The Politics of the Seven Deadly Sins

The reason that the seven deadly sins are deadly is not because they are inherently evil, but rather because they are such powerful motivators that people are prone to indulge in them to excess. This may seem counterintuitive to many, but consider a few examples from the following table:

Sin	In Moderation	In Excess
Wrath	Natural and healthy reaction to unfairness or injustice.	Broken friendships, feuds, vendettas, casual violence, and unjustified war.
Avarice	The will to provide oneself and one's loved ones with the necessities of life, and perhaps some comforts as well.	The pursuit of money or material goods to the exclusion of relationships, to the detriment of the environment, to the exclusion of effort on truly worthwhile pursuits, or to the point of unjustly depriving the needy of the necessities of life.
Sloth	Avoid wasting energy in cases where nothing useful can be accomplished, recharge one's batteries, smell the roses.	Wasting time and energy when critical work needs doing, when others need help, or when excellence and achievement are possible.
Pride	Keep one's possessions in presentable condition, maintain an upstanding reputation, be unreproachable in both word and deed.	Refuse to admit mistakes, rest on the laurels of long-forgotten achievements, refuse to improve oneself.
Lust	The continuation of the species.	Addictive behavior, neglect of duties, betrayal of loved ones. Or, as the case may be, previously loved ones.
Envy	Emulating the successes of others.	Wasting time and effort coveting the possessions and successes of others, reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, thwarting success and achievement of others, and perhaps even attacking others simply to spite them.
Gluttony	"A man's gotta eat!!!"	Poor health and early death, to say nothing of wasting food, thus resources.

Some would argue that the indignation that rights a wrong on the one hand and a vendetta that destroys a community on the other are different in kind, not merely different in scale, and perhaps rightfully so. However, for our purposes, the crucial observation is that both are driven by the same feelings and emotions—in other words, they are both symptoms of the same underlying motivations. The sad fact is that the participants in a vicious and destructive vendetta feel the same sense of moral outrage felt by someone standing up to a belligerent bully.