Pride Goes Before Destruction

“Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

This leaves you with an understanding that humility is a virtue; pride is not. Humility comes when people are secure while pride comes when they are insecure. Humility is your strength whereas pride is your weakness.

More often than not the line between pride and humility is blurred. While trying to keep it in check, you get either too arrogant or too humble when the time comes. Your thoughts become conflicting while figuring out whether to be proud or humble in a certain situation and you almost always end up doing the opposite of what was intended. It seems like a never-ending maze without any particular destination.

So the question that arises now is how do you distinguish when to show what emotion and in what quantity? This can be achieved by knowing the answer to these two simple questions.

What is the difference between true pride and false pride? What is the difference between true humility and false humility?

True pride is when you acknowledge your identity and your actions without the burning need for approval from the outside sources. False pride is claiming that you are more than you believe you are and that you know more than you need to know. In this case, a person will feel empty and inadequate from inside and need approval for every tiny detail of his life from others. Now outside approval is not necessarily a bad thing but when you feel like your self-worth depends on it, know that you are in deep trouble. Another thing associated with false pride is a sense of arrogance. True pride is knowing you are better than the other person at a certain task. This is not somehow affecting your performance or hindering your progress. False pride is getting the other person to acknowledge the fact that he is behind you in that task. Often while doing this, a person loses sight of the long-term goal with his need to feel superior to others.

True humility is when you acknowledge your identity and your actions without the burning need for approval from the outside sources. False humility is claiming that you are less than you believe you are and that you can do less than you believe you can. A person with false humility is driven with a need to get everyone to accept that he is too humble as he feels himself to be inferior to them. This could be the case when he thinks being even a little proud is bad for him or when he wants to shadow his arrogance by overcompensating for it. A truly humble person will not be affected by what others think of his actions.

What this brings us to is that true pride and true humility are one and the same thing. We need to balance out these emotions in our lives, all the while working towards our goal and not caring about unnecessary opinions.

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References: Proverbs 16:18