Of Pride and Arrogance

“Don’t expect me to be rising up when the sun rises in the East” 

“The sun does not rise in the East. It is the Earth that rotates” 

From the tone of his voice, I felt for a moment that I had missed out on learning this valuable nugget of information at school. I delved into my mind and found, surprisingly, that this was one of those few bits of knowledge that was still clinging precariously on the slippery slopes of what passed for my brain. 

All of you, I am sure, must have met people like my acquaintance. People to whom every single bit of knowledge seems like a divine revelation exclusively granted to them which they bequeath to you with all the condescension that Moses could have felt in handing down the Ten Commandments. 

To feel proud of what you know is to acknowledge the fact that you are better than you were yesterday. If that pride needs to be bolstered by the assumption that others do not know what you know, then it veers off into arrogance. Arrogance, I have normally found, comes from out of a personality that is so lacking in self-respect that it has to look on the others as being inferior in order to feel worthy of existence. Pride, on the other hand, looks inward for self-respect. 

“I think that this word has been mistyped here” 

“You need to learn to properly spell words” 

When you prima facie presume that the other person knows what you know, you give him the benefit of the doubt and assume extenuating circumstances. This is particularly when you have no reason to know the capabilities of the other person yet. A person secure in his own accomplishments – a person with pride – does not feel the need to put down the other person. It is the arrogant that normally have to assume that the other person is necessarily at fault because it gives them that special glow of being better. In other words, a man of pride assumes the other person to be capable unless proved otherwise; the arrogant man assumes the other person to be incapable and would rather die than be convinced otherwise. 

“Look! We both had the same sort of education. Now I have twenty-four green marbles, sixty-seven yellow ones and even a large red one. What does he have? Two white marbles and a pair of tops” 

Change the numbers; put in cars, houses, stocks whatever for marbles and tops. That, in effect, is the arrogant man’s litany. It does not strike him at all that both of them may not have even been running the same race. 

That, probably, reminds most people of ‘Chatur’ of 3 idiots – the man with the car, bungalow and all and what had ‘Rancho’ achieved? Teaching A-B-C to kids! It does not strike the arrogant man that teaching was probably what the other man wanted to do anyway. And, yes, like Chatur, most arrogant people are weak – it takes a lot of lying to themselves about the inferiority of the others to keep their self-respect going. “Loser” is a word of contempt only in an arrogant man’s dictionary – a man of pride never feels the need to put down anyone else. 

Arrogance comes in many guises. It may show itself at the level of looking on other individuals as inferior. It may show itself as looking down on another gender, people of another community, color or nationality as inferior. The latter is even easier to do – since you can adopt received wisdom from others like you who came before and stick to it as true. 

Pride comes out of who you are and how you have grown as a person. Arrogance relies upon fables about what other people are and resolutely closes its eyes to any evidence to the contrary. 

When you feel a sense of accomplishment when you compare yourself today to what you were yesterday that is Pride and you should embrace it. When you get your self-respect out of comparing yourself to others to your advantage you are on the slippery slopes of arrogance. Keep away from me, please!

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