PRIDE
Part I: That Luciferian Thang
A few years back I ran into a friend of a friend at a
social event. I asked how things were going. “Great,” he
responded. “I’ve only got seven left.” An awkward silence
followed. “Uh, seven what?” I asked. He slowly brought his
hands up to chest level, flipping me the bird in stereo.
“Excuse me?” I replied. With a thin smile, he repeated the
gesture. I burst out laughing. “Very diplomatic!” I said,
slapping him on the back and then walking away.
Later I learned this fellow was referring to seven more
episodes of a television series he was producing for a
cable sports network. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t
drunk. He was simply offended by my lack of awareness of
his monumental multimedia work, and had no reluctance in
communicating this. A little man with a Napoleon complex,
and a show that everyone should know, he was sending me a
message of social expendability. Simply put, our respective
professions didn’t intersect, and there was no purpose – no
utility – in his treating someone outside his sphere with
respect. I could be safely written out of his script.
I discovered later from others who knew him that this
encounter was consistent with his character. This guy
certainly didn’t have any problem with self-esteem. In
fact, he could have used rather less of it, and a more
realistic assessment of his talent. I’d like to think of
him as a bit of an anomaly, but the sad truth is he’s just
another example of a personality structure that has gained
some authority in the past few decades. After years of
valourizing the individual, telling him or her to “look out
for number one,” to “go for it” and to “just do it,” we’re
now seeing the result: the ascendance of the
just-short-of-sociopathic personality. The mental state at
issue here is overweening pride. Arrogance.
“Superbia, ira, invidia, avaritia, acedia, gula, luxuria.”
Pride, or superbia, tops Pope Gregory’s Latinate list of
the deadly sins. In the hit parade of crimes against body
and spirit, pride beats out envy, anger, greed, sloth,
gluttony, and lust. The last of two, gluttony and lust, are
mere carnal sins. They are sins of the flesh – the body or
lower self. Superbia, or pride, is the top sin of the
higher self, or soul. Pride’s transgression is to make your
own ego a personal god.
It’s obvious that a certain measure of self-interest and
self-regard is necessary to function in the world. What’s
not quite as obvious is that too much pride or “vainglory”
can kickstart a fair bit of bad behaviour. Pride can lead
to envy if you find you are not acknowledged or rewarded in
the same manner as others. Envy can in turn lead to anger
and melancholy, which may feed greed as you try to fill a
hole in the soul with money and material goods. And should
any of these gambits fail to caulk the opening, there’s
always the other vices that may act as a temporary stopgap.
“Pride goeth before a fall.” The line refers to the worst
career move in religious literature, described in the Book
of Isaiah. Lucifer, first-born of the angels, was powerful
and beautiful, but also proud and presumptuous. He aimed
too high and defied God, who banished the original rebel
angel from heaven. Lucifer’s crime in challenging God was
the defining sin of the Judeo-Christian universe. The sin
of pride, of ego.
The word “sin” itself is of Indo-European origin, going
back 5,000 years, which is as far back as etymologists can
trace any word with assurance. In a 1989 interview on the
CBC Ideas series, Cambridge university theologian Don Cupit
explained the beginnings of “sin.”
“People are told not to cross over lines. So many of the
oldest words for sin in the Old Testament, for example,
imply trespassing, transgression, overstepping the mark,
crossing a boundary that you shouldn’t have crossed in some
way. When you violate a line or boundary in that way, it
creates a condition of ritual impurity that you’ve got to
purge by some kind of sacrifice or compensation, and it’s
from that primitive origin that the doctrine of sin
develops…”
Cupit holds that the Judean concept of sin was elaborated
further by Christianity into the idea “of the universe as a
hierarchy, a divine order, rank above rank, and sin becomes
a matter of not keeping to your proper place in the scheme
of things.”
Over the past 500 years, the western world’s attitude
toward pride, and our place in the universe, became less
damning and much more dynamic. This transformation is
central to the construction of the modern secular psyche.
During the Renaissance, humanist scholars rediscovered the
ancient Greek conception of the autonomous individual as
the measure of all things. A hugely liberating social
transformation swept across a continent still reeling from
the plague and feudalism’s collapse. The rise of
mercantilism, freeing believers to pursue personal wealth
without guilt, allowed the rise of a secular money-economy
in which the individual was central.
The Catholic church, which historian Lewis Mumford once
described as the “tomb built on the body of Christ,” no
longer functioned as the sole arbiter of everyday lives.
Protestantism transformed the individual’s relationship
with God to a more personal dynamic, in which a deity could
be gloried through Good Works and the acquisition of
personal wealth, further pushing the individual to the
center of all things.
