Pride - Mine

Pride is the original harm. Not just because it was by some coincidence chronologically first, but because in the Christian worldview it is the thing that is at the root of all other harm, or as we call it, sin.

But it is also poorly understood. I think a lot of people think it is just "thinking very highly of yourself", but that misses a lot.

I would define it closer to "an incorrect understanding of your true position in reality in relation to others and God". It can be either a misunderstanding of your position, or a desire to be in some position other than where you should be.

That is as abstract as it is because it encompasses many ideas that may not seem related from a non-Christian perspective.

It includes the most popular version of thinking very highly of yourself. We are not high up in the world. In the Christian context we observe that God is infinitely higher than you are. Since God is the Goodness, in all senses, when you either wish to place yourself above God or believe that you already are above God, you can not help but start being less than Good. God already fully occupies Goodness and there is no room for you to be more Good than Him. From this displacement of the proper place of God and the proper place of Goodness comes all manner of things that are not Good. Or, in another word, evil.

We are also not above the people around us:

All things come alike to all. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, to the clean, to the unclean, to him who sacrifices, and to him who doesn't sacrifice. As is the good, so is the sinner; he who takes an oath, as he who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event to all: yes also, the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. - Ecclesiastes 9:2-3

The "event" there is death; death comes to us all, and levels us all out in a short period of time.

We all see the arrogant sort of pride around us. But having a wrong understanding of your place in the world can also include having an excessively lowly view of yourself as well. The obvious way this can manifest into insisting on being treated lowly in day-to-day life is uncommon, though not unheard of.

However, the less obvious way to be prideful is where one insists on simply doing something lesser with one's self than what God intends for you. Everyone does this in some form.

In the grand philosophical sense this can include things like seeking annihilation, merging into nothingness, or merging back into some impersonal god or universe, which are all denials of the gift of personhood that God has given to you.

In a more down-to-earth sense it can be things like frittering away a valuable life on distractions and irrelevancies, or spending a valuable life contemptuously with self-harming activities, even up to the ultimate self-harm where someone decides the world is better off without them.

The worst part of this is that this is not a single continuum, as nothing really is in life, and the vast majority of humans have both of these forms of pride at once.

Since pride is at the root of all harms, it is hard to address it without addressing everything. Since I am not perfect, I have those more subtle manifestations of pride too. But I can also speak to the more conventional manifestations of it, because I struggle with those as well.

I want to be the main character, to use a current American idiom. I want to be the best in the room, whatever room I may be in. I want to be acknowledged as the best by everyone.

More subtly, I want to be the one who saves the world. I want to not just to struggle against evil, but for God to consider me the reason goodness won. This is also a form of pride.

But I'm not the main character. God is the main character. He is the best. He is the reason evil is being defeated, and will stay defeated once he is done.

If the hope of the world truly rested in me, or in any of us, the world would be doomed.