Pride Crap

     I’ve just thought of another “Please, 2017” item that really should have been in yesterday’s list: the repudiation of insane “pride” in things or conditions that are no way achievements.

     I’m not perfectly sure where this trend was ignited. It might have been the “Black Pride” nonsense of the Sixties or the “Gay Pride” garbage contemporaneous with it. If its roots go still deeper into time, I’m unable to locate them. Whatever the case, Pride Crap has been about as divisive as any insanity this nation has suffered in its 230 years.

     The laughter should be especially loud and contemptuous when the “pride” at issue is about something the “proud” claim they would never have chosen if they’d been given a say. That, of course, is the defining characteristic of Gay Pride. Of course, as homosexual conduct correlates with elevated risks of psychosis, drug abuse, physical disease, suicide, and shortened lifespan, its irrationality goes well beyond mere Pride Crap. There are other “prides” that come close, but in no case is the pressure of the contradiction quite as great.

     Glory be to God! What are these people proud of?

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     Note that Pride Crap is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Left-Liberal Lunacy, Inc. We in the Right aren’t allowed “pride.” We’re the cause of everything unjust, hurtful, and ugly, remember? So no Men’s Pride, or White Pride, or Straight Pride shall be countenanced. Whenever such a thing dares to raise its head above the trench lip, it evokes a withering barrage of condemnation from the salaried bien pensants of the Main Stream Media...and from quite a few on the Establishment Right, as well.

     Actually, it’s worse. In keeping with the horrors for which straight white males are supposed to feel guilty, the Left insists that we must atone. We must make restitution for our many sins against them. The prescribed penance is nearly always a transfer of wealth from us to them. Shut up and write that check, straight white boy. And don’t demand to know when you’ve paid in full.

     And these...persons wonder how their anointed one, destined by the gods to become America’s First Woman President, could have lost an election to a real estate mogul from Queens.

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     These past couple of years, Pride Crap has evoked several counter-trends that have shown some promise. Among these are the “red pill” movement among men fed up with pseudo-feminist BS, the “white identity” groundswell that’s risen in reaction to the epidemic of bad behavior from blacks, and the resurgence of disdain for homosexual activists who have nothing to offer but bad art and vulgar street demonstrations. Some of it has been excessive, of course – that’s always the case when the pendulum smashes into one of its stops – but in the main, it’s helped to restore some of our national perspective.

     The most striking contrast between Pride Crappers and those aligned with one or more of the counter-trends has been the juvenility of the former versus the maturity of the latter. The tantrum-wielding two-year-old is the perfect emotional and tactical model of a Pride Crapper: the screaming, crying purveyor of nothing but demands, tears, and feces. Pride Crappers insist that everyone conform to (and help to enforce) their notions of what’s offensive; their opponents merely laugh at them and maintain the right to their own practices, locutions, and opinions. Pride Crappers are full of whining demands; their opponents merely want to be left alone. In the name of “diversity and inclusion,” Pride Crappers agitate for changes in law and social custom that would invert six millennia of human norms; their opponents tell them to get stuffed, whether in the marketplace, in the media, or at the ballot box.

     It should require no great degree of insight to understand why the bastions of the industries that produce nothing of enduring value should be filling up with Pride Crappers while their opponents move to more peaceable climes.

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     This map:

     ...says more about the counter-trends to Pride Crap and its allegiants than any thousand words I could produce. As I noted in this essay, it’s important that we not allow it to mislead us, as maps often do. However, it’s as good an illustration of the geographic and demographic effects of Pride Crap and the reactions to it as is possible. Where Pride Crappers dominate, there is much social pathology, all the way from public crudity and open vice to outright violence. Where normal Americans dominate, such pathologies and the deviants that promote them get much shorter shrift. Social problems tend to be more rationally viewed and more effectively addressed.

     You’d think that even a Pride Crapper would eventually draw the moral. However, as my hero Jame Retief has said, “Most people are willing to give up their preconceptions, once they’ve had them tattooed on their heads with a blunt instrument.” That process still has some way to go. Perhaps 2017 will bring an inflection point. We shall see.

