Pride and Simplicity in Social Relations

It would perhaps be hard to find a subject better suited than pride to prove that the obstacles to a better life, calmer and stronger, lie within us rather than in our circumstances. The diversity, and above all the contrast, of social conditions inevitably give rise to all kinds of conflict. But how much simpler, in spite of everything, relations between members of the same society would become if we brought another spirit into the framework that outward necessities have drawn! Let us be thoroughly convinced that it is not, first and foremost, differences of class and occupation, or the very unlike shapes of people's destinies, that set them at odds. If that were so, we should see an idyllic peace reigning among colleagues, comrades and all who share similar interests and a like lot. On the contrary, everyone knows very well that the fiercest quarrels are those that break out between equals, and that there is no worse war than civil war. But what keeps people from getting along is, above all, pride. Pride turns a person into a hedgehog that cannot touch anyone without wounding them. Let us speak first of the pride of the great.

What displeases me in the rich man who drives past in his carriage is neither his equipage, nor his clothes, nor the number and fine bearing of his servants: it is his contempt. That he owns a great fortune hurts me only if there is something wrong with my character; but that he splashes me with mud, runs me down, and makes it plain in his whole manner that I count for nothing in his eyes because I am not as rich as he is - that is what rightly offends me. After all, he inflicts suffering on me, and needless suffering. He humiliates and insults me for no reason at all. It is not what is base in me, but what is noblest, that rises up against this wounding pride. Do not accuse me of envy, for I feel none: it is my dignity as a human being that is wounded. There is no need to look far for examples of these impressions. Anyone who has seen something of life has brought back from it many experiences that will bear out what we say. In certain circles devoted to material interests, the pride of wealth prevails to such a degree that people rate one another the way shares are quoted on the stock exchange. Esteem is measured by the contents of the safe. Good society is made up of the large fortunes, middling society of the middling ones. After them come people of little account and people of no account. On every occasion, people treat one another according to this principle. And whoever, being relatively rich, has made someone less wealthy feel his disdain is in turn made to drink his fill of disdain from those above him in fortune. Thus the mania for comparison rages from the top to the bottom. Such surroundings seem prepared to perfection for cultivating the worst feelings; but it is not wealth that is to blame, it is the spirit people bring to it. Some rich people do not hold this crude view, especially those whose families have known ease from father to son. But they forget that there is a certain delicacy in not letting contrasts speak too loudly. Even supposing there is no harm in enjoying an ample superfluity, is it really necessary to display it, and above all to offend with it the eyes of those who lack the necessities, to flaunt one's luxury right next to poverty? Good taste and a kind of decency will always keep a healthy person from talking about a hearty appetite, sound sleep and the joy of living beside someone who is dying of consumption. Do not many rich people sometimes lack tact, and by that very fact pity and prudence as well? Are they not ill-advised, then, to complain of envy after doing everything to provoke it?

Above all, we lack discernment when we take pride in our wealth or yield unconsciously to the seductions of luxury. To regard wealth as a personal quality is a childish confusion. We could hardly make a more naive mistake about the relative value of the wrapping and its contents. I do not want to dwell on this question: it is too painful. And yet how can one keep from saying to those concerned: "Take care, do not confuse what you have with what you are. Get to know better what lies beneath the splendors of the world, so that you may feel the full force of their moral poverty and childishness." Truly, pride sets traps for us that are all too ridiculous. We must beware of a companion who makes us hateful to our neighbor and robs us of our clear sight.

Whoever gives himself over to the pride of riches also forgets another point, the most important of all: to possess is a social function. Individual property is, no doubt, as legitimate as the very existence of the individual and his freedom. The two are inseparable, and to attack such elementary foundations of all life is a utopia fraught with danger. But the individual is bound to society by every fiber, and everything he does he must do with the whole in view. To possess, therefore, is less a privilege to boast of than a responsibility whose weight one must feel. Just as every social function requires an apprenticeship, often a difficult one, so this function we call wealth requires its apprenticeship too. Knowing how to possess is an art, and one of the hardest to learn. Most people, poor or rich, imagine that in opulence there is nothing left to do but take life easy. That is why so few people know how to be rich. In too many hands, wealth is, to use a jovial and formidable comparison of Luther's, like a harp in the hooves of an ass. They have no idea how to use it.

