Pride caused the fall of D'ni

ToriaURU · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 1:19 am **Posts:** 1300

Pride caused the fall of D'ni society. The inability of Veovis to admit any wrongdoing. Who else do you see as being too proud in the stories of D'ni?

Frisky Badger · **Joined:** Tue Mar 20, 2007 6:48 pm **Posts:** 746

Veovis was just a pawn, albeit a powerful one. A'gaeris was the mastermind. Veovis wouldn't admit any wrong doing because he had done nothing wrong. He was setup by A'gaeris. Ultimately, Veovis and Atrus (father of Gehn, not son of Gehn) saved everything. If not for them, A'gaeris would be ruling a million worlds as a god. Just like Gehn would have, only about a billion times worse.

AndyCloseEyes · **Joined:** Sat Dec 08, 2007 3:04 am **Posts:** 39

I agree with Frisky Badger. The first crime was a frame to make him more angry so that he would help A'gaeris destroy D'ni, and I can actually kind of empathise with poor Veovis.

However, you are right about pride causing the fall of the D'ni. None of this would have ever happened if Veovis had just accepted the "Outsider". He (and originally all of D'ni) thought that only they were a good race and THE best one. Veovis just couldn't let go of that. If he had, he would've still been friends with Aitrus, and Suarhnir wouldn't have asked A'gaeris to frame Aitrus after he had won a debate against Veovis, which had made him angry since they were enemies.

Then, of course, A'gaeris started using everything to his advantage, killing the two guildsman, planning to frame Aitrus, but he sensed Veovis' true power and anger and hate and got him instead. Yep, he was truly mad.

Karkadann · **Posted:** Thu Jun 11, 2009 12:38 pm

Pride is definitely a problem but you hafta consider Greed could have also played a part in the the fall of D'ni, some people knew what they wanted and where willing to do anything to get it. unfortunately they did not anticipate the overall effects of their actions, and now all we have are memories of what once was.

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2632

Pride was rife in the D'ni culture, but I wouldn't blame the fall on it, it was a combination of things.

There is no "poor Veovis" either, whilst A'gaeris was behind a lot of what he did, Veovis still knew what he was doing, still made a conscious choice to go through with certain things.

Nor was he mad, in the end he was apologetic (to a degree) about what he had done, he wouldn't step over that final line and break the biggest of D'ni rules.

zander_nyrond · **Posted:** Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:51 pm

Pride did not cause the fall of D'ni, any more than the rain this morning was caused by the absence of clouds.

It amazes me how persistently people repeat these things without thinking about them. Xenophobia and bigotry are not pride, are nothing to do with pride. They have a lot to do with fear, with insecurity, with a feeling of inferiority that leads to a wilful self-delusion, but good gods, nobody who is genuinely proud of who they are has any reason to hate or fear anyone else.

The D'ni were prejudiced against outsiders because they were afraid of them. Ashamed, on some level maybe, of the wrongs they knew had been done in their name. They were a smallish cityful of people, mostly decadent, ruling ten thousand Ages, and if any two populated Ages had got hold of linking books to the City, the D'ni would have been right where Rome was when the Goths came calling.

Fear. Guilt. Paranoia. An inability to reach out to the other in love and seek understanding. Pick one from each column; that's what caused the fall of D'ni. Pride is just Yeesha's pet hate, possibly because it's what she dislikes most in herself.

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2632

I dunno xenophobia with the D'ni seemed to be more of a "we're better than you so you can't join us" which in my mind is more of a pride thing, however there was the aspect of "oh having a hybrid baby would dilute our great nation" which was more of a fear based thing.

zander_nyrond · **Posted:** Fri Jun 12, 2009 7:26 am

A better word might be arrogance, of which the principal characteristic is that, unlike pride, it is always unmerited.

Pride doesn't need to strut, or put others down, or put walls around the community. That kind of thing is done by people who desperately want to convince somebody, mainly themselves, that they are not as inferior as they know themselves to be (if only by their deeds). The only thing keeping the D'ni in their elevated position, allowing them to enslave and exploit other races, was the Art, and they were clever enough to know that that was something any human could learn to do given the chance; in other words, their "superiority" wasn't innate, and in fact was purely superficial, like the white men's boom-sticks. If the savages ever worked out that the eclipse was going to happen anyway, they'd be completely up the creek...and they knew that, and trembled, and hence the whole racial superiority thing.

The trope about "the sin of pride" comes, I think, from Christianity, and in its more extreme form from various flavours of Puritanism and/or Quakerism. I don't want to disparage those belief systems here--not the place--but not everyone shares them, or thinks that fetishised humility and self-abasement is necessarily a good thing for everyone.

I think that in general parlance there should be a line drawn between, as I said, the desperate arrogance born of insecurity (which isn't "pride"), and reasonable self-respect (which is). Because "pride" should be able to be a good thing as well.

vidkid7 · **Posted:** Fri Jun 12, 2009 8:08 pm

Tweek wrote:

oh having a hybrid baby would dilute our great nation

But don't hybrid babies use less gas?

Tweek · **Joined:** Tue May 09, 2006 12:11 am **Posts:** 2632

nope, it's a myth

Alahmnat · **Posted:** Sat Jun 13, 2009 2:24 am

zander_nyrond wrote:

A better word might be arrogance, of which the principal characteristic is that, unlike pride, it is always unmerited.

[...]

