohoo, she made their life difficult, so they get out of prison in a few years. Their names were never revealed because they were minors at the time of the crime. They were both reintegrated with no past identity to follow them.

But ex-convicts who are known can reintegrate into society. They can change names, move, start a new life (granted they have the resources.) Due to circumstance, Issei Sagawa got free after two years. He was a Japanese student abroad in France. He killed and cannibalized a classmate. He went to jail, but his father pulled strings to have him transferred to Japan. Along the way, official documents were lost and his case was dropped. He didn't even need to change his name. He was free! He even became a celebrity back home. People knew exactly who he was and what he did, but that didn't change a thing for many of the people around him.

Morality does not run our world, and I'm not frankly sure it exists. This concept that people should inherently know not to do something for its "immoral" character confuses me.
 

Hotaruko

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Religion if I'm honest Lol. *** is our weakness.
its not religion itself, but the misuse of religion by greedy and corrupted humans...
and i wouldn't qualify *** as our weakness, otherwise we wouldnt be here lol. humans would have gone extinct long ago haha
Money and war birth new knowledges or reshape views.

Religion, however....Nothing positive had came out of it so far.
but if handled correctly, it can create miracles :0
its just that we've seen so much crap out of that already that we cant see the positives :/
 

Multiply

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its not religion itself, but the misuse of religion by greedy and corrupted humans...
and i wouldn't qualify *** as our weakness, otherwise we wouldnt be here lol. humans would have gone extinct long ago haha
But the amount of bullshit that has happened in our history over ***. Lol. It'd be better to say Love like Transcendence said.
 

BrillyMac

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The murderer doesn't need everyone to accept them. No matter who you are, there will be someone who has a problem with you. It doesn't matter if you're a murderer, ugly, famous, gay, decrepit, illiterate, transgender, or have a particular taste in fashion. Judging other people is a characteristic of humans, and not all people perceive the same instances in the same ways. To some people, a murderer is a martyr who ought to be glorified. See the guy in my avatar? There are hundreds of people who glorify him for it. :| It's really a curious topic.

In other cases people are just sympathetic to murderers. Take the Bathtub Girls for example. They were minors who drowned their mother. But, boohoo, she made their life difficult, so they get out of prison in a few years. Their names were never revealed because they were minors at the time of the crime. They were both reintegrated with no past identity to follow them.

But ex-convicts who are known can reintegrate into society. They can change names, move, start a new life (granted they have the resources.) Due to circumstance, Issei Sagawa got free after two years. He was a Japanese student abroad in France. He killed and cannibalized a classmate. He went to jail, but his father pulled strings to have him transferred to Japan. Along the way, official documents were lost and his case was dropped. He didn't even need to change his name. He was free! He even became a celebrity back home. People knew exactly who he was and what he did, but that didn't change a thing for many of the people around him.

Morality does not run our world, and I'm not frankly sure it exists. This concept that people should inherently know not to do something for its "immoral" character confuses me.
It shouldnt confuse you. When you were a child, and you did something wrong, didnt you hesitate? Didnt you stop to think about what you were doing? When you are doing what is it right, you dont have to think twice and worry about covering your tracks and having consequences. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thats the laws of physics that applies to everything. If youre not doing good, there will be an equal reaciton for that. You feel when you are doing wrong. You know not to push some random dude in the street because its wrong. The mind is the best calculator known. It even makes calculators. It travels faster than anything in the universe. It asses a situation even when you dont know it did. It knows when you messing up and it tells you. I hope you get what im saying. Justice is a natural instict in the mind. Unless you go completely savage, then you might not have remorse or anything. But to go completely savage, you have to go through a process. You have to get worse and worse. If you have to get worse, its not natural. Youre natural state is how youre born. This world makes people full of sin because youre born into a world of sin. Its not the people who are bad, its the circumstances that set them to be bad.
 