Quickies: Rose Colored Glasses Everywhere

     Opinion-writer Brian Kilmeade is fairly reasonable most of the time, but he can be deluded into ignoring the realities before him:

     President Obama still hasn’t learned the key lesson that Jefferson and other presidents (most recently George W. Bush) learned about the Middle East: You can’t crush an outlaw Islamist regime from the air. The more we delay putting boots on the ground against ISIS, the more the American people will lose patience – and the more power and prestige ISIS will gain for surviving our attacks.

     In his final year in office, with his legacy on the line, Obama needs to realize that winning a war is more important than his pledge to end a war. He needs to empower our military and trust the experts at the Pentagon. He needs to end the irresponsible releases of terrorists from Gitmo, tighten restrictions on immigrants from countries that support terrorism, confront our enemies abroad, and do whatever it takes to keep us safe at home.

     What’s that you say? Obama hasn’t learned? But how could The Won – the man who openly said the following:

     Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: "I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it," he said. "It's hard to give up control when that's all I've known." Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign's political director. "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Obama told him. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."

     ...be expected to learn anything from anyone, past or present? He’s The Won! He already knows it all; it’s we the unwashed who should be learning from him! Any notions on our part about his having erred are due to faults in his messaging, remember?

     It simply doesn’t matter what a humbler, more American president would admit he needs to do:

     Do not expect Obama to “learn” anything.
     Never imagine that he would admit to an error.
     And disabuse yourself of the notion that he’ll ever put American lives or interests before the preservation of his ego, his narcissism, or his “legacy” -- especially when Islam is on the other side.

     A leopard would be more likely to exchange his spots for a zebra’s stripes.

On Thinking Well Of Yourself: A Rumination

Among the problems made possible by the loose use of words -- i.e., a use that distorts their meanings or applies them in a tendentious fashion -- one of the most nagging is our treatment of two of the capital sins: specifically, pride and envy.

These days, you'll hear quite a lot of persons denigrate pride unconditionally, as if there were no such thing as just pride. But there is: pride in accomplishments of one's own that acknowledges the just pride of others in their accomplishments. Sinful pride -- in Latin, superbia -- is of the sort that exalts oneself categorically over others. This is deemed a capital sin because it encourages us toward contempt and lack of charity, and in the worst cases, the dismissal of others' rights.

Our problem with envy is similar but worse. We misuse the word when we apply it to the admiration of another person's special gifts or attainments, perhaps coupled to a yearning for similar things for oneself. That might seem harmless enough, and would be so if it were to stop there. Unfortunately, there are many to whom another person's gifts or good fortune are an inducement to something much worse than innocent admiration or yearning: what Ayn Rand and others have described as "hatred of the good for being the good." That becomes sinful when it morphs into covetousness: the willingness to plot against another, whether it's with or without result, spurred by envy.

But to me, the fascinating part of this is how pride and envy are linked. For it is observably the case that there are persons among us who need to think well of themselves, but are so enviously fixated upon the different or greater gifts of others that they're unable to do so.

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Everyone wants to think well of himself. It's innate to our natures as thinking beings. Fortunately, it's possible for anyone, once he's absorbed the right fundamental assumptions and attitudes.

The key to thinking well of yourself -- i.e., acquiring and maintaining just pride -- is the concept of the personal best.

We are united in our common natures, but not in our individual aptitudes. (NB: That is, we are not "equal," never have been, and never will be, but that's a subject for a politically focused tirade.) To achieve the just pride that allows one to think well of oneself requires:

1. That he learn where his personal strengths and weaknesses lie;
2. That he strive ceaselessly to improve upon his strengths and remedy his weaknesses;
3. That he never deceive himself about those things, or fixate on the different or greater gifts of others.

Yes, it's that simple. He who focuses upon personal improvement, rather than on how he compares to others, has a very good chance of achieving just pride. Indeed, if he can maintain that mindset, it's practically guaranteed.

