What’s bad about pride?
The pride of the thought ‘I’ isn't about any thoughts involving a self. After all, thoughts like “the self isn't real” or “I'm not the kind of thing I thought I was” also involve an idea of ‘self' or ‘I'.
Instead, this kind of pride is one that reinforces, emotionally, perceptually, or cognitively, a sense of yourself as a real and separately existing thing in the world.This is made clear in the description by Nagarjuna, an important Buddhist philosopher from India around 200 ce. In his ethical text, Precious Garland, he describes this type of pride in a chapter devoted to the bodhisattva ideal:
Consciousness grasping on to
Those empty five aggregates
By foolishly hanging on to the idea of ‘I'
This is called the pride of the thought ‘I'18
This kind of pride is present in many experiences that imply a self that is separate from the five aggregates.Think of a reaction rooted in the bad kind of arrogant pride: a rich guy in a suit gets average service in a restaurant and gets angry because he thinks he deserved better. His pride, thinking he is better and more important than the other customers and the staff, manifests in a wide range of domains.The most obvious is behavioral — he speaks rudely to his waiter and his body language betrays his arrogance.
But his pride also touches other domains.An important one is emotional; he gets angry and frustrated and feels contempt for the people waiting on him. He might have an explicit belief that he is more important, thinking to himself, “These minimum-wage losers can't even get my burger done right.” His sense of pride also affects what he notices and what he ignores; he notices things like small mistakes, messy shirts, and a working-class accent while he ignores the customer-to-waiter ratio, sincere apologies, and other mitigating factors.
This guy's pride is bad and leads to harmful emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
His thoughts about himself are self-centered and mistaken in various ways; he thinks he is more important than others and he assumes the world, or at least that restaurant, revolves around him. But if Buddhists like Nagarjuna and Santideva are right, this guy's pride rests on an even deeper mistake. It rests on the assumption that he has an independent self at all, that there is a persisting self that has all of the good qualities and importance that he attaches to it.Assuming that a pile of laundry is something separate from the items of clothing that make it up is a mistake.Talking about the ‘pile' is just shorthand, a conceptual fiction and not something real. Someone who learns about the average American but then asks where exactly this person lives makes such a mistake. ‘Average American' is not a real person but a conceptual fiction used to talk about a complex collection. For Buddhists, the same is true of a sense of an independent self. The guy in the restaurant isn't just wrong about his own relative importance in the world, but makes a more fundamental mistake about what he really is. It's not just that his comparisons are off, but he's mixed up about the very nature of the things he's comparing.
From a Buddhist perspective, he's a bit like a severely delusional person who boasts,“I am a chicken, the most powerful bird in the world!"This person is wrong on two counts — a chicken isn't the most powerful bird, but, more importantly, they're not a chicken.The arrogant restaurant patron is wrong that he's a more important than other customers, but this mistake rests on a deeper one. He's wrong that he's a persisting and independent self at all.
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