Pride — A Two-Faced Coin Pt.1
Personal conversations made to be public: The 7 Deadly Sins
My beloved “M”;
In our last meeting, I asked you if you think I’m a proud person and you just stared at me. Pride in your eyes is neither necessarily a virtue nor a sin and so you did not know what to answer me. You didn’t know how I perceive her and correct me if I’m wrong but you didn’t want to make me sad and you didn’t want me to take it as a compliment either.
You told me that we are all proud to a certain degree and that you perceive pride as well as selfishness. And I can’t disagree with you on that. The very definition of pride likens it to selfishness, and the way we treat it in modern society identifies it with it.
I choose to separate pride in my mind with two different meanings. Each of them has its own place in time and I will explain to you right away what I mean.
The one face of pride, to me, is beautiful and reminiscent of ideals of an earlier era. It is taken from the pages of Jane Austen and has a special place in the world of classic literature. Pride and Prejudice. A book that describes pride as a shield to protect ourselves, as a wall we put up to protect our hearts, as a boundary we put on the people around us to prevent them from doing us further harm.
“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine”
says Elizabeth characteristically and encapsulates the meaning of the entire book in a single line. With this statement, she refuses to let Darcy hurt her anymore and matures as a character. But what our protagonist does not know at that moment is that Darcy has already put his pride aside for her.
And before you misunderstand the author’s intentions; pride for her is not an impregnable castle as she guards every person but also matures with the protagonists and shows them the way to return to each other. Pride not as a brake but as natural moral protection.
The other face of pride is much more simplistic, cold, and without depth. It fits a standardized modern age and is used as a pretext for low emotional intelligence. The ill-conceived pride is an aggressive selfishness that overlooks the welfare of the crowd for the longevity of the unit. The one that makes man closed, lonely, remote, and one-sided. Advantageous and greedy. Unacceptable in the opinions of others. Thus, depriving him of the ability to evaluate the advice of others as she has blinded him with the illusion of omniscience.
And so simply, this pride took its place among the 7 Deadly Sins. It became synonymous with evil and lost its former glory.
Yes, my “M”, we are all proud. Ultimately the issue is which of the two faces of pride we choose to wear.
P.S. for our audience: How do you perceive Pride?
