Pride

I once watched the owner of a shipping line walk the full length of his own dock. He looked at the cranes. He looked at the cargo nets swinging up out of the holds. He looked at his watch. In all that long length he did not once look at a single one of the men doing the work—not because he was a cruel man, exactly, but because to him they were not quite there. They were part of the equipment. You do not say good morning to a winch.

That is Pride. Not the loud, strutting thing the word makes you picture. The quiet kind. The kind that lives behind the eyes of a man who has come to believe, somewhere along the way, that he is a different and higher order of creature than the people who serve him—that the distance between his office and the dock below is not a distance of dollars but a distance of kind.

I put Pride second in the seven, right at Greed's elbow, because the two of them have always worked as a pair. Greed does the taking. Pride does the explaining. Greed reaches into the working man's pocket; Pride leans down afterward and murmurs that the fellow likely deserved to be poor anyway. Greed could not sleep at night without Pride in the next room, telling him he earned every dollar and every man he stepped on to get it. Where Greed steals the bread, Pride steals the one thing a poor man still owns when the bread is gone: his dignity—the plain, level look in the eye that says I am a man, the same as you.

The first lie of Pride is the self-made man. It is the favorite story of every baron who ever lived: that he built it all himself, alone, by his own genius and grit, owing nothing to anyone. It is a lie, and not a small one. No man is self-made. The richest man in America did not pave the road his goods travel, did not pour the schoolhouse where he learned his letters, did not raise himself from an infant, did not invent the language he bargains in or the law that protects his property or the coin itself. He stands, like all of us, on a mountain of labor and luck and inheritance he did not make and mostly cannot see. Frederick Douglass, who had more right to the title than any tycoon, said it plain: there are, properly speaking, no self-made men^[1]. Pride's whole power depends on you forgetting that.

The second lie is that some people are simply a lesser kind. This is the dangerous one, the one the blood has been spilled over. Once a man believes he is a higher order of being, cruelty stops feeling like cruelty and starts feeling like sorting. "They don't feel it the way we do." "They're not suited to better." "It's their nature." Every chain ever forged, every wall ever raised against a people, every door shut in a hungry face, has been justified by this one rotten idea—that the sufferer is a smaller sort of human whose pain weighs less on the scale. It is the most expensive lie in human history, paid for in millions of lives.

The third lie is that the top is the proof. Pride looks at the man in the corner office and the man in the soup line and says: there, you see—the cream rises. The one on top is on top because he is better; the one on the bottom because he is worse; the arrangement is not theft, it is a kind of grading, and the grades are deserved. It is a comforting story if you are near the top and a crushing one if you are near the bottom, and it is false at both ends. The dock is not full of failures. It is full of men who got a worse roll of the same dice, and who would, given the owner's start, have run the line as well or better.

Now let me be fair, because there is a good thing that wears the same name, and I will not have it confused with the thief. There is the pride of a man in a job done well. The pride of a mother in her children. The pride of a people in something they built together with their own hands—a bridge, a union, a country worth the name. That pride lifts a man's chin without lowering anyone else's. It does not need a smaller man beneath it to feel tall. That is not the sin. Keep it. Earn more of it.

The thief is the other kind—the pride that requires someone below it. The pride that cannot feel high unless someone else is made to feel low. Test it that way and you will never confuse the two: honest pride stands on its own work; the sin of Pride stands on somebody's neck.

And here is where I part ways with the pulpit, as I always do. The old books call Pride the first sin—the one that threw the bright angel out of Heaven. Let the preachers keep the angel. My quarrel with Pride is not in Heaven; it is here, on the ground, in the daylight. Pride is the thing that lets a comfortable man look at a hungry child and feel nothing at all, because he has privately decided she is a lesser sort of child, of a lesser sort of family, who must have done something to deserve the hunger. That is not a stain on his soul I am worried about. It is the child.

The barons of our time have caught the same fever, in a newer strain. The old robber baron at least knew he was a businessman. Today's lords have promoted themselves higher than that. We are told the man who built a clever machine is therefore a genius about everything—about how you should live, how the nation should be run, which people are worth keeping and which are a drag on the species. Being right about one invention has convinced him he is right about the world. The crown did not disappear when we threw out the kings. It came back, in a hoodie, on the head of a man who believes his fortune is the same thing as wisdom.

It is the same Pride, and it carries the same blindness. A man drunk on his own superiority cannot learn anything, because learning requires admitting you did not already know. So he fills his rooms with people paid to agree with him. He stops hearing the word no. He mistakes the silence of the frightened for the assent of the wise. And this is the strange justice buried inside the sin: of all seven thieves, Pride is the one that also robs the man who hosts it.

Now hear the good news, because there is always good news where Pride is concerned, and it is this: of all the countries on earth, ours was built to be poison to it. We are the people who abolished bowing. We threw the king's tea into the harbor and his crown after it. The whole homely dignity of this republic is that a workingman can look any millionaire dead in the eye, call him by his first name, and owe him not one inch of his spine. That is not rudeness. That is the entire point of the experiment.

The proud man wants the crown back. He wants the bow returned, dressed up now as deference to the visionary, the founder, the great man. Do not give it to him. The cure for Pride is not to tear the high man down into the mud—that is only Pride running the other direction. The cure is to refuse the whole arrangement of high and low. To stand at your accurate height. To look up at no man and down at no man.

That is the dignity Pride steals, and it is also the dignity that solidarity gives back—the two-edged kind. It guards the workingman from being looked down upon, and it guards him just as fiercely from looking down on the man beside him. The same level gaze, turned both directions. That is not weakness, and it is not vanity. It is the plainest truth there is: that the owner on the dock and the man in the cargo hold are, underneath the dollars, exactly the same kind of creature—mortal, frightened, hoping, and worth precisely as much as each other.