So when we meet a man who is at once rich and simple, that is, one who regards his wealth as a means of fulfilling his human mission, we should greet him with respect, for he is certainly somebody. He has overcome obstacles, come through trials, triumphed over temptations both coarse and subtle. He does not confuse the contents of his purse with the contents of his mind or his heart, and he does not reckon the worth of his fellow men in figures. His exceptional position, far from exalting him, humbles him, because he feels keenly how much he lacks to be fully equal to his duty. He has remained a man; that says it all. He is welcoming and helpful, and far from making his possessions a barrier that separates him from the rest of humanity, he makes them a means of drawing ever closer to others. Although the trade of being rich has been singularly spoiled by so many proud and selfish men, such a man always manages to win the esteem of anyone who is not indifferent to justice. Whoever comes near him and sees how he lives is compelled to look within and ask: "What would I have become in such a position? Would I have this modesty, this detachment, this integrity that makes one treat one's own property as if it belonged to others?" As long as there is a world and a human society, as long as there are bitter conflicts of interest, as long as envy and selfishness exist on earth, nothing will be more worthy of respect than wealth imbued with the spirit of simplicity. It will do more than earn forgiveness: it will make itself loved.

More harmful than the pride inspired by wealth is the pride inspired by power, and by power I mean here any power one person holds over another, whether wide or narrow. I see no way of preventing there being people of unequal power in the world. Every organism implies a hierarchy of forces. We shall never get away from that. But I fear that, while the taste for power is very widespread, the spirit of power is almost nowhere to be found. Because they misunderstand it and misuse it, those who hold any particle of authority end up, almost everywhere, discrediting it.

Power exerts a very strong influence on whoever holds it. It takes a very steady head not to be turned by it. The kind of madness that seized the Roman emperors in the days of their omnipotence is a universal disease whose symptoms have appeared in every age. In every man a tyrant lies asleep, waiting only for a favorable occasion to wake. Now the tyrant is the worst enemy of authority, because he offers us its intolerable caricature. Hence a host of social complications, frictions and hatreds. Anyone who says to those who depend on him, "You will do this because it is my will," or better still, "because it is my good pleasure," is doing evil work. There is something in each of us that prompts us to resist personal power, and that something deserves great respect. For at bottom we are equals, and no one has the right to demand my obedience because he is he and I am I: in that case his command degrades me, and no one may allow himself to be degraded.

You need to have lived in schools, in workshops, in the army, in government offices, to have watched closely the relations between masters and servants, to have stopped here and there wherever man exercises supremacy over man, to form any idea of the harm done by those who wield power with arrogance. Out of every free soul they make a slave's soul, that is to say, a rebel's soul. And this baleful, antisocial effect seems to follow all the more surely, the nearer fate has placed the one who gives orders to the one who obeys them. The most implacable tyrant is the tyrant in miniature. A workshop foreman or an overseer brings more ferocity to his methods than a factory director or an owner. Many a corporal is harder on the soldier than the colonel is. In certain households where the mistress has not much more education than her maid, the two stand in the relation of a convict to a prison warder. Woe to anyone, anywhere, who falls into the hands of an underling drunk with his authority!

We too often forget that the first duty of anyone who exercises power is humility. Haughtiness is not authority. It is not we who are the law. The law stands above every head. We only interpret it, and to make it prevail in the eyes of others we must first be subject to it ourselves. Command and obedience in human society are, after all, only two forms of the same virtue: voluntary servitude. Most of the time, if you are not obeyed, it is because you did not obey first.

The secret of moral ascendancy belongs to those who command with simplicity. By their spirit they soften the harshness of the bare fact. Their power lies neither in gold braid, nor in title, nor in disciplinary measures. They resort neither to the rod nor to threats, and yet they obtain everything. Why? Because everyone feels that they themselves are ready for anything. What gives a man the right to ask another man to sacrifice his time, his money, his passions and even his life is not only that he himself is resolved to make all these sacrifices, but that he has already made them inwardly, in advance. In an order given by a man animated by this spirit there is some indefinable power that passes into the one who must obey and helps him do his duty.

In every field of human activity there are leaders who inspire, sustain and electrify their soldiers: under their command a troop works wonders. With them we feel capable of any effort, ready to walk through fire, as the saying goes, and we would walk through it with enthusiasm.

But there is not only the pride of the great; there is also the pride of the lowly, that arrogance from below which is the worthy counterpart of the arrogance from above. The two prides spring from the same root. The man who says, "I am the law," is not only that lofty, imperious being who provokes insurrection by his bearing alone; he is also the subordinate whose unruly head will not admit that there is anything above it.

There are positively a great many people whom every kind of superiority irritates. To them, all advice is an offense; all criticism, a slander; every order, an attack on their freedom. They cannot endure any rule. To respect something or someone seems to them a mental aberration. In their own way they tell us: "Outside of us, there is room for no one."

