Pride will allow us to believe all kinds of nonsensical things, and the belief in perfection is one of these. It overlooks the fact that we can perceive anything only when there is some kind of contrast or differential. We know light only because there is dark, heat only because there is cold, life only because there is death, and perfection only because there is imperfection. If we lived in a perfect world we would not know it was perfect.13
Pride can operate in very subtle ways. It can provide an assumption on which we can build beliefs about being humble and unselfish, such as are involved in feeling responsible for everybody and everything. Just what the extent of our responsibility is can often be hard to decide, but in general we can be responsible only for those things over which we have control. When we say we are responsible for something we are implying that we have control over that thing. Claiming to be responsible for everybody and everything is a claim to great power, and such a claim is an act of pride.14
When we feel responsible for certain matters but fail to prevent disaster we feel guilty. Guilt is the fear of punishment, and, uncomfortable though it may be, many people prefer to feel guilty than to feel helpless. Guilt implies that you could have kept these matters under control but you failed to act. Helplessness is a recognition of how little in the world we do in fact control and how chance-filled life can be, and this understanding can be very frightening because through it we know that we can be struck by disaster at any time and that our ideas about what is happening can be proved wrong.
Thus, when disaster strikes and we ask, ‘Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?’ we seek an answer which will show a clear pattern of cause and effect. Such an answer will remove uncertainty and keep our meaning structure whole. As a result the answer ‘It was my fault’ can be preferable to the answer ‘It happened by chance’.
Many of us begin our struggle with such questions when we are young. In a television series a mother, Nicky Harris, described the guilt she felt when her second child, a baby boy called Jordan, suddenly died. She discovered that her four-year-old daughter Jessica was also struggling with questions of guilt and responsibility. Nicky said:
I realized soon after he died that she was feeling the same guilt that I was feeling. We always talked, and about a month after he died she said to me, ‘Mummy, I know why Jordan died,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘I bounced the bouncy chair too hard. Do you remember when you told me not to do that?’ And I felt the guilt flowing out and I was able to deal with it. I just totally knocked that theory on the head. It had nothing to do with it. I thought I’d got that over with, and then a couple of weeks later she came back to me and she said, ‘Mummy, I think I’ve definitely worked it out now.’ This is a four-year-old child talking to me. She said, ‘When Grandma was sitting over there and you were sitting over here, and I was hugging Jordan, and Grandma said, ‘Don’t hug him too tight, you’ll kill him.’ She said, ‘That was it. I must have hugged him too tightly.’ Inside I was crying for her for I felt the same way.15
Here was a four-year-old prepared to take responsibility for her brother’s death because she saw that as being preferable to knowing that terrible things can happen at any time and that neither she nor her mother could prevent them. Yet, even though pride may have provided her with an explanation which showed that this event did not happen by chance, this explanation would ensure that she could never be happy. Happiness, she would have come to believe, was something she did not deserve.
I continued to study the functions of pride, and by the time I came to write Friends and Enemies16 I was thinking in terms of two kinds of pride - moral pride, which is a way of thinking which develops as we create a conscience, and primitive pride, which is an integral part of the functioning of the meaning structure. Both kinds of pride aim to maintain the integrity of the meaning structure and thus prevent us from changing, and both can work together and enhance each other, but, while moral pride can be a spur to unselfishness, tolerance and a love of truth, and be amenable to logic and reason, primitive pride is always utterly selfish, utterly ruthless and impervious to the demands of reason. Nicky Harris described how, while she knew quite well that she was not responsible for her son’s death, she could not help expecting and indeed wanting the police to arrest and punish her.17
Any working system has within it certain forms or mechanisms which enable the system to function. I wrote:
The meaning structure is a self-regulating system. All self-regulating systems have within their structure some mechanism which maintains the integrity of the system, preventing it from grinding to a halt or shattering to pieces. Our body, a self-regulating system, has a number of such mechanisms. The mechanism which forms blood clots to stem the flow of blood through a wound is one. In the meaning structure primitive pride is the form of thought or mechanism which selects from within the individual meaning structure a collection of meanings; when put together, these meanings serve to give immediate protection to the integrity of the meaning structure. This collection of meanings may have little relationship to what is actually happening or in the long term be an adequate defence. Indeed, it usually creates more problems than it was assembled to solve. Its importance is that it can be assembled immediately, in the blink of an eye.18
In psychology no one ever discovers anything which is completely new. Many people have noticed pride’s function in survival as a person, though they may not have called it pride. Psychoanalysts have described the defence of rationalization, and one analyst, Karen Horney, wrote about what she called ‘pride systems’. More recently two American psychologists, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, uncovered what they called a ‘psychological immune system’, which was ‘an army of rationalizations, justifications and self-serving logic’.19 Many psychologists working with people who are experiencing a psychosis now see hallucinations and delusions as methods of trying to maintain ‘self-esteem’.20
‘Self-esteem’ is a jargon term for a complex of ideas concerning how we feel about ourselves - that is, how much we care for and care about ourselves, how much we value ourselves, on what values we judge ourselves and how harshly we judge ourselves. When we are fond of ourselves, look after ourselves, when we value ourselves and judge ourselves reasonably and in a kindly manner, we feel self-confident, and so when we encounter a crisis or disaster we see it as a challenge which we shall master. When we do make a mistake both moral and primitive pride can comfort us. If, for example, you make some arithmetical errors in your income tax return and someone points this out to you, you can comfort yourself by thinking, ‘Well, I mightn’t be good at maths but I really know how to put words together.’ Or, when someone is unpleasant to you, instead of trying to work out why, you can simply assume that actually, underneath, that person really does like you.
The more we despise and hate ourselves the greater the degree of comfort pride has to create, and the greater the degree of comfort we need the less realistic that comfort becomes. Thus we can take pride in having impossibly high standards, or we can take pride in being the object of a worldwide conspiracy of influential people, or in possessing some vast mystical power which controls the universe. Our pride can indeed comfort us, but we can become so attached to that comfort that we refuse to give up our comforting delusions, even though these are the very ideas that create great distress for us because they are so removed from a realistic appraisal of ourselves and our world. We hang on to our comforting delusions, not just because they comfort us, but because they protect us from our greatest fear.