The trope about "the sin of pride" comes, I think, from Christianity, and in its more extreme form from various flavours of Puritanism and/or Quakerism. I don't want to disparage those belief systems here--not the place--but not everyone shares them, or thinks that fetishised humility and self-abasement is necessarily a good thing for everyone.

[...]

I think that in general parlance there should be a line drawn between, as I said, the desperate arrogance born of insecurity (which isn't "pride"), and reasonable self-respect (which is). Because "pride" should be able to be a good thing as well.

I think a better word would be one which Mirriam Webster recommends as a synonym to pride: conceit. It's a wonderful (and highly annoying) side-effect of the English language's construction that one word has so many different and obviously distinct meanings, but I think it's always been fairly obvious from Cyan's usage of the word that they're aiming at the more negative "stuck-up, conceited, arrogant" definition of pride, rather than the obviously innocuous and positive "self-esteem" definition. Odds are that its inclusion as one of the Seven Deadly Sins is, as you noted, a major influence in its use in Uru, but even in that case, growing up as a Christian, I was always taught that the sin of pride was aimed at discouraging the negative definition's characteristics rather than the positive one's. Pride can be and is a good thing, but it also can be and is a bad thing. It's a nuanced word with lots of layered meaning, and I don't personally think it makes sense to try and lay exclusive claim to the use or definition of the word just because one definition is more negative than the other.

Given all of that, I think it's a valid statement to say that the negative sort of pride eventually led to the downfall of D'ni. Veovis and A'Gaeris were both people who had suffered severe blows to their pride and, coupled with an association to the xenophobic underbelly of the D'ni culture, decided to exact revenge upon D'ni for -- and, in a way, "purify" it of -- its many wrongdoings. I think Yeesha overplays the importance of the D'ni's imperial and supremacist behavior (which she also somewhat rightly defines as "pride" in the negative connotation of the word) in their downfall though, taking something that could easily be used as a lesson on fairness and forgiveness, and turning it into a stump speech talking point for her personal quest to help the Bahro. By doing so I think she overplays her hand, but I don't think her underlying point is entirely without merit.

Also, vid, thanks for the chuckle.

zander_nyrond · **Posted:** Sat Jun 13, 2009 11:45 am

I still think we're talking about two different things, and therefore it makes sense and avoids confusion to use two different words...but this is also not the place for an endless semantic quibble, so I'll leave it at that.

Rudolfson · **Posted:** Sun Jun 14, 2009 8:15 am

Aitrus stubborness is omitted. He had a dream as a youth to break out on the surface. And that dream affected his sentiments towards Anna from the start and on through every thing he did and said on the matter. And ultimately played as great a part in the splitting of the dynamic duo as Veovis stubborness.

greendragoon · **Posted:** Sun Jun 14, 2009 1:50 pm

I realize that the below statement could be interpreted as an attempt lecture someone. It is not. This should be taken as a serious attempt to analyze human behavior and it is not directed at an individual group or person. In college, Psychology was one of my favorite subjects.

Pride is a mental state. A state in which we believe that ourselves or something we love has a certain state of value. So far no infraction has occurred. Now someone or something comes along and challenges that predefined state, hurt, fear, and anger are the result. Let's face it, we all suffer from it. We all want to say we're better than that and can shrug it off, but when our ego (defined as our own mental concept of ourselves, whatever that concept is) has been dented, these emotions are the result.

Now here's where the problems start. The person faced with these emotions has a number of choices of how to deal with these emotions. Will they lash out at the source of their pain? Will they fear it? Or will they try and not let these emotions control them? From here it's easy to see where such negative emotions such as xenophobia and hatred come from.

zvpeyronne · **Posted:** Mon Jun 29, 2009 1:06 am

I would suggest that we are seeing something a little more epic than the Christian pride as chief of the seven deadly sins. The ancient Greeks gave us the concept of hubris, which is usually translated as overweening pride. The interesting thing about hubris is that it isn't a sin. Villains aren't the only people to have it. In fact, it is often the tragic flaw in the character of a hero that brings him/her to fate. The example often cited in Greek literature is Oedipus Rex - Oedipus the King.When his city was stricken by disease, he asked the oracle how to cure it. He was told that the previous king's murderer had not been punished. He decreed that no stone be left unturned to bring the murderer to justice. His local prophet warned him that this would not be a good course for him to take, but Oedipus refused. He could not back down from a course he had set, so sure was he that he could bring relief to his people. Needless to say, he was the killer - on his way to this city, he had a conflict with another band of travellers who attacked him. Yeah. Guess who.Several plot twists later, Oedipus had blinded himself and sent himself into exile - because his hubris would not let him heed the warning given to him.

How does this apply to the D'ni people? Well, Veovis didn't start out as an evil doer. His zealous love for his culture combined with a certain consciousness of his social status led him into hubris - overweening pride (or arrogance or conceit) that would not let him see virtue in alternative ways of action. His reaction to Ti'ana then became personal when she "took" Aitrus from him - his personal sense of security was threatened by the rift with a friend. This combined with the anger of hubris - someone of Veovis's station had courted a friendship only to see this spurned for an "inferior!" I feel that this was the point at which his hubris lead his zeal to become active aggression. Other characters in the drama, of course, had their parts to play as well, but I think Veovis was the embodiment of pride in the Greek sense of hubris - the tragic flaw that led a once good man to his own destruction.

Just my thoughts - and I could be mistaken.

Z.V. Peyronne (missing The Cavern)

Pride caused the fall of D'ni

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