To the family of the proud also belong all those people of humble station, intractable and touchy to excess, who find that their superiors never show them enough honor; whom even the best and most humane of superiors cannot manage to satisfy; and who do their duty with the air of victims. At the bottom of these peevish spirits there is too much misplaced self-love. They do not know how to hold their post simply, and they complicate their own lives and the lives of others with ridiculous demands and unjust suspicions.

When we take the trouble to study people closely, we are surprised to find that pride has so many refuges among those whom it is customary to call the humble. Such is the power of this vice that it manages to raise around people living in the most modest conditions a thick wall that cuts them off from their neighbor. There they are, entrenched and barricaded in their ambitions and their disdain, as unapproachable as the mighty of the earth behind their aristocratic prejudices. Obscure or illustrious, pride drapes itself in its dark royalty as the enemy of the human race. It is the same in poverty and in grandeur: powerless and solitary, distrustful of everyone, complicating everything. And it can never be repeated often enough that if there is so much hatred and hostility between the different classes, we owe it less to the fate outside us than to the fate within. The clash of interests and the contrast of conditions dig ditches between us; no one can deny it. But pride turns these ditches into chasms, and in the end it is pride alone that shouts from one bank to the other: "There is nothing in common between you and us."

We are not done with pride, but it is impossible to portray it in all its forms. What I resent most is pride that mingles with knowledge and makes it barren. We owe our knowledge, like our wealth and our power, to our fellow human beings. It is a social force that must serve, and it can do so only if those who know remain close in heart to those who do not. When knowledge turns into an instrument of ambition, it destroys itself.

What shall we say of the pride of good people? For it exists, and it makes virtue itself hateful. The righteous man who repents of the evil that others do remains in solidarity with them and in social truth. On the contrary, the righteous man who despises others for their faults and failings cuts himself off from humanity, and his qualities, sunk to the level of an empty ornament for his vanity, become like those riches that goodness does not inspire, like that authority which the spirit of obedience does not temper. Haughty virtue is as detestable as the proud rich man and the arrogant master. It gives a person features and a bearing in which something indefinably provocative shows through. Its example drives us away instead of drawing us on, and those it deigns to honor with its good deeds feel as though they had been slapped.

Let us sum up and conclude:

It is a mistake to think that our advantages, whatever they may be, should serve our vanity. Each lays an obligation on its possessor, rather than offering a reason to boast. Material goods, power, knowledge, and qualities of heart and mind become sources of discord when they nourish pride. They remain beneficial only when they give their owners reasons for modesty. Let us be humble if we possess much, because it means we are in debt: everything a person has is owed to someone. Are we sure we can repay our debts?

Let us be humble if we are invested with important functions and hold the fate of others in our hands, for no clear-sighted person can help feeling unequal to such grave duties.

Let us be humble if we have much knowledge, for it only helps us recognize the greatness of the unknown and compare the little we have discovered ourselves with all we owe to the labor of others.

Finally, let us be humble above all if we are virtuous, because no one should feel their own faults more keenly than a person whose conscience is well trained, and such a person, more than anyone, should feel the need to be indulgent toward others and to suffer for those who do wrong.

"And what of the necessary distinctions?" someone may ask me. "By pressing simplicity so far, will you not wipe out that sense of distance which must be maintained if a society is to function properly?"

"I am not in favor of abolishing distances and distinctions. But I believe that what distinguishes a person lies neither in rank, nor in office, nor in uniform, nor in fortune, but solely within that person. More than any other age, ours has seen through the vanity of purely external distinctions. To be somebody now, it is no longer enough to wear an emperor's mantle or a royal crown; so what good would it do to pride oneself on a stripe of braid, a coat of arms or a ribbon? Outward signs are certainly not to be condemned; they have their meaning and their use, but only on condition that they cover something and not emptiness. The day they no longer correspond to anything, they become useless and dangerous. The only true way to distinguish oneself is to be worth more. If you want social distinctions, so necessary and so worthy of respect in themselves, to be truly respected, you must first make yourselves worthy of them. Otherwise you help to make them hated and despised. It is unfortunately all too certain that respect is on the decline among us, and it is certainly not for lack of distinctions fit to mark what wishes to be respected. The root of the evil lies in the prejudice that a high position exempts whoever holds it from observing the ordinary duties of life. As we rise, we think we are freeing ourselves from the law. And so we forget that the spirit of obedience and modesty should grow with one's position. The result is that those who demand the most respect for their office also make the least effort to deserve it. That is why respect is diminishing."

The only distinction we need is the desire to become better. A person who strives to become better grows humbler, more approachable, even more familiar with those who owe them respect. But since they gain in esteem when known more closely, the hierarchy loses nothing. They harvest all the more respect for having sown less pride.