Science delivered the coup de grace. The stiff Aristotelian
universe inherited by Christian clerics, where change was
equated with corruption, was shattered into pieces by a
succession of thinkers, from Galileo to Einstein. There
have been obvious gains from this intellectual freedom (and
especially freedom from the guilt and fear pitched by the
church), but at a price. The individual has been reduced to
a free agent adrift in a dynamic, but fundamentally
meaningless, universe. A cosmos where morality is as
relative as the observer’s point of view offers freedom,
but it is largely the nightmare freedom of the void.
The irony is that over time one set of chains – dogmatic,
anti-intellectual – was exchanged for another set –
individualistic, technocratic, and materialistic. Science
and spin entered into a Luciferian relationship, pitching a
new kind of fear and limitation to the citizen-consumer,
with a mass market responding to newly-created desires.
From the early twentieth century on, psychology,
organizational management, and the dark arts of public
relations combined to valourize the individual, even while
making him or her greater prey to the hypnotic forces of
mass persuasion. There was – and is – much to enjoy from
the triumphs of hypercapitalism, but the deal has a dark
side. From the Aztec collapse to the Belgian Congo’s slave
trade to the resource wars of the present day, the West has
bought its pleasures largely on the back of others, in
places where market forces have meant more stick than
carrot.
Today the citizen/consumer of the West has become the
deciding unit of social measurement, and pride is no longer
considered a sin. Quite the opposite; it’s just another
word for high self-esteem – the more the better, in theory.
As I noted earlier, a certain healthy amount of pride, the
defining trait of the ego, is necessary to mediate the
world. But it’s all the negatives attached to the ego –
fear, envy, and greed – that fuels the money culture of
mass desire. Community gets reduced to isolated atoms of
consumption, resonating to advertising’s ceaseless signal:
“me.”
Yet in most cultures throughout history, “looking out for
number one” would land the true believer into a hut on the
outskirts of the village, or even outright ostracism from
the rest of the tribe. Too much pride is toxic to the
social mix of indigenous people, but here is the irony: it
is the very foundation for consumer culture. This is the
psychopath writ large, the idiot monster that is ravaging
the biosphere and threatening our future survival.
Ironically, the finger-waving acquaintance mentioned at the
beginning had no shortage of self-esteem. In fact, you’d be
more likely to call him boastful and arrogant – qualities
that aren’t necessarily a hindrance to success. Society
often rewards those who convincingly carve out a false idol
with the aid of a mirror.
(The self-aggrandizing hip-hop scene is one of the more
obvious manifestations of this. The narcissism is hammered
home so often it’s become a kind of pop-culture white
noise. In a scene from the MTV music video awards two years
ago, white rapper Kid Rock took the podium, declaiming his
triumphs as a “badass pimp” with the “bitches.” A
succession of posturing superstars stepped up to the
podium, all with equally colourful descriptions of their
awesome selves. “It’s all about me,” each star declaimed in
so many words. The crowd, living vicariously through these
swollen egos, roared assent.)
What do you tell someone who believes “me” to be the whole
show? Do you tell them that if everyone else is thinking
the same thing, it can’t be anyone’s show? In spite of what
they may think, those who have built a temple to themselves
aren’t unique, autonomous beings – they’re link sausages.
The system cranks out personality after personality just
like theirs. As they flip the bird to the world, you can
only shake your head at these agents of ego, and how
powerful the illusion of separation that they have bought
into.
Part II: THE CULT OF SELF-ESTEEM
What human quality could be better than high self-esteem –
or worse than the opposite, low self-esteem? As a society,
we’re obsessed with building ourselves up so we can love
ourselves more. We’re continually told high self-esteem is
the royal road to success or happiness, through a winning,
salable personality.
In our schools, no child ever fails, no child is ever
“average.” Building self-esteem is a huge industry, and its
axioms have penetrated academic institutions, management
seminars, and popular culture. As the Whitney Houston song
goes, “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of
all.”
Conversely, we’re told low-self esteem is the source of
most social evils, from violence and drug addiction to
prostitution, rape, and spousal abuse. “This all makes so
much sense that we have not thought to question it,” wrote
psychologist Lauren Slater in a 2002 issue of
The
New York Times Magazine. “The
less confidence you have, the worse you do; the more
confidence you have, the better you do; and so the luminous
loop goes round.”
High self-esteem is just another term for pride – a word we
don’t hear all that much these days, owing to its negative
variants. “False pride,” and “prideful,” along with
“vanity,” “vainglory,” have devalued its verbal currency.
