What it Really Means to Be Prideful

What is Pride?

Pride has come to mean many different things to different people. To some pride can mean gratitude for an attribute or characteristic. To others it can mean hatred for an attribute or characteristic one does not possess. For the purpose of this article, “pride” refers to what I call “Contentious Pride”, or a pride that seeks to contend with something or someone else.

Contentious Pride is a pattern of behavior that seeks to compete with and vanquish other people, beliefs, or situations, resulting from a fundamental belief that one is inherently and essentially empty, unprotected, damaged, and liable to change or break.

This insecurity leads to arrogance or, in other words, the extreme confusion of personality for identity. This arrogance, or delusional state where one regards himself as simultaneously better and worse than others leads to superciliousness, or behaving and expressing cool, patronizing disdain for others. This worldview of being better or more fitting than others (people, situations, ideas), causes presumptuousness, which is characterized by neglecting to either see or respect limits and boundaries of what is allowed, suitable, or proper in the circumstances.

This presumptuousness finally leads to insolence, or the offensively impolite or ill-mannered behavior that arises from a belief that someone or something is not good enough to deserve one’s respect, appreciation, or regard.

Contentious Pride is always on guard and ready to fight everything around it. It can be described as a motivating compulsion to force agreement with the delusional belief that one (or one’s knowledge, feelings, or will) is better and more fitting than anything else it encounters. This includes God, people, situations, ideas, opportunities, and even the host’s (the person who is bound by a pattern of Pride) Higher Self.

The Components of Pride

The major components of Pride are insecurity, arrogance, presumptuousness, insolence, competition, judgment, emptiness (devoid of identity), and struggling (against restraint and constraint).

The first four components are the pathway that leads to pride. The last four are characteristics of Pride. Where you find one, you will inevitably find the others.

How is Pride Developed?

Contentious Pride is an unconscious pattern that is born of having no clear identity; therefore, it is created by developing personality in defense and then identifying with that construct to the exclusion of the actual self.

In other words, it is the fancy, well-maintained alarm system on an unoccupied and unfurnished house. The owner (pride) obsessively protects that which is empty (the awareness of the true self). It does this for no other reason than because it is empty fears that others might discover the vacancy. If the house, or self, was occupied, the residents would be able to protect and defend it themselves

The Essential Functions of Pride

There are at least two essential functions of Contentious Pride:

1) To protect the host from others assessing the state of vacancy within and, therefore, their vulnerability to attack and siege.
2) To protect the host from the perceived constraints and restraints that come from occupation (indwelling) and maintenance (stewardship).

The Cause and Consequences of Pride

Causes of Pride

There are two potential causes of insecurity at so fundamental a level as to cause this pattern of behavior:

1) Confusing one’s personality (what one does, thinks, feels, has, desires) with one’s identity (who one is).
2) Ignorance, lack of acceptance, or out right rejection of God and, therefore, the self.

Consequences of Pride

Pride affects every area of the host’s life. The consequences are staggering and total:

1) A pattern of failure, especially in anything that requires relationship (spirituality, money, work, marriage, health, etc.)

2) A pattern of dissatisfaction

3) True insecurity (i.e. being unprotected from attack physically, mentally, financially, psychologically, spiritually, etc.)

4) Isolation (from God, self, family, friends, community)

5) Total dependence (on thoughts, feelings, moods, urges, fears, people, habits, etc.)

6) An obsessive-compulsive nature (neuroticism, depression, substance and behavioral addictions, etc.), especially internally

7) Utter confusion or chaos, especially externally

10 Types of Contentious Pride

1) Greed and Asceticism: competition with stuff—money, food, power, etc.

2) Lust and Aversion: competition with pleasure—sex, vanity, drugs, nice things, joy, depression, etc.

3) Vanity and Self-Effacement: competition with image—keeping up with the Joneses, narcissism, reputation, manipulation, too much or too little care of physical appearance, etc.

4) -isms and Conformity: competition with perceived differences—racism, sexism, patriotism, chameleon personality, peer-pressure, individualism, utilitarianism, etc.

5) Habitual Failure and Cheating: competition with limitations—giving up, manipulation, overt and covert cheating of systems, shortcuts, not trying, avoidance, over-extension, overwhelm, mental breakdowns, etc.)

