Pride's Prejudice

the harmony of pride and purpose

In high school, my worth hung from me - a necklace of invisible accolades as bright yet imperceptible as ultraviolet light. I wore confidence for the outside world, snatching praise like my first drink of water after a drought. But my inner world knew no confidence. I was self-conscious as an elephant in a room full of mice. As meek as a black sheep. Lonely and scared as I was dependent. 

I thought I came into the world that way - standing in a filthy pit of negative confidence. I knew more about digging myself deeper instead of how to build my confidence higher. I dug until I reached liquid fire lava. I was convinced I was playing the confidence game right - I believed at my molten core that I was humble - that I held humility where others held hubris. I thought it was wrong to take pride in one’s self so I made myself small until I was just another mouse in a big circus tent. 

It was okay for others to praise me. External affirmation was confirmation that I was doing good by the world. I was inextricably dependent on others to see me as a good person to believe it for myself. Any praise was better than my own - the kind of praise I didn’t want to be caught dead with. Even in my most life-changing accomplishments as a young adult, I suppressed the weary smile that crossed my face, feeling too much discomfort with my own pleasure. 

“Don’t be prideful,” I’d remind myself until the mouse disappeared into the crumbly dirt that was danced and laughed and juggled over. 

It would be many years later that I came to the understanding that refusing myself any pride in my being was my kryptonite. My lack of pride was gasoline over parched timber, scorching my self-worth and feeding my shame. Black limbs scattered my path of purpose leaving me utterly directionless. 

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Pride Is the Root of All Evil (Genesis 3:5)

Pride. 

What a small yet charged word. Every interpretation equally potent. Mortal as a handful of nightshade berries. Life-giving as the first breath of oxygen after being submerged underwater. 

Pride is sin. Right? Pride is an obstacle to truth, the devil in disguise, our worst, most shameful side. Right?  

I hear more of pride’s wrath than pride’s prowess. I think that is what I too have learned to perpetuate - pride as a toxin. For millennia pride has been kicked around as an idea of superabundance - man overstepping beyond what he is to appear superior¹. I look upon the boasted feathered chest and high chin gilded by a blue-green mirage of fanned tail feathers of a single, arrogant man in the wild, and scoff. The iron metallic taste of the word “pride” lingers on my tongue. But it’s my own pride’s prejudice that allows me to do so. It’s my, “I would never do such a thing,” mentality that looks down on the pride of another. Pride iron-cast in cynicism guarantees we are constantly pitted against one another. You want me to rise to your level, and I want you to fall to mine while pridelessness is a mere figment of our human capabilities. And when our only standard of pridelessness is godliness, pride finds a supreme arrogance that battles for the same godly domain here on earth. 

I thought for most of my life that pride was an evil temptation that lives within all of us. 

But recently, my perception of pride has been shifting in my mind. 

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It took me many years past high school to ditch the notion that pride isn’t my dark side or a wrath of self-serving pursuits. My most meaningful triumphs and self-sabotages, both every day and life-changing, are accompanied by feelings of pride. It is everywhere, as pervasive as televisions in living rooms. I realized in the sweet slowness of thousands of days on earth that everything I do, as mundane as setting an alarm to wake me on a blustery winter morning is acting in service of the person that I want to be. When I act in harmony with my purpose, my pride swells like the tide of my rising chest. 

Purpose is as complex a word as pride. Purpose, to me, is finding clarity and congruence between one’s core self and their outward representation in a manner that seeks human fulfillment and well-being. 

Humans are purposeful creatures - always acting in accordance with their self-aligned purpose, consciously or subconsciously, like the characters in our favorite novels. But purpose isn’t self-perpetuating. Living out purpose requires motivation. I think that pride is that motivator - sometimes subtle and sometimes as striking as a thunderbolt from the heavens.

For most of my life, the same intoxicating thought coursed throughout my body: I want to live in service of others with a selfless heart that needs nothing in return. But even the mere thought of living in service of others created a swell of joy within me. 

Recently, just as quickly as this swell raised, it burst with a reckoning. 

Living in service of others makes me feel proud of myself. I must feel proud of myself in order to fulfill my purpose here on Earth. If I don’t feel proud of myself I will not do, and if I do not do, I will not make the most of this body and brain and soul I was gifted. 