High self-esteem has no such associations. Of recent
vintage, the term has been polished to a market-friendly
shine in the hands of professionals.
In fact, all that has really happened is that pride has
been spun into a Deadly Spin, marketed through a
bulletproof buzzword. Yet dissenting voices have come
forth, questioning the orthodoxy of self-esteem. Along with
Slater, academic researchers like Nicholas Emler of the
London School of Economics and Roy Baumeister of Case
Western Reserve University have come to a counterintuitive
conclusion: self-esteem is overrated in today’s culture,
and it may even be a culprit for some social problems,
rather than a cure.
There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is
particularly harmful, these researchers have found. People
with low self-esteem seem to do just as well in life as
people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better,
because they often try harder. In an article in Scientific
American called Violent Pride, Baumeister takes this
observation further: he demonstrates that low self-esteem’s
opposite – high self-esteem – can compel one to acts of
violence.
The PhD social psychologist says he began his career “on
the self-esteem bandwagon,” accepting it is an
unquestionably positive state of mind. Yet he failed to
find any primary studies in the psychological literature to
back this up. It seemed to be an idea built on thin air. So
he decided to conduct research of his own to prove it. To
his surprise, he discovered just the opposite. In a 2003
interview with CBC’s Michael Enright, Baumeister explained.
“Pure self esteem is such a seductive idea that all our
problems would disappear if we simply loved ourselves more.
It seems like such a nice solution.” The idea of
self-esteem as being an unqualified good he now rejects as
“completely false.”
“People who do the worst things in the world generally have
a very high opinion of themselves. Think of the most modest
person you know. Now think of the most self-aggrandizing,
most obnoxious, with the biggest sense of superiority.” He
asks who would you rather associate with, and who would be
the most problematic to deal with.
In his experiments, Baumeister discovered that subjects
with favourable views of themselves were more likely to
administer blasts of ear-splitting noise to a subject than
more timorous subjects who refused to press the horn. An
earlier experiment found that men with high self-esteem
were more willing to insult subjects to whom they had given
electric shocks than their low-level counterparts.
Not everyone with high self-esteem is an unmitigated
monster, obviously. Baumeister sees the issue as
multidimensional. “Some with high self-esteem are perfectly
content and nice, and at peace with the world; others are
out to prove (themselves) all the time and lord it over
others, and expect favourable treatment.” In the high-self
esteem population, it’s the latter that are the source of
trouble for others in society.
“It’s not a sense of superiority alone,” Baumeister told
Enright, in a world-weary tone. “It’s a sense that your
superior position isn’t being recognized.” In the language
of the street, this means being “dissed,” and it can lead
to violent outbursts. It’s the people who think well of
themselves – and want others to think well of them too –
who are highly sensitive as to whether or not other people
are confirming this view of themselves.
Did leaders like Hitler and Stalin suffer from low
self-esteem? Quite the opposite, says Baumeister. People
responsible for the worst things in the world generally
have a very high opinion of themselves. He suggests that
entire nations can manifest a sense of high self-esteem,
and lose touch with reality. With enough nationalists
conflating self-esteem with national pride, the results can
be sabre-rattling or worse. Baumeister gives as an example
the imperial pretensions of Japan and Germany in World War
II. Other more recent examples may come to the reader’s
mind.
In their studies, Baumeister and Emler found no shortage of
individuals incarcerated for acts of violence who had high
self-esteem. Emler put antisocial men through every
self-esteem test at their disposal, and discovered no
evidence for the old psychodynamic concept that they
secretly feel bad about themselves. “These men are racist
or violent because they don’t feel bad enough about
themselves,” he notes. Given this finding, it hardly seems
the right approach to counsel a head-busting Hell’s Angel
or an inner city gang-banger to repeat daily, “I’m good
enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”
Writes psychologist Lauren Slater: “I have seen therapists
tell their sociopathic patients to say ‘I adore myself’
every day or to post reminder notes on their kitchen
cabinets and above their toilet-paper dispensers,
self-affirmations set side by side with waste.” Unless the
necessary work of self-reflection is done – along with
confronting the Shadow, that dark repository of
unacknowledged pain and suffering – how does anyone learn
to love themselves in any true, deep sense?
Writes Slater: “Self-esteem, as a construct, as a
quasi-religion, is woven into a tradition that both defines
and confines us as Americans. If we were to deconstruct
self-esteem, to question its value, we would be, in a
sense, questioning who we are, nationally and individually.
We would be threatening our self-esteem.”
There are economic factors to consider here.
