Kimberly Steele

You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

-Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone

Pride: I'm no stranger to it. I have had the weird experience of being the nerdiest of nerds and the hottie within the span of a few years. I was the ugly duckling that turned into a swan, and like many swans, I became arrogant and resentful of people in general because I perceived myself as being treated badly as a duckling.

The Ugly American Trope

Americans have a pride problem. We display pride where it doesn't belong. Many of us think it is OK to go to the store in pajamas and flip flops. Before the Coronapocalypse, some of us who had the money to travel abroad were known as obnoxious tourists: loud, badly dressed, ignorant, and proud. For a while there, we had an awful lot of chutzpah, spreading our Disney movies and greasy fast food to every corner on the globe along with wars nobody asked for. Nowadays we find ourselves shrinking back from Empire (I hope, anyways) and forced to take a raincheck. We aren't used to having to behave this modestly.

I can tell you from deep personal experience that pride is most often a function of insecurity. Take a proud Christian man I knew who grew up hard and poor on a farm, his life a series of bitter disappointments. He had two things: his God and his pride. He spoke with certainty that he was going to spend an eternity with his Father in Heaven, and because of this, he had a death fetish that included not one but two living funerals for himself. He held these two pre-funerals so everyone could recognize his achievements and celebrate his assured ascent to the pearly gates. Another proud Christian man I knew somehow attained a PhD while not being able to execute a grammatically-correct paragraph. Pride does not have a great deal in common with reality.

The proud are always under threat, whether this is real or perceived. They lack a sense of humor if the fun is being poked at them.  Anger is their constant companion. They confuse one type of achievement with another: Christian Man number one confused being given the short end of the stick in life with being holy, and Christian Man number two confused his ability to cheat the system into providing him with a degree with real intelligence. The proud are impossible to convince of their own vices/faults. If you told either of these guys what was going on in their own heads, they would curse you. If they were young, they might try and throttle you.

Pride and Pulchritude

When I was prouder, I thought myself smarter and better-looking than I actually was.  At age twenty-one, at the acme of my beauty and when I cared a great deal about it, I thought I was a genius 10 when truth be told I was more like an 8 with a somewhat above average brain. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm confident for a select few (my husband at least seems to be fooled) I am an 11, off the charts, hubba hubba. For others, I am and always was a meh at best: too short, too odd, not enough, too much.

This is meatworld. The Perfect 10 does not stay that way for long. At the apex of my physical attractiveness in my early twenties, it was all higher, tighter, cuter, and trimmer than it ever would be again. Today's TikTok cutie is tomorrow's ancient swamp hag.  As I have said many times, if you don't let go of pretty by age forty, it will eat you alive. Plastic surgery will not help. Surgery renders the aged into freakish, B-version mockups of their former twenty-something selves, a turn of the head revealing a telltale scar or a dent in a cheek or nose. There's the creepiness of a face that is frozen and unable to move as if the entire thing was Novocained.  The best case scenario -- looking a convincing 23 when you are actually 63 -- is bizarre and aberrant.  At some point, and I would argue that point is a few years before menopause for women and the same approximate age for men, the wisest thing to do is to walk away from the competition, especially if one was a Perfect 10 such as Brigitte Bardot or Beyoncé.  

Pride's Opposite: Pandering

The opposite of pride is pandering, groveling, kissing butt, sucking up. Ironically, there are plenty of proud people who pander. Hillary Clinton comes to mind with her hot sauce: there is no low too transparently degrading to which she would sink. Pandering is weakness, swinging to the opposite side instead of finding the happy medium between pride and its opposite. Pandering is often used as a bargaining chip, for instance the actress who steps into the sleazy producer's hotel room while angling for a movie deal isn't always naive to what is about to transpire. Pandering implies a compromise of one's dignity in order to gain an advantage. Of course pandering happens on the small level all the time: being nice to someone who is loathsome because you hope to gain a favor from them feels slimy. I've been there and done that and I'm trying not to do that anymore. Either I don't parlay with that person or I avoid them altogether: this is my goal.

Pandering happens when the line in the sand gets erased: how low will you stoop to get the goods? What ideals will you discard to survive?  Will you sleep with someone you find repulsive?  Will you maim yourself?  Will you eat garbage?  As someone who remembers two past lives where I strongly believe whoever I was starved to death, I think it doesn't matter how low you go. Sometimes you don't survive no matter what you do, so you might as well go down with dignity.

Humility

Humility is the state of grace between the two extremes of pandering and pride. Humility is the admittance you don't have to be the best -- you don't even need to qualify as top tier. Humility is picking your battles rather than rushing headlong into them without thought. There are many friends in my past whom I should have accepted for themselves without being jealous of them or without having to be "better" than them. Going your own way does not mean that it has to be superior. To each their own. Humility means not having to turn every project into an empire. Humility allows failure and better yet allows us to laugh at it without cruelty or self-hatred. Humor puts ego in proportion.   Humility draws a line in the sand and leaves one's fate in divine hands. 

Understanding that I am of little importance and the Universe is happy to go on without me does not have to resolve in atheist nihilism. Instead, I can take what little influence I have and make the best out of every moment of every day. For I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, even if it is only by the slightest amount.