6) Self-Reliance and Dependence: competition with vulnerability—won’t ask for or accept help, self-made, comfort zone, re-inventing the wheel, no autonomy, bad credit, bad with money, workaholic, chronically unemployed, chronically single, love averse, relationship/marriage hopping, etc.

7) Apathy and Codependence: competition with compassion—willful ignorance, set in ways, prejudice, bigotry, overly sentimental, hurt by everything and everyone, “empathic”, cruelty, victimhood, etc.

8) Judgmental and Unprincipled: competition with beliefs—this worldview is better, worse, right, wrong, mine, theirs, nonjudgmental, accepting (of anything), relative morality, etc.

9) Arrogance and Self-Loathing: competition with one’s own identity— I am too …good/bad, smart/dumb, rich/poor, perfect/flawed, etc.

10) Stubbornness/Complacency and Noncommittal: competition with change—won’t/can’t change, always been this way, family history/past, restlessness, free-spirited, no-follow through, no self-assessment, etc

How Pride Affects Learning

Contentious Pride has at least two known functions and both of them protect the learner from finding and integrating new information. This is because the pride itself can only seek knowledge for those reasons. Pride seeks and integrates new information only if it can:

1) Learn to protect ego from being confronted with the fact that it does not know something and is therefore vulnerable to others who already know it or a situation calls for it, or

2) Learn only information (and in a way) that does not change the ego’s status quo and/or does not place any constraints or restraints on the ego’s current beliefs, lifestyle, or learning process.

These two functions of pride leave the host person incapable of learning. The first function poisons the search for information; the second poisons the acceptance or implementation of whatever information it finds.

Contentious Pride will only allow its host to seek knowledge that does not reveal its ignorance and will only accept and implement knowledge that does not challenge its position or limit its control or behavior. Pride cannot allow itself to be challenged or lessened thus making the learning process impossible or, at the very least, contaminated.

Can Contentious Pride Ever be Good or Managed?

When we look at the consequences, functions, and types of Pride it is clear that it is an enemy of God, our highest selves, and everything we are, and everything we hope to be in relationship with. Because of this fact, Pride should be regarded as an enemy. 

There is nothing healthy or good in it. It should be rooted out and destroyed in thought and action. This is not one of those qualities that we love into acceptance or seek the positive aspect of in our lives. This is not a trait that has a shadow side and a light side to be integrated and then will lose its negative power. Let me be clear: There is no goodness Pride. It is incapable of goodness. It, by its very nature, is at war with everything. It is dangerous at its core; its essence, evil. It must be brought under God’s authority and destroyed through His power. Now.

How Contentious Pride Leads to Destruction

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Gen 3:1-6 (NIV)

1) There exists an adversary of God, who seeks to destroy you and everything and everyone you relate to because he is in competition with God.

2) The adversary lies in the form of a question. He presents false, blasphemous information as a thing for you to deeply consider. The key is he knows it is a lie when he asks and so do you.

3) You dignify the adversary with an answer, letting him know you are willing to engage him and discuss lies.

4) The adversary takes this opening and lies to you out right, blatantly, boldly and with authority. This lie will always contradict God and a truth already known to you.

5) The adversary tells you that the truth is really a lie designed by God to keep you from power or some other desired thing.

6) Your mind already susceptible to discussing and entertaining lies, becomes susceptible to the lie itself. You begin to slant toward or become “inclined” to taking action on the lie and abandoning the truth.

7) Now that you are inclined to this new action, you will see and considered only three things before you agree to it: Can I do it? Will it increase my pleasure or reduce my pain if I do it? Can I gain some desired benefit, especially power and control, by doing it?

8) You do it, think it, say it, feel it, and then share it with your family and community around you.

Pride is Your Enemy

This is the pattern of pride. The pattern of pride that leads to sin. The pattern that leads to failure, despair, sadness, destruction, confusion, and all things that contend with God, your highest self, your vision and goals, your relationships, your money, your body, and everything good in your life. This is the pattern of that steals your power and makes you subservient to its whims and rules. This is Pride.

This is your number one enemy.