Pride:
The Foundation of Evil

Last Update: 31 July, 2022

What the Issue is:

Pride is about an excessive sense of self-importance, usually seeking ways in society to reinforce that excessive sense of self-importance.

Pride leads to distortion of perception of what is fair in dealing with others, due to excessive sense of importance of self and diminished sense of importance of others. This unfair thinking, in turn, leads to unfair words and actions.

Examples of How It's Been Happening:

Pride is the foundation for all evil: evil being selfishness to the extent that it's unfair, and pride stokes that desire to serve self and serve others less.

Besides underpinning all evil, pride is actually celebrated annually as the theme of annual parades around the world.

How pride manifests:

1. Blind Rebellion: Pride is the reason that people who are told what to do or believe, by those who do not have enough power to enforce it, tend to find any way to resist compliance, even to their harm, just to show their power to refuse.

2. Resiting Truth: Pride causes people to resist truth presentations, especialy from anyone who doesn't have authority over them or clearly more success than them (pride doesn't work well with people who are clearly more successful, but if someone appears less successful than you, proud people accept that fact as absolutely proof you have nothing worthwhile to learn from them). Even if it's true, they resist it, because they don't want to appear as less than or a follower of the one trying to teach. Of course, with authority figures this is no shame, especially if they order it. As for trying to win the proud over with evidence, it doesn't work, as they make a demonstration of the power of their free choice, and therefore superior power, to reject any evidence.

3. Cruelty: Since pride is an excessively elevated sense of your own value compared to beings around you, it leads you to believe that you deserve better treatment than others precisely because you are more valuable, and that this is fair, as a deliberate decision. That leads you to commit acts of abuse and cruelty without even realizing it is objectively unfair: subjectively you will believe it is fair. For example, the Nazis believed that Jews were dirty and not persons, which after believing, could not see any unfairness in treating them that way. Many religious people are taught by their clerics that animals have no soul, and based on this belief they don't recognize such a thing as cruelty to animals beause they believe there is no consciousness there that it matters how you treat them. We've allowed our military to bomb poor foreign nations in drone assassination strikes because we apparently don't value their lives as much as ours, so we act as though assassination and collateral mortality are a fair way to deal with them but certainly not a fair way to deal with us.

4. Callousness. With belief that you are so much more important than other beings, it leads you to fail to acknowledge any kind of cruelty to others as such, on any level, not even emotionally. One example is using gladiators, who were typically slaves forced to fight to the death, as entertainment in the ancient world: rather than the 'entertained' feel emotional horror, they felt emotional joy.

5. Refusal to Limit Your Own Freedoms. Due to extreme pride, those in a position of power have sometimes claimed a freedom to oppress including even kill those in a weak position as though a right. Of course, to insist that your own freedom of choice should not be limited to protect an unborn child from assassination is extreme pride.

6. Military Assassination of Foreigners. The Public has shown stunning tolerance to invasion of other nations, or assassination in foreign lands, of anyone our military decides to target there, as well as great tolerance for those clearly innocent who are killed as 'collateral damage'. The basic idea is based on a proud thinking that we are valuable beings but those foreigners over there are dogs and somehow deserve to be killed or it doesn't matter that they are.

7. Blasphemy. This is based on the belief that you are so much more important than God that it's somehow right for you to mock Him.

8. Disobedience. This is based on the belief that you and your will are more important than the will of the authority figure.

9. Crime. This is based on the belief that what you want is more important than the Law.

10. Theft. This is based on the belief that what you want is more important than others' property rights.

11. Murder. This is based on the belief that what you want is more important than someone else's life.

12. Tyranny. This is based on the belief of rulers that it's more important for them to inrease their control and power than allow someone else to rule who is more worthy.

13. Environmental Pollution. This is based on the belief that it's more important for you to have the convenience of polluting than everyone have a clean environment.

14. Lying. This is based on the belief that you deserve protection of your interests more than the other person deserves to hear the truth..

15. Prejudice. You won't recognize it as unfair, though. Your pride will cause you to think that your prejudice is the absolute truth.

Of course, if you are proud, you won't likely care about harm to others because you already esteem yourself far more valuable than others; that's what pride means. The more proud you are, the more easily it will seem fair to you that others should be treated worse than you ,and you will see this as so sensble (from your vantagepoint of pride) that you probably won't recognize any unfairness.

Pride also hurts the proud person, in ways such as:

1. Backlash from the people you abuse.

2. War. War usually hurts all those involved. Pride tends very easily towards war because the proud person is less likely to recognize the complaints of the other party leading up to the war, because of their pride, they can't see abuse of others as abuse. In act, they will consider others' complaint as abuse of them, and think they should retailate. For example, in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, when Moses told Pharaoh that God said to let His people go, Pharaoh not only failed to recognize any abuse in the enslavement of the Hebrews, but insisted they be given more work in retaliation for this complaint.

3. Inability to accept needed correction.

4. Mocking all others who report what you don't want to hear

Why We Should have Realized this was Wrong:

There is an order to the universe, and we are part of that order, greater than some things, but equal to and less than others. More than that, we are created and part of a whole of creation. To glorify our own importance beyond the bounds of our place in creation is pride and perverts our thinking and morality.

What We Can Do About It:

Stop doing or saying things for our own glory.