Love and Pride
of our Nation, Race and Deeds
It’s usual to proclaim our right to pride: to motherland, to
our deeds, to our race... And that pride is, deep down, a
way of loving: of loving our nation, our race, our personal
deeds. Our pride is not entirely separable from love.
But pride is usually a minor and poor way of loving, and a
minor or negative feeling. It may be vanity, arrogance,
presumption, racism (in the case of racial pride), silly
nationalism (in the case of displaced love to the nation we
belong to).
Love present in pride is built at the cost of more authentic
loves. To love the country we were born in, or to be proud
of what we have done can be rather reducing and a form of
ignorance.
Yes. Pride is ignorance, or a cause of ignorance. Pride can
blind us: those who feel proud of their deeds, beauty,
intelligence or physical strength, are ignoring the other
side of reality, valuing excessively transitory things of
our lives, forgetting our inner condition of modest and
humble beings. Pride is an expression of vanity, and vanity
blinds us towards the fundamentals of our existential
condition. Pride is to pretend to be more than what we
really are, or what things we value are.
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