Hypercapitalism thrives on the be-all-you-can-be,
looking-out-for-number-one ethos. A message contrary to the
scripture of self-esteem in North American society is not
good for business. The psychotherapy industry, for
instance, would take a huge hit were self-esteem to be
re-examined, as Slater notes. She calls psychoanalysts the
“cultural retailers” of the self-esteem concept. If the
concept were to falter, “so would our pocketbooks.“
So much for high self-esteem. But does it necessarily
follow that low self-esteem is a desirable state of mind?
Low self-esteem may not feel very good on an ongoing basis,
but research indicates there is a positive social dimension
to the resulting self-examination. For example, a feeling
of guilt could mean acknowledging your own limitations or
responsibility. Guilt does seem to make people behave
better, according to Baumeister.
In his studies, he found that the population of best
performing students in US schools, young white girls,
demonstrated the lowest self-esteem. Conversely, the worst
performing students, African American boys, demonstrated
the highest self-esteem. One can argue that the problem
here is less about self-esteem than a human response to
regimented, rote learning, but the observation is still
noteworthy.
Children have been exposed to three decades of assurances
that all their thoughts and feelings are precious and
precocious. In an April 2004 article in The
Globe and Mail, Leah
McLaren addressed the social and psychological fallout of
this pattern of reflexive praise, with an attendant refusal
to exercise parental or social authority. One interview
subject, a high-ranking Toronto executive, described the
rich and good-looking Ivy League graduates he encountered
professionally. “They would shoot their mouths off in
meetings and demand way more than they should. They felt
they didn’t need to work as hard as anyone else in order to
get what they wanted.”
The executive found the behaviour “pretty astonishing.” His
observations were mirrored by young professionals in their
twenties, who spoke openly about their superhuman
self-regard. They attributed their lofty self confidence to
their upbringing, from parents who acted more like
siblings, or friends, than authority figures. One
22-year-old Canadian describes the freedom her parents
allowed her. From the age of 15, she was going to bars
every night until about 2 am. “I had my reasons, and I
would explain them to my parents. As long as I could prove
it was just, then it was fine.”
All this is anecdotal stuff, of course, but the
observations jibe with the research of Baumeister and his
colleagues. One amusing pop-cultural expression of such
unbounded self-esteem is the Idol television phenomenon.
Zak Werner, a host on the Canadian Idol show, regularly
witnesses auditions by young people who seem incapable of
objectively assessing their limitations. Zak finds the
attitude outright delusional, according to
The
Globe and Mail article.
“The kids come up to me and they tell me how incredibly
focused and hard-working they are, so driven, and they know
its going to happen to them. And you know what? It’s the
most boring story in the world. I hear it every day. It’s
like they think, if they try hard enough, they’ll become
the fairy princess.”
It’s “not going to happen,” Werner says, noting that little
children are much more realistic about their life
opportunities. “You’ll ask them what they want to be when
they grow up, and they’ll say a swimming teacher because
they think that would be a really cool thing to do. Then
something happens to them when they’re teenagers and they
get sucked up into the pandemic of celebrity culture.”
What happens to a generation that speaks of the future in
terms of expectations rather than hope? What does the
future hold for young dreamers who believe they deserve it
all, and have it coming, when all indications are the
boomer glory days are long dead? If job opportunities dry
up and day-to-day life becomes more of a struggle, how will
the high-selfesteem generation deal with diminished
expectations, and living at home with aging parents into
their late twenties or early thirties?
No one can fault parents for dreaming big for their kids.
But if children’s egos are inflated to the point of
disconnection from reality, that’s another matter. The
sharpest response to the parental endorsement of infantile
self-promotion isn’t from a psychologist or television show
host, but rather from a computer animated character, the
young Dash in the Pixar film The Incredibles. When
Elastigirl tells her son that “everybody is special,” Dash
morosely replies,” “That’s just another way of saying no
one is.”
Humility, once held to be the inverse of the deadly sin of
pride, can act as a check on excesses of selfish,
ego-driven behaviour. Humility is still regarded as a
virtue, albeit in a highly qualified way. It’s associated
with timidity, which is anathema to our manic age of
acquisitiveness and ceaseless self-promotion. How does
anyone get to the head of the line if they don’t believe
they deserve a piece of the pie, if not the whole bakery?
And why put a dimmer switch on that Byronic inner glow that
is your core self in the first place?
Although the pharmaceutical industry is busy at work on
drugs for shyness and other social “mood disorders,” it’s
not too likely we will ever see a drug remedying the worst
behavioural aspects of high self-esteem. “Pills take you up
or level you out,” writes Lauren Slater, “but I have yet to
see an advertisement for a drug of deflation.”
Geoff Olson