Kishi Uzumaki

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Biggest mistake is getting conceited in their own beliefs either it be religious, political, social or personal and it has created problems in the past ( from interpersonal conflicts to wars ) and it do in the present and will do in the future as well .

and there's many weaknesses that is different from person to a person but that's not somethings a person can't change with some efforts .
 

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To think we can control Nature

Our biggest weakness lies in being the only species with the ability to think abstractly thus leading to more complex emotions and behaviours which results in our evil/destructive nature.
 

Ldude

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It shouldnt confuse you. When you were a child, and you did something wrong, didnt you hesitate? Didnt you stop to think about what you were doing? When you are doing what is it right, you dont have to think twice and worry about covering your tracks and having consequences. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thats the laws of physics that applies to everything. If youre not doing good, there will be an equal reaciton for that. You feel when you are doing wrong. You know not to push some random dude in the street because its wrong. The mind is the best calculator known. It even makes calculators. It travels faster than anything in the universe. It asses a situation even when you dont know it did. It knows when you messing up and it tells you. I hope you get what im saying. Justice is a natural instict in the mind. Unless you go completely savage, then you might not have remorse or anything. But to go completely savage, you have to go through a process. You have to get worse and worse. If you have to get worse, its not natural. Youre natural state is how youre born. This world makes people full of sin because youre born into a world of sin. Its not the people who are bad, its the circumstances that set them to be bad.
What you just said is not true. Children are shown to have no sense of morality until they are a few years old. They are taught to follow and believe a moral system. In truth there is only punishment. A child can through time learn that certain actions will get them in trouble. However, if no one catches these actions, no morality will bring punishment.

On another forum I found a whole thread of people talking about their biggest shoplifting hits. Most of these people were doing it for the thrill at the cost of the small-town employees getting punished. Do they care? No.

Then again, at the basic level, morality is survival. I do what I can to survive. When people like us are born into large-scale governments where there is a law code, it is basic survival to follow that code. We have two forces which sometimes come into conflict: personal survival and group survival. I don't harm other people because coexistence will provide me a better chance of survival. When that is no longer true I can abandon that part of my morality. Someone could act like you and follow all the rules but have different basic principles. People do not want to be punished, but they don't care about doing bad things. You can even see that in the thread given the circumstance that we have 24 hours to live. Some of the people in that thread were saying they'd like to murder and rape and harm the people they don't like. They can do so because there will be no punishment.

You say that the world makes people sin because it is already full of sin, but I don't agree (disregarding the fact that what you and I consider sin is not the same thing.) People do whatever the hell they want. As Dostoyevsky says in Brothers Karamazov, "Everything is permitted."
 

Punk Hazard

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What you just said is not true. Children are shown to have no sense of morality until they are a few years old. They are taught to follow and believe a moral system. In truth there is only punishment. A child can through time learn that certain actions will get them in trouble. However, if no one catches these actions, no morality will bring punishment.

On another forum I found a whole thread of people talking about their biggest shoplifting hits. Most of these people were doing it for the thrill at the cost of the small-town employees getting punished. Do they care? No.

Then again, at the basic level, morality is survival. I do what I can to survive. When people like us are born into large-scale governments where there is a law code, it is basic survival to follow that code. We have two forces which sometimes come into conflict: personal survival and group survival. I don't harm other people because coexistence will provide me a better chance of survival. When that is no longer true I can abandon that part of my morality. Someone could act like you and follow all the rules but have different basic principles. People do not want to be punished, but they don't care about doing bad things. You can even see that in the thread given the circumstance that we have 24 hours to live. Some of the people in that thread were saying they'd like to murder and rape and harm the people they don't like. They can do so because there will be no punishment.

You say that the world makes people sin because it is already full of sin, but I don't agree (disregarding the fact that what you and I consider sin is not the same thing.) People do whatever the hell they want. As Dostoyevsky says in Brothers Karamazov, "Everything is permitted."
I have to agree with LDude. There is no such thing as right and wrong, just public opinion.
 
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