V. What's Wrong with People?

We have a keen sense of detecting faults in other people while we are equally prompt to find ourselves mostly good. What are the roots of such obvious contradiction? What is really wrong with others... and us?

We often wonder what is wrong with people, easily forgetting the plank in our own eyes—the only person we can change is ourselves. An insight into the most common inner struggles to be a good person has been discovered and used for hundreds of years, proving its validation. We know it popularly as the seven deadly sins. However, it is the list of eight master wrong inclinations. This list provides us with an invaluable tool to examine ourselves sincerely and familiarize ourselves with our enemy within. 

Gluttony has been reduced to simply eating too much; greed, reduced to amassing too much money; envy to desiring others' fortune, sloth to laziness, and vanity is celebrated as the banal proclamation of oneself. Contrary to the simplistic platitudes that the list of seven deadly sins has become, the eight capital vices is a careful examination of the most common mistakes in the realization of the human condition. If we aspire to become better persons, a constant check on these pitfalls is necessary. The better world is not the world with better solutions, but the world with better people (99CST # 70) and the best place to start is with ourselves. The main question to ask is how much control all these eight enemies have over us.