This-essay is a8406172.htm which is available at the web-site www.essayz.com. See more notes at the bottom. Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay By-Months By-Years By-Words Webs of Like-&-Un-Like ESSAYS <==> Like-&-UN-Like This-One ========================================================== %LIMITS TO PRIDE 840617 We are not proud of losing control of ourselves because pride pertains to how we feel about fulfilling other people's expectations, courting favorable judgments, about having conformed to what is expected of us. It is virtually impossible to conform to what is expected of us when we lose control of our behavior. Thus pride pertains to maintaining control of our behaviors. When pride dominates our lives we tend to become manipulative---in order to be able to be proud of having successfully conformed our behavior to expectations of us by others and our self. Pride leads us to be dominated by our mutual expectations, even when they do violence to our personal and communal integrity. Thus pride goes before a fall in integrity. If we do not give ourselves to that which transcends us, our lives lose their meaning. Yet we find it hard to be proud of letting ourselves go, and so we are under the control of that which we do not understand, can not predict, and do not control. Through lack of control people are often violated, so we tend to idolize control directed by traditional ideals and values. Unbalanced pride leads us in such a direction. For this reason unbalanced pride tends to undermine creativity and renewal. Unbalanced pride can not be the foundation of a community which enjoys both communal and personal integrity. We can not be proud of integrity, because we are rarely expected to seek integrity. Those people who seek integrity challenge many conventions, traditions, taboos, legalisms, etc. which tend to undermine integrity. None of the greatest religious leaders were popular with the religious establishments of their own time and place---because they sought integrity and threatened establishments of their own time and place. Leaders who seek integrity will always be suspected by the powerful whose traditional ways undermine the integrity of their communities and of the poor of those communities. The powerful will be proud of their accomplishments under the rules by which they succeeded. They will fight to keep the rules by which they succeeded, even if those rules undermine the integrity and viability of the poor and of their community. It is rare for a powerful person to be willing to spend power in working for communal integrity and the personal integrity of the poor in the community. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================
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