This isn't an epoch-defining discovery by a Twenty-First Century Certified Galactic Intellect; it's something we've known since Socrates. Indeed, it was he who said "Only one thing do I know, and that is that I know nothing:" the ultimate admission that even he, the foremost philosopher of his day, could still improve upon his personal best. Ralph Waldo Emerson rephrased that sentiment with a slightly different focus: "Every man is my superior, in that I can learn from him." That's the proper approach to appreciating and harmlessly exploiting the different and greater gifts of others.

But if this is something "we" have known for many centuries, it doesn't show in the behavior of a lot of our contemporaries.

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"To be" means "to be in competition." -- Screwtape

Competition is a useful spur to self-improvement, but if not constrained by the limits to just pride, the competitive urge can carry us far beyond self-improvement. It can lead to a willingness to damage others that we might "rise above them:" a textbook case of hatred in action.

Have a little more C. S. Lewis to that effect:

No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.” [from Screwtape Proposes A Toast]

That "itching, smarting, writhing awareness of inferiority" is what impels the man dominated by envy to contemplate destructive measures. John Ringo exploits the nature of destructive competition brilliantly in his recent novel The Hot Gate. His South American characters are depicted as persons consumed by unjust pride -- pride in status-by-birth, a non-achievement for which they cannot justly claim credit -- who, compelled to confront superior performances by others, don't strive to improve themselves but rather attempt to corrupt those others' achievements, even if it should result in injury or death.

That's how unjust pride -- superbia -- gives rise to sinful envy: covetousness.

The beginnings of sinful envy are often manifested verbally, in the denigration of others or their achievements. Perhaps if it could be halted at that stage, it would be merely a peccadillo. Yet it is a form of injustice, and God is nothing if not just. I can't help but think that even verbal injustice will have unpleasant consequences in the life to come.

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Yes, all of this is part and parcel of the need to think well of oneself. If we lacked that need, we would be immune to the temptations of sinful pride and sinful envy. However, as individuals with individualized motivations and gifts, we are right under the crosshairs of both those infernal guns.

Unfortunately, there is no way to immunize oneself against such temptations. Humans are social creatures, forever destined to rub up against one another in ways both pleasant and unpleasant. It's guaranteed that, with the possible exception of lifelong hermits, each of us will repeatedly confront others who are our superiors in some ways...and now and then, perhaps even in all ways.

I've often written of the importance of humility. That virtue is as frequently misinterpreted as is just pride. Humility is merely the willingness to acknowledge reality:

• That we cannot merely decree that what we want is what shall be;
• That reality's laws are superior to our desires, opinions, and wills;
• That others are what they are and have a right to be so, despite our preferences to the contrary.

Inversely, humility is not self-abasement or an imposed belief in one's own inferiority. The humble man need not subjugate himself to anyone or anything. He merely accepts that the world is what it is, and that events will sometimes run contrary to his desires.

The humble man is quite capable of attaining just pride and averting destructive envy. Indeed, humility of that sort is prerequisite to the rest.

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If you've been wondering what brought this subject to the top of my stack this fine October morning, yesterday's exceedingly brief piece has garnered invidious reactions that caused me to wonder what I might have said or done. I've concluded, tentatively at least, that any discussion of intelligence and its political and socioeconomic importance simply flicks some persons on their sensitive bits. But perhaps it's because of the writer rather than the subject; that's a possibility I shouldn't overlook.

Well, you can't please everyone, and anyway, I gave up trying long ago. I'm too taxed by struggling to do something others find valuable while striving to concentrate on exceeding my personal bests. As my gifts are few, the former demands more focus from me than it would from more fortunate persons; as my energies are steadily waning with the passage of the years, the latter is more challenging than ever before. Yet those are the things that I must do to think well of myself.

This might seem a strange way to conclude so philosophical an essay, but I'll do it anyway:

Don't expect too much from me. I'm as human as you.