Pridemonger

It’s important to understand that competition is crucial for the existence of pride. Pride is the pleasurable emotion we feel when we have reason to believe ourselves in a favorable position, specially when compared to other people.

Even though this may sound overly aggressive, and perhaps you believe that you can feel pride without needing to compare yourself to others, if life was easy and if success was guaranteed, there would be no need to feel proud of yourself. You would simply wake up and decide to do something, and you would be very successful at it despite of how little or how much you tried. There would be no one trying to do the same thing you do, and no one trying to succeed more than you to take your place.

When we win an award, for example, we feel pride because we understand that even though there are people who are doing better than us, there’s people who are definitely doing  worse than us, and are not being recognized like you just were. This successfully places us in a spectrum, and that positioning will inform us of how far we’ve come, and will better prepare us to start moving into a better position in the future. This also tells us that we no longer may be within the bottom of the hierarchy. If there was no spectrum, there would be no need for any awards, and no rewards either. No one would be given attention because everyone would make the same sort of work all the time. No one would be special, and nobody would be thought of as more or less efficient.

Pride was considered a sin because success can be toxic. It can get to our heads. Competing in a harsh world can feel so good that we can begin to think ourselves naturally better and more fit for praise. In the old days, this was seen as a disrespect to God, who made us all equal, and who frowned upon prideful people who believed themselves as powerful as God. Today, we can still criticize pride in that it’s not right to step on others just because we were born with more money and better social status, or because we have a talent someone else does not have. Pride can prevent us from reaching down to help others, because it can confuse us and make us desire to have nothing to do with those who have not been performing at the same level of productivity as us.

But, pride is part of us for a reason, and it shouldn’t be looked at as a sin, but rather we should learn to control it, and to use it properly. Small doses of pride can motivate us to work more and continue pursuing higher goals and moral outcomes. It can be the fuel we need to be better members of society. We all like to be rewarded for hard work, and feeling pride for being productive is not inherently bad, as long as we can be disciplined enough to understand that this does not give us a pass to punish others who were not as lucky as us, or who didn’t succeed in the same thing you did.