4
"Pride, the first peer and president of hell”
– Daniel Defoe
Issue 4
February 1, 2015
Pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins; it has always been so. It moved Eve to think she could know as much as did God. It caused Milton’s Lucifer to think it “better to reign in Hell, than serve in heaven.” It destroyed King Lear. It comes before falls, and it gives all of us distorted notions of our abilities and potential and as it does, it follows that we have distorted notions of the abilities and potential of others. Pride damages everyone.
Pride means simply that we think we are better than we are, some a little, some a lot. Thinking that you have done well if you have done well is not pride. (Although it is risky. Do it too often and the various instances ooze into the state of pride.) Thinking that you have done well if you have not, is pride. Mild vanity and Narcissism are forms of pride, to be avoided, certainly, but not quite as dangerous as the pride that reigns in hell. A useful word for that pride is the Greek, hubris, which means excessive self-esteem plus defiance of the gods. Hubris brings about nemesis or downfall. It is not just that pride comes before a fall, but that pride causes the fall, and as far as the Greeks were concerned, it always did. Hubris meant for them making false assumptions about the world of the moment and therefore about the future. The Greeks called this our ‘fatal flaw’ because only the gods know the moment and the future. Hubris, therefore, leads to disaster because, being human, we make plans without knowing what lies around or ahead, and we stumble and fall, some a little, some a lot.
What the gods know is not, of course, an issue for us. For us, pride is an ego trip, but an ego trip, even a mild one, means we have a false notion of what we are and what we can accomplish, and that leads to pain and suffering for ourselves and for others. Pride is very difficult to recognize, at the moment or overall, but if we finally do realize we are mistaken in our view of ourselves—if we are so fortunate before we die—at that moment we have given up our pride. But that moment does not come easily. It might be easy to recognize that we have made some mistake of one kind or another, but it is not so easy to recognize that overall we are less than we think we are, that is to say, to give up our pride.
Thus with perhaps the best of intentions we push our way—if we have the power—over the interests of others. We wrongly think less of others. We overestimate ourselves and underestimate others. This pride, this hubris, is so pervasive and so damaging that even though there is strong competition, pride has been number one on the list of deadly sins for a long, long time.
