PROUD PEOPLE: Shouldn’t Everyone Be One?
Pride is a highly subjective term. However, in the most popular contextual usage, a ‘proud person’ is a denigrating appellation. This is more so as the band wagon is often swift to cite that “pride goeth before a fall”. But my question today that “Is pride an entirely bad thing?” and “Are proud people the worst people”?
Before you hire your lawyer against me, allow me to drop my two-cent on this matter. I already feel very alone on this side of the divide because I beg to differ that proud people are not entirely bad. With your permission, I would attempt to make a disambiguation being that there are two types of proud people.
- Those with an over bloated estimation of their gross worth.
- Those with a firm grasp of their net worth.
To make the above distinction, I lean on my mobile English dictionary (Wordweb 7.1) which posits the definition of pride thus:
- A feeling of self-respect and personal worth
- Satisfaction with your (or another’s) achievements
- The trait of being spurred on by a dislike of falling below your standards
- Unreasonable and inordinate self-esteem (personified as one of the deadly sins)
ARROGANCE vs PRIDE: DISAMBIGUATION
As for the first category, nothing is more filled with wind than their fiction of superiority. Every waking moment is spent feeding the mill of their ego with everyone else who by default is inferior to them. Theirs is presumptuous confidence, ruthless impudence and no truth for evidence. For this class of proud people, I have no ass to grind for this indeed is not pride but mere arrogance. The two are synonymous yet not the same.
The defendants for whom I don a wig in this courtroom are the second category. The class of persons with a more ‘accurate approximation’ of their self-worth are those for whom I plead. Those who abhor all that is unworthy of them so as to preserve their dignity.
Indeed my Lord, every human being deserves a preserve of pride for it is this same pride that is constitutionally referred to as human dignity. A man without any pride is a menace to society because he neither has nor respects acceptable standards. A man without dignity will trample on that of others. Hence, he is self-conceited and that is blatant arrogance.
In my cursory day to day observation of human behavior, a cumulative sample size gives me the confidence to culminate at the following as attributes of really proud people.
Firstly, proud people like to be believed without having to try too hard to be convincing. A lazy approach to this end is to try to build a rock solid history of speaking only the truth. Consequently, proud people do not lie. They take pleasure in speaking only facts and would heavily label their opinion merely as theirs to serve as an escape pod just in case a superior logic jettisons the validity of their own argument.
Secondly, proud people despise obsequiousness which in simpler words means servile compliance. Proud people overtly or covertly question all that is questionable. They also work assiduously to earn their place lest they be stripped of every other option than condescending to lick other men’s boot. Proud people do not enjoy being told what to do. Hence they do what they ought and in many instances, try to render initiative by being proactive.
Third, a proud person does not enjoy the rap of creditors on his door and so, he lives within his means, scarcely borrows unless he has to and will often pay back even before the debt is due. A proud man is prudent with resources because he is never excited at the prospect of being called upon to fulfill an obligational expenditure only to come up blank. For a proud man, it is truly more blessed to give that to receive.
By now, you must have caught my drift. But I must admit that this continuum is a slippery slope from which many have gone adrift, lost at sea. The graduated calibration between ‘pride’ and ‘arrogance’ are in the ‘micro’ range. Hence, one can unwittingly slip from one to another. Kindly, below are a few fail safes.
THE THIN LINE
A man who is proud but becomes close minded has already become arrogant. This is true because a depth of knowledge that is understood and applicable is called wisdom. Wisdom brings gratification but gratification with complacency makes a man eclipsed from the reality that there is yet much more to know. Hence a closed mind is a dead mind and this death is the penalty for arrogance.
Secondly, a man who is proud but disregards the pride of others is arrogant. This is also true because we all have individual worth. As a fortiori, we have dignity. Anyone too impaired by the self-aggrandizement of their net value will hastily summarize everyone else to be inferior. It is by considering others as valuable that we add to our own value.
On yet another fail safe, I shall draw on the principle of the ‘Dunning Kruger Effect’ which summarizes that the truly intelligent people always doubt themselves while the otherwise are supercilious. The point being that only the arrogant are overly confident whereas proud people are not timid but cautious and corrigible lest they quickly become obnoxious.
PROUD, CONFIDENT and THIRSTY
Furthermore, whereas proud people leave past achievements in the dust and race towards other feats, the arrogant are stuck on the conveyor belt of gloating stale accomplishments while soliciting accolades in a graveyard. Both the proud and arrogant are very busy men. Each busy at very different things.
A trace of any of the above manifestations is a harbinger of the most suitable ‘character-label’ soon to be slapped upon every man’s back.
In conclusion, it is my strong position that proud people are good people and that all people ought to be proud to some measure by putting in the effort which yields results that one can genuinely feel honored to be associated with.
My recommendation today is that everyone thrust out into the world to become proud. Everyone should indeed be proud of at least one thing every day. After all, the sky is big enough for all the stars to shine.
