The Seven Deadly Sins
I recently posted part 4 of my series The Collapse of the First Global Civilization: The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology. The entire article was listed as a 46 min read. There are subsections that stand on their own that I’m sure will interest special audiences in a smaller format. Here is one of them.
This post discusses a phenomenon known as the Seven Deadly Sins (7DS) and shows how modern society has totally misunderstood what they are and the original story behind them. The 7DS in ancient times had NOTHING to do with “SIN”, as modern society views that term. This short article describes what they really are and how they integrate with the new A3 theory of consciousness. This theory presents a functional model for consciousness in both animals and humans which is consistent with new discoveries in brain physiology. The consciousness model was developed along with a new 3-brain physiological model that is discussed in another article.
The Seven Deadly Sins
The ancient philosophers already understood this human behavior in detail. They divided it up into seven categories that we now call the “SEVEN DEADLY SINS”. Ironically, as originally used, this knowledge had nothing to do with religion. The confusion arises from the word “SIN”. When the origin of the word sin is traced back to Hebrew, it meant “missing the mark” or “missing the goal”. As understood 4000 years ago, this meant doing something that caused social discord. It was only through Christian revisions that the “mark” was reinterpreted from being a social goal in asocial context to an obedience goal in an authoritarian context — i.e. from a “natural” goal to a “supernatural” goal.
During abundant times, in small isolated groups, with simple cultures and with good leaders, we may get along ok. But as soon as the environment (physical, economic, or cultural) brings hardship, the party is over. THAT IS WHAT THE WORLD IS NOW FACING.
So, what’s the point about the Seven Deadly Sins (7DS)? The classical 7DS are: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. These can be further grouped because Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony and Envy are all variations on GREED. We see greed a lot in the news these days. There are strong fundamental reasons for that. So, let’s start there.
Greed
Greed is an intense and selfish internal desire for something far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort, with the intention to keep it for one’s self. It can also mean a behavior that suggests such a desire. To understand the importance of greedy behavior in ancient society, it is important to envision it in a society that was plagued with resource shortages and governed by authoritarian rule.
Resource shortages would typically cause many people to die. So, any person, observed to be hording something of value for himself, was considered to be rejecting the implied or preached “social contract” which bound members of a tribe or clan to mutual support. “Royalty” overtly rejected such an obligation claiming that they were either supernatural beings themselves, or appointed to leadership by a supernatural power. Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony and Envy are greed for: anything another person has, sex, food, and social advantage respectively. The first three are tied to psychological drives right at the primary level of Maslow’s hierarchy. The fourth provides power in the community to control the first three. This connection to Maslow’s hierarchy is not coincidental. It is an important observation because human psychology and behavior are strongly and simply driven to protect basic life needs. Therefore, if a member of society was observed as greedy, this would raise strong security based fearemotions among the community, to the point of physical violence, against the greedy person. So, any form of greed was seen as a social disruptor.
Pride
PRIDE is also part of the Greed group. It’s just a lot more complicated. In almost every 7DS list, Pride is considered the original and most serious sin and the source from which the others arise. Most people view pride as a positive feeling someone gets when they do something good. Pride does have this positive side to it. Of course, that’s not where the problem lies. In fact, having this positive side is one of the reasons the negative side of this sin is so easily missed.
To understand the social concern with “Pride”, we should change the word used for this first sin from Pride to SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS.
A good description of this was a summary published by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. Paraphrasing: a self-righteous person is someone who “prides himself” as knowing the truth, but won’t acknowledge anything anyone else has to say about it. This isn’t a problem as long as a person is satisfied just following their own beliefs. But most self-righteous people aren’t. Self-righteousness turns into a social problem when one person’s “good” turns into everyone else’s “duty”. It becomes a social problem when a person views himself as a privileged judge of others, with a right to judge the others for their failure to perform according to the self-righteous person’s standards.
The “sin of Pride” is essentially the social imposition of hypocrisy andfalse pride on others.
“We can recognize aprinciple of self-righteousness when people associating with it, who don’t even understand it, go out in the middle of the night to light torches and break windows. We recognize it in the arrogance of associating with a cause or belief that makes people want to kill each other, and reject people different from themselves.” (Taylor)
In summary, self-righteousness is a pride that isn’t based on a personal accomplishment that has contributed true value to society. Self-righteousness is the composite personality a narcissist believes himself to be which he has stolen from others but can’t begin to live up to. Self-righteousness is the behavior of a gang of kids who have not contributed value to their school or community with skills the community normally defines as desirable, who strike out through violence against kids at another school just because some sports organization structures them as “rivals”. On a larger scale, we see this implemented as Nationalism. It is the self-righteous SIN of PRIDE that takes nations to war — AND, takes religions to war. Here is how Eric Hoffer put this in his book Passionate State of Mind:
“Monotheism — the adherence to a one and only God, truth, cause, leader, nation and so on — is usually the end result of a search for pride. It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be. Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a party or a holy cause, we are proclaiming our own uniqueness. …Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
Put another way, when a person insists that there is onlyone right way to do something, what he is really saying is that HIS way is the only right way. The hidden assumption is that he, of course, wouldn’t do something another way if there was only one right way. And, such a person can usually provide “proof” of his belief by pointing to all theothers who also have that belief.
