Finally we arrive at the conclusion of my little sin parade. The final sin not yet discussed is vanity. Most, if not all, of the evils in this world come from selfishness and most of the other sins can be derived from it as well. On the other hand, a little self-interest never hurt anyone right? True true, but when people actually start believing, without even knowing others, that they are fundamentally better than they are, then we have a problem.

‘So who is truely vain then?’, you might ask. Dictionary.com tells me this;

‘excessive pride in one’s appearance, qualities, abilities, achievements, etc.; character or quality of being vain; conceit’

Surprisingly, this is actually a fairly good description. The keyword here is excessive. Pride is fine, if you have something to be proud of, by all means express it. Just don’t overreact it; nobody likes you better because you spend two damn hours fixing your make-up. And to cross over to the other side of the spectrum; nobody thinks you’re cool because you have a level 70 character in World of Warcraft. For both examples apply; even if you do, just shut the fuck up about it.

Unfortunately, these are by far not the worst examples in the world. These are the people you really need to watch out for;

• Racists. How someone can claim superiority over another person via something as trivial as race is beyond me. How can you claim that you are better than a black person or an asian person or a white person without knowing one? In all honesty though, usually these people are raised to think this way. This is however no excuse for the parents nor the children when they reach a certain age (round 15 will do) and start thinking for themselves (most never do though).
• Religous Fundamentalists. These share a lot of characteristics with racists by the way. Religion if fine. Most people don’t care what you believe in anyway. The annoying ones are the ones trying to force their belief on you. Again, this would be fine if they took either ‘no’ or ‘I’m not interested’ as an answer. But nooo, they are so convident of the their version of the truth that your’s can not possibly be correct. Impossible.
• Atheists. Undeserved religious superiority goes both ways. You are not some epitome of logic just believe there is not God (or gods if that’s your thing). Just let other people have their beliefs, without having to defend them in debate whenever you see them. You are not necessarily smarter than they are.
• People who think their pretty. These are obviously less dangerous than the others mentioned, but I added them because I think most people know at least one of them. So you are pretty? Great, good for you. Wait, what? No, I am not going to buy you a drink you dumb whore, I don’t even know you! I happen to remember a specific conversation from high school in which one girl said to the other; “It doesn’t matter though, because we are pretty”. I don’t remember the rest of the dialogue, but there is not a single context in which that is not extraordinarily vain. The ironic thing was of course, that neither of them were pretty, mediocre at best.

What do we do with them? I am sure baseball bats, reality checks and proper education can come a long way here. Especially the first.

Now where does that leave us? I have shown you the sexual frustrated obese, the money-grubbing sloth, the jealous hate-monger and the miscellaneous persons with a superiority complex. And hopefully I have been able to make you laugh at least twice. If you are one of the above mentioned assholes though, I hope you change, seriously, society has no need for you. In fact, the world would be much better if everyone lived by two basic rules;

Do not treat other like you would not like to be treated yourself.

This one is also referred to as the Golden Rule and should speak for itself.

Life is a privilege, not a right. Live by it.

Don’t take everything for granted. Don’t be assholes to people who don’t deserve it and don’t think that just because you breath you have rights. Rights, like all other important things in the world, have to be earned.

Updates;

The State of the World (0/7)

Lust and Gluttony (2/7)

Greed and Sloth (4/7)

Envy and Wrath (6/7)

Vanity and the conclusion (7/7)� <- you are here

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.