Humility

 

I get periodic emails from the Atlas Society which I enjoy. This week, October 16, 2023, they have a discussion on humility and pride, and I do not have time to listen to the panel discussion, but I will offer some quick remarks on how feeling proud or humble are ethical or unethical, and how they contribute to one’s self-esteem or detract from it.

 

First, people need to love themselves, so that they can love the Good Spirits and the good deities, and then to love others that they interact with, and then to feel a feeling of warmth towards humanity in general. Egoist-individualist ethics is the way to achieve this. As the wise Dennis Prager said, good behavior is downstream from good values, so be an egoist, so then you can be an actual altruist, helping others, and not hurting them or stifling them.

 

Let us take pride. If we accept that we are born flawed, in sin, incomplete and a mess, then we have a realistic orientation to our essential nature and starting point, then we can learn to esteem ourselves, and begin to love ourselves. If our parents and culture and religion provide us with good values, we then can act ethically, and can begin to fix ourselves, and then self-discipline ourselves so that we set out to self-realize as our telos. As we travel along that path, we will begin to grow a good will and become kinder, wiser, more pious, more skilled, competent and knowledgeable. Then we can be proud of what we have achieved, how more skilled we are, and we will know that the Good Spirits now regard us with affection as we grow in moral and spiritual goodness.

 

Now for humility. Our pride must be earned and based upon a love of realism and truth: we must accept that we are not perfect, though now more skilled, and noble, but the self-perfecting for a lifetime is our quest. We aim for perfection, and know we will never achieve it, and this is normal and okay. Always, we do not take ourselves too seriously, or not seriously enough. We have a sense of calmness and being at peace. We do not brag; we do not talk loud,  crudely, or aggressively. We do not put others down nor do we allow them or ourselves to put ourselves down.

 

We treat the Good Spirits, others, and ourselves most of the time or all the time with courtesy, dignity, and respect. We are quiet and modest. We need to be proud and esteem ourselves (if merited and earned) but we must express and display this quiet self-assuredness with humility and dignity. No strutting, no bragging, no lording it over those less developed or less moral than ourselves that we are superior to them.

 

We need to be proud but act modestly, and that is where humility creates social harmony, and it is also a fine way to interact with the good deities and the Good Spirits, for, when humble and friendly towards them, we are not insubordinate, rebellious, and insulting to them, our actual superiors in self-development, goodness, and rank in the Great Chain of Being.

 

We do not want to chase after selflessness or low self-esteem or fake humility, when self-loathing is our worldview, we poison ourselves and all that we encounter.

 

Eric Hoffer has talked about the bottomless arrogance and invincible if empty feeling of superiority that true-believers feel about themselves and their rivals. Those utterly lacking in self-esteem and self-are are the most haughty, unprincipled, mendacious, cruel, hostile, dangerous creatures on earth, on the march for world domination, spreading their crap cause everywhere.