True pride is cool and nonchalant. Conceit is at once touchy and dependent.
Our conceit shields us from humiliations which would prove fatal to our pride.
Pride is obnoxious to itself and all the world. The proud are dangerous, but the presumptuous are disarmed by their own presumption. Pride is a querulous radical, conceit a complacent tory.
Pride is solitary, conceit is clubbable. Smug people are more straightforward, less tortured, less venomous and too vain to be vindictive. The conceit that makes them deaf to real derision makes them receptive to feigned praise. Stroke their ego the right way, and they will purr like kittens. So long as they’re sufficiently flattered, they will be quite amicable. And since they’re always flattering themselves, they are friendly and accommodating. They are so pleased with themselves, that they are not hard to please, and that’s enough to make everyone else pleased with them.
We would be much less pleasing to others, if we were not so pleased with ourselves.
Those who feel most pride are bound also to feel the most shame. I’m stung by my pride, since I have to justify it. But I’m comforted by my conceit, because it justifies me. ‘Pride, a noble
passion,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘is not blind to its faults, but hauteur is.’ The independent weigh their own and others’ worth by their intrinsic merits, the smug by the prestige that they’ve won in the eyes of the world.
Proud people pay too dear for good turns. Braggarts deem that they are due all the favours that are done them, and so they pay them back too stintingly.
The brazen beg so much for themselves. The proud demand so much of themselves. ‘The gentleman,’ according to Confucius, ‘strives to deserve. The arrogant wish to get.’
Pride pioneers new concepts. But conceit satisfies us with the rusty banged-up idols of our tribe.
Conceit contents you with humbug, but honour contents you with nothing short of the truth. Most people’s self-assurance is sturdy enough to buttress all their trumpery, though few have a springy enough pride to propel them to seek out the truth. Principled people give up their chance of happiness to serve the truth. The vain give up happiness to serve a lie.
Our pipedreams cost us nothing but our true pride. And we’re always ready to shop that to keep up our sham self-belief.
We agree with Pope, that pride is ‘the never-failing vice of fools,’ and since we know that we are no fools, we conclude that neither are we proud. You need not be undeserving to be vain.
Vanity dogs pride wherever it goes, as hyenas tag a lion. The conceited may have too little pride, but the proud still have no end of conceit. ‘To be vain,’ as Swift points out, ‘is rather a mark of humility than pride.’
Many of us are less modest or less proud than we seem, but none are less conceited. No one has too little self-esteem. But it may be that all of us have too little self-respect.
Some people set such a high value on themselves, not so much because they overrate what they are, but because they underrate what they might be. They think too well of what they are to
be humble, but don’t think well enough of what they might be to be proud. They shoot at such a low mark, how could they fail to hit it?
We judge that those above us are arrogant when they assert their preeminence over us, and that those below us are presumptuous when they assume an equality with us.
10 Conceit
We are gratified both by our enemies, since we know that we are not like them, and by our friends, since we’re sure that they are not like us. We feel that our friends are better than everyone else, and that we are better than our friends. And so they give us a double reason to think well of our own worth. Two will jog on well in tandem, so long as each feels superior to the other in some respect. And as Chesterfield wrote, ‘most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.’
A group is maintained by a corporate vanity of its own which feeds but exceeds that of its several members.
We live inside a bubble blown by our own self-flattery.
Some vainglorious people babble to you about all the wonderful things that they’re up to, and some are sure that they are so well known that they have no need to. They don’t want to insult you by assuming that you alone of all the world could be ignorant of it.
‘One speaks little,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘when vanity does not make one speak.’ Some people have nothing to say of a thing if they have no part in it. And some can find something of their own to talk of in everything.
Ambitious people tell themselves the self-serving lies that most of us only tell others, and they dare to tell others the mad self-glorifying lies that most of us keep locked in our own breast.
‘A man’s self,’ says William James, ‘is the sum total of all that he can call his.’ It takes in all that pertains to us, from our body and clothes to our husband or wife, our sons and daughters, clan, car, club and address, firm, homeland, faction or church. The self that my vanity fancies I fill up juts out much farther than the self that others can see. So without perceiving it they are
constantly bumping and bruising my imaginary being. We use words to fix the outline of our shape, and they have the elasticity to stretch it farther than we reach.
I reckon myself richer for each of my belongings. And I reckon my belongings so rich because they are mine. Custody is nine tenths of how we rate a commodity. Our beaming
self-satisfaction gilds all the dross that we manage to scoop up.