Asklemmy

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!

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.

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 elses greed? Then wouldn't the absence of all greed also kill all industriousness? In that case @[email protected] would probably be right, civilisation would have a hard time existing.

Islamic theology has a take on it, that I find more logical. Basically angels are like humans but without free will. So they do have all the traits humans do, but cannot act on it, except when deemed acceptable by a perfect being. That way they managed to create a perfect community.

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.

Probably really boring.

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

The interesting thing about character traits is the mix. Some that we think of virtuous or beneficial become toxic at the extrema. It also depends on the context. You want your aircraft pilot to be unrelentingly fastidious and vigilant but that doesn't work in a relationship.

I think we could make a much improved society by focusing more attention on health and knowledge rather than on business, war and money. It's becoming increasingly clear that many people, even superficially successful people, are suffering from some kind of mental disorder. It's well known that psychopathy is often an advantage in business dealings. We allow our cognitive biases to rule us and our behaviour is evolving at a much slower rate than our technology.

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.