What that person doesn’t see is that his self-righteousness is based on the collected false beliefs of the others, not something he personally did. But, the world is a diverse place. Eventually the person runs into others who don’t share his belief. When that happens, he no longer gets therespect he is searching for. Social disruption occurs when this kind of person is so driven by a desperate need forbelonging, that they resort to FORCE to compel the non-believing others to give them respect.”
Denial of Evolution
Before I leave the discussion of self-righteousness, let me address the case of self-righteousness that I think has probably done the greatest social damage to the human race. That is the self-righteousness concerning our human nature, through the DENIAL OF EVOLUTION — the rejection that humans have an intimate relationship with other animals. The denial of evolution is so destructive because it has blocked the human race from understanding the foundation and importance of both Maslow’s hierarchy and the 7DS.
By denying the connection between humans and our animal past, we deny that humans have inherited millions of years of animal brain development, honed to deal with survival in a brutal, hostile environment. When we deny that, and replace it with erudite, arrogant ideas of angelic virtues, we throw away the key link to explain why humans do many of the things they do.
Misunderstanding Evolution
When presented with the prospect that our Stone Age brains are not capable of managing modern complexity, many people suggest that evolution will provide us with adequate brains. This “solution” has two serious problems. First, it ignores the timescales it takes for evolution to work. If such a change takes, say, typically 40,000 years, it would be much too late to address the current collapse time scale, which is expected to occur in less than 50 years. But more introspectively, isn’t this yet again just another version of human arrogance? Why are we so sure the evolutionary changes will go in a direction that buys into the current social pipe dream? Evolution, described as “survival of the fittest”, has usually meant physical strength and ruthless domination. But, to be fair, that isn’t a hard requirement. The dominant requirement is passing needed traits forward through reproduction whichsustain the population.
There is nothing in this requirement that guarantees the skills for dealing with high complexity will be favored. In fact, it is more likely that evolutionary change will favor the destruction of “life forms” that create and require complexity to survive. Think, maybe, “the meek shall inherit the earth”. Einstein had an interesting view on this, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Planet of the Apes ring any bells?
Anger
Anger, as referred to in the Seven Deadly Sins, isn’t just getting mad at someone. It is an extreme emotion in the form typically referred to as blindrage. As an action, it often involves violence. The principles of the 7DS state that anger is part of a human’s animal drive. Once we see that, we can identify its evolutionary past.
The word “blind” is the tip-off. When a person is overcome by rage, they become blind to reason. This is a case of Middle brain turning off Thinker. Now mix this with self-righteousness, greed, lust and envy and you have the perfect recipe for violence that is very hard to stop. When a person becomes blinded by anger, they vehemently deny truth.
While their denial is verbalized and directed toward others, more important, due to the blindness, the person is in denial to themselves. This is often called “lying to yourself”. How can such a thing happen?
The A3 model explains it. Middle brain doesn’t only store “truth”. It stores all human experiences. Later on, it keeps accessing all of these experiences trying to determine which one provides the best model to guide action in a current situation. When Thinker brain is trying to figure something out and probes Middle brain for memories, potential threat situations can easily trigger Middle brain to respond with fight or flight behaviors that more broad “logical” analysis would reject. Once this happens, a downward spiral occurs. Anger drives lies; lies drive more anger. The bottom of the pit is where we find REVENGE. What makes revenge so hard to stop is that it is not based on truth. It is not based on logic or facts. The brain generated emotions of FEAR and RAGE become the drivers themselves.
So, the key to understanding anger is knowing that anger is the emotionalprocess that converts FEAR into violence. It is the fight element in the “fight or flight” response. This is a process that is partly hard wired into our brains from the earliest levels of animal evolution. It is not an easy problem to deal with.
Envy — as related to anger
Envy is an emotion a person has when they think someone else is being treated better than they are. Another word for it is jealousy. Jealousy is usually driven by self-righteousness. It can be an excuse a person gives himself for greedy behaviors. It surely plays a part in love relationships. And it usually involves anger. What distinguishes envy is that it is an outwardlooking trigger that selects a target for the inward looking elements of self-righteousness and greed that we can blame for our misperceived misfortunes.
Sloth
Sloth, in simple terms, means being lazy. While it might seem to only affect the person doing it, it takes on a whole new meaning in a social context. What happens if a large part of our society decides not to vote because they are just too lazy? What happens to a form of government like socialism if people are lazy and don’t want to do their fair share? What happens to our family structures if young people become lazy about taking care of their aging parents, or parents get tired and lazy about taking care of their kids? What happens if a husband or wife is lazy and won’t contribute effort to the marriage?
