On Pride According to Christian teachers,
the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed,
drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through
Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice:
it is the complete anti-God state of mind ... If you want to find out
how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I
dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of
me, or shove their oar in, or patronize me, or show off?" The point is
that each person's pride is in competition with everyone else's pride.
It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed
at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what
you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive
by its very nature - while the other vices are competitive only, so to
speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only
out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud
of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are
proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If
everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would
be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud:
the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition
has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially
competitive in a way the other vices are not. It is Pride which has been
the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world
began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good
fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste
people. but Pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity
between man and man, but enmity to God. In God you come up against something
which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you
know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison
- you do not know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and
people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see
something that is above you. Pride comes directly from Hell. The other,
and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal
nature, but this does not come through our animal nature at all. Pride
is purely spiritual. Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler
vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a child's Pride, or, as they
call it, its self-respect, to make it behave decently: many a man has
overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they
are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly
content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided,
all the time, he is setting up in you the dictatorship of pride - just
as he would be quite content to see your cough cured if he was allowed,
in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats
up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
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