When I first considered this, I felt inklings of disgust. Wretched tendrils of realization that one of the fundamental human motivations is the desire to feel good about one’s self suffocated my altruistic view of this world. These inklings of disgust were the heart of what stifled me all these years sprouting from the definition of pride I was spoon-fed on a sputtering airplane utensil - that pride is the genesis of all sin and not the genesis of all things said or done in goodness. I was convinced there must be a way to live wholly selflessly. A life of sacrifice where filling one’s self with pride isn’t the end goal but, at the end of my contemplations, I surrendered to the notion that I do what makes me feel good about myself. Pride and purpose fuel one another like the cycle of harvesting seeds into plants. One gives life unto the other again and again. 

In the purity of one's purpose lies the purity of their pride.

Though pure in its origin, pride’s manifestations in the real world are often not. It seems that pride always acts in tandem with a simple emotion - an emotion that in nature serves survival and social functions: hubris, humility, indignance. If it is true that pride is the root of all evil, then pride is also the root of all goodness. It is what our pride is in service of that transforms it into good or evil. Through my hubristic pride, I’ve learned that humans will run emotional ultra-marathons to defend their honor. I’ve also learned that humans are motivated by self-interest but not all self-interest is hubris. Self-interest can serve selfless needs. Self-interest and humility can work together which opposes the Thomas Christian view I long accepted as truth that pride is directly opposed to the virtue of humility. 

Pride is a cornerstone, complex emotion that fuels some of the most fundamental human pursuits: the desire to achieve, to fall and stay in love, to have and raise happy children, to find connection and status in a social group, and most importantly, to be a good person and feel good about one’s self. 

Pride, no longer tainted, emerges as a beautiful and life-giving force, weaving together my aspirations and guiding me toward the profound essence of human life. 

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I have since time-traveled backward to some of my biggest mistakes, some of my nastiest arguments, and the most regrettable and stomach-clenching memories. In the years I spent suppressing internal pride and seeking it in the outside world, I was acting in irony with my own intentions. I wanted as I always have, to live in service of others, but instead of enabling myself to do so, I was pushing myself further away from it. I thought that “goodness” was “selflessness” but instead all I achieved was an entire lack of self. I was not motivated intrinsically because my perception of self is what I was fed from the outside world. During the time of life I thought I was prideless, I was exuding the kind of pride I most feared - the evil kind - the kind that is blind to its own destructiveness. I defended my goodness instead of giving goodness. My hubris and pride galavanted around me in a fiery rage, holding hands and twirling fueled by the relentlessness of the self-preservation of my identity.

With the same intensity that I want to serve this world, I started climbing out of that musty, squalid hole I had long ago buried myself in. Living among others was disorienting when I no longer postured myself for praise. I became self-conscious of my words and body language when I no longer had anything to prove. Rigidness stifled my body and my words came with more pause. Somewhere inside me, I still longed for adoration but I looked internally for confidence in quiet mornings and journal musings. I felt lonelier than ever. The vapidness of my days gnawed at my insides. Before there was confidence there was an even grander absence of it. However, I kept at this transition of dependency from that of others to my own. It was the little things before it was the bigger things. Things that felt silly and material but were the first steps at reclaiming myself. Changing my wardrobe to appease no eyes but my own. Cutting my hair the way I liked it. Spending more time in solitude. Surrounding myself with people whose core motive is loving fervently on earth - to be good and giving people. Fearlessly writing and publishing not for praise but because my heart told me to do so. And sitting with the discomfort of others about the path I am choosing for myself.  

Growing into myself and into my own confidence allowed me to better release my dependency on being seen as a good person by others. The pride that comes from within fuels me to do good in this world. I think that should be enough.

Pride is neither good nor bad. Pride is pride. It says choose your own destiny: live in accordance with me or live defending the idea of me. It’s what we choose to do with it that is bad or good. It’s not either or, it’s not neither nor, it simply is.  

I am beginning to think that at the end of it all, a heart and some pride were all we ever needed to do good in this world.

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I started writing this essay three weeks ago hoping to stay on a normal publishing cadence but it turns out that pride is a hard topic to write in brevity. Sometimes, as in this case, it takes writing 10,000 words to write 1,800, and other times writing comes much easier. Though it is important to me to publish on a weekly cadence, I will never sacrifice the quality of my work just to hit a deadline. Thank you for your patience with me.

I cannot thank

Tommy Dixon

and

Steven Foster

enough for helping me work through five drafts and transform this essay into something that isn’t perfect but something I can be proud of.

Thank you for being here and I hope you have a wonderful entrance into the New Year. May the year 2024 start with love and delight.

Let me know what your experiences and thoughts on pride are in the comments! And as always, if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it with a friend.

1. Question 162. pride. SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: Pride (Secunda Secundae Partis, Q. 162). (n.d.). https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3162.htm