What makes sloth a social problem is that most human activities have social implications. One of the biggest examples of this is related to what we callentitlement thinking. To escape having to put out effort, humans quickly grab on to promises from their leaders, that the government will take care of them. Now bring in natural human drives toward greed. People are not willing to stop at just basic needs. They quickly convince themselves thateverything they want is something they need. And, they want it ALL. They then convince themselves that the government, that promised to meet their needs, is supposed to give them everything they want. This creates a huge social problem because anything that is given to an “entitled” person had to be produced by someone else. It is a big problem because the inability of government leaders to understand the complexity of this situation lumps lazy people in with the many others justifiably suffering unwarranted hardship.
This issue was already contentious when the industrial revolution just started. A book called The Poor Laws written by Joseph Townsend in 1786 said:
“To a man of common sensibility nothing can be more distressing than to hear the complaints of wretchedness, which he hath no power to redress, and to be daily conversant with misery, which he can neither fly from nor relieve…
[discussing motivation of the poor] — what encouragement have the poor to be industrious and frugal, when they know for certain, that should they increase their share [i.e. contribution to society] it will be devoured by the drones [i.e. lazy people]? Or what cause have they to fear, when they are assured, that if by their indolence and extravagance, by their drunkenness and vices, they should be reduced to want, they shall be abundantly supplied, not only with food and raimament, but with their accustomed luxuries at the expense of others. The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action — pride, honor and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labor; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger…
He who statedly employs the poor in useful labour, is their only friend; he, who only feeds them, their greatest enemy. Their hopes and fears should center in themselves.”
The Poor Laws, so generous in theory, promoted the evils they meant to remedy and aggravated the distress they were intended to relieve.”
As with many social solutions that have been and are currently being implemented, including many of the programs of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the Poor Laws failed miserably because they did not take into account the structure of human brain thinking and the 7DS. Obviously, thinkers like Townsend already understood the general nature of human behavior. But then, as still persists today, because of the 7DS and particularly false-pride, the culture civilization has set up completely deniesthe inability of the Stone Age brains of our leaders to understand the complexity of human interactions.
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies, a 1954 book by William Golding, is a typical high school reading list book about a group of boys shipwrecked alone on an island. The early parts of the book, playing heavily on student idealistic stereotypes, leads the reader to believe that, left alone from adult interference, the marooned boys would pull together and build a tropical paradise. But, as the book unfolds, the kids brake up into warring groups. I thought they would listen to the smarter kids who had good ideas about how to survive and signal for help. But the tough and ruthless kids played on the fears of the average and weaker kids and took control. They even killed the smart kids when they wouldn’t go along.
I remember how the students in my class, including me, didn’t want to admit that what the book was portraying applied to the world we wanted to envision. We wanted to believe that humans, especially when faced with crisis, would respect wisdom and work together to produce harmony in the world. The book had a very different message. Given human nature, wisdom will not be respected. Instead, society will revert to Stone Age survival behaviors led by the most ruthless among us. It depicted a society more like the reality show “survivor” than Swiss Family Robinson.
The teacher asked us to find precedents to support our position. That was more disturbing. The history of civilization, even with all the great thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Galileo, is a chronicle of war. And two of the three thinkers I listed were killed or imprisoned for just speaking their views. Even today, with all the resources humanity “believes” are available and the technology already available to extract and harness them, the planet is plagued by conflict, poverty and hardship, rather than progress based on mutual support. We surely kid ourselves if we attempt to group world nations into allied cooperating camps. As soon as some large corporations in the U.S. are challenged by cheap lumber from Canada, or cheap electronics from China, the “friendship” gets hostile right away.
In the Lord of the Flies, the survival instinct was not just a drive to secure Maslow’s basic physical needs. It was psychology driven by the 7DS — primarily GREED for power — to achieve security by dominance. This was driven by the lack of A3 thinking that understands and supports cooperation. This greed has always played a dominant role in human society. And human society’s inability to control this drive will be a primary reason for the collapse of society this series is discussing.
7DS conclusion
For humans to survive as a race, society needs to understand the behaviors described by the Seven Deadly Sins, and face up to the fact that they areintegral parts of our human nature. We need to acknowledge how they mold human culture, and what needs to be done to address this nature. It’s a much bigger problem than anyone expects. But if we don’t make this acknowledgement, we will be trying to answer the wrong questions about human interactions, and keep coming up with wrong answers. And, to be clear, NONE of the 7DS explanations here are related to any religion. This is physiologically driven human psychology. In short:
- The Seven Deadly Sins are the key to understanding why humans have so much trouble building cooperative societies.
- The Seven Deadly Sins concepts were developed by ancient thinkers as a structure to guide people’s behavior away from violence.
- Humans can not escape numerous strong self preservation instinctsthat have been hard-wired into the human brain over millions of years of evolution.
There is a much more detailed discussion of the 7DS at a3society.org under 7 Deadly Sins.
Other short excerpts from article 4 related to psychology are:
Sigmund Freud Vindicated ! — a New 3 Brain Model
Consciousness — the New A3 Model
Consciousness linked to Maslow’s Hierarchy
Why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work — Truth, Values and Freedom
Additional discussions of this issue can be found on the A3 Society web page under the following tabs: Brain Theory ; Human Species ; Psychology
Images courtesy of flickr — ascriptions with photos
