Years ago, while I was rejecting God, I was much more provocative. I would sometimes dress or behave in ambiguous modes. Back in the days before HIV I was amused by a tee-shirt that said "How dare you assume that I am heterosexual." I wasn't gay - just provocative. I was wearing my brokenness on the outside regardless of how many other broken people I might damage more. There were some, may God forgive me, that I damaged.
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From Wikipedia:
Pride is emotional response or attitude to something with an intimate connection to oneself, due to its perceived value.[citation needed] Oxford defines it amongst other things as "the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's own importance"[1]
If I recall correctly pride was the cause of the fall of Lucifer. I have at times expressed perhaps too much self admiration. I am competent in some fields and I have a moderately broad band of playful learning. I have been guilty of pride in this older sense.
The modern version of "pride" seems rooted rather in a lack of security, a lack of self-acceptance, of self-esteem. Some act out of pain, in denial of the difficult memories and realities. Some fuzz their public persona by expanding, absorbing environmentally, without pause for integration.
Perhaps I was also "proud" in my unacknowledged brokenness.
Why does it matter?
I have spent time with too high an opinion of myself. I have also tried to evade myself out of shame. There might be a certain amount of morbid amusement for someone observing me, but the acts and the observation are precisely that: morbid.
And so Weimar America celebrates morbidity this month rather than health, termination of the young and old rather than life. Perhaps it is Nero or Caligula's America.
It would be better to focus on health and life while acknowledging imperfection, aspiring to better, rather than setting the imperfection as the standard, aiming ever lower
