Isn't Pride a sin?
I have always found it strange that people are proud this and proud that, proud about their colour, or their sexuality, or their heritage. And yeah, while I am not religious in any way, the majority of people are and pride tends not to mesh well with the various scriptures. But that is the minor part of my annoyance, because what most people are "proud of" seems to be things that are not within their control. You can't choose your skin colour, your parents and supposedly, your sexuality. So, what does it mean to be "proud" of those things?
I don't think pride has no place, because I think when it is a level of self-respect and personal worth based on one's own accomplishments or what one played a significant part in, has its place. But pride based on inherited traits?
I wish people would take more pride in what they do instead of what they "are", because taking pride in what you are (what you believe yourself to be) is the lazy way. It is an avoidance of what actually makes us who we are - our behaviours. Celebrating our various traits has hijacked the approach that what we do matters, so that a person can feel "self-worth" without actually having to do anything at all.
Have you ever thought what "self-worth" means?
Self is obvious, as should worth be, but it seems that people don't tend to put much stock in the actual meaning of things. Worth however is about value and therefore self-worth is about the value of who we are. But worth is the value, importance, usefulness of something or someone. And what that means is that the worth of the self is tradeable.
Not necessarily as a commodity, but our self-worth should be derived from what we are able to offer the world. Our value might not be monetary, but it still requires the ability to transfer it, because something that is non-transferrable, that is static, is valueless, because it can't change hands. But our behaviours impact on others and our environment, which means that they do hold transferrable value, which is why what we do matters and "what we are" doesn't.
Does that go against your intuition?
We have been led to believe that just "being" makes us intrinsically valuable, but I don't believe it does. In fact, I think that we are intrinsically a cost in resources, which means to be valuable we have to generate more value than we cost, and most of us are failing at that I would assume. Again - not just looking at money here, because money is a ridiculous indicator of value.
If we aren't making the world better, we are making it worse.
We aren't intrinsically valuable just for being, and we only start to add value when we are able to provide value-adding activity to the world. This might come in what we do for work or how we raise our children, or it could be in how we repel those who do harm, or influence people to change their behaviours for the better.
As I see it, the world doesn't matter at all other than its ability to provide our species with life and resources. It was here before us, and it will be here after us, in whatever form it takes. However, we have to take care of the world itself because we need it as a species to survive. And as I think survival isn't enough and we should be looking to thrive as a species, which means increasing our wellbeing, potential and opportunity, caring for the environment is a core function of our species. And again, we are failing.
And I think this is what drives me to annoyance about "taking pride" in all these things that don't matter, but not behaving in the ways that do matter. We can wave rainbow flags or swastikas, and ultimately they are the same thing - a symbol. They aren't the actions we need to make the world a better place, they are just people making visible what they are, without having to do anything. And the more that do it, the more support and belief in what doesn't actually matter.
Think for a moment and consider a world where our self-worth was based on the positive difference we make in the world - how many would be valuable? All those people sitting in front of their screens screaming at strangers over ideology? All those people trading for imaginary money on derivatives? All those people playing games, watching movies, and staring into space with a headset on?
What actually has value?
Rather than being automatically proud of who we are, we should be working to be proud of how we are. How we behave, how we treat people, how we raise our children, how we interact with others, how we consider our actions and the impacts they have, and how we are not surviving, but striving in the things we do to make the world better.
But that is not what we do. We don't want to strive, we want comfort. We want convenience and the easy way. We want to feel good about ourselves without having to work for it.
And it is easy to achieve.
Just take pride in what you are.
Taraz
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