Pride

One night, lying in bed I re-listened to a lecture on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The lecture was based on the social virtues that Aristotle thinks we should aim for. For those unfamiliar with Aristotle, his ethics was about the “middle way” approach. For example, a person should neither be prodigal with money (like the story of the Prodigal son in the Bible) nor a “scrooge” – loving the acquisition of money for money’s sake. Instead, Aristotle argues, the middle way of being prudent with money has validity in itself. We should spend money when the need arises but be wise about spending within your means. That seems fair enough to me. It makes perfect sense.

One discussion however was especially interesting. It was Aristotle’s take on Pride. For Aristotle, Pride was taken as the ideal, the middle way (the extremes being Hubris – the excessive pride before a fall and the total lack of self-esteem).

For most people, whether culturally or via religion, Pride on most counts is seen to be something to be avoided. Pride was after all in a list of the cardinal sins by the Catholic Church. To me personally, I have always been taught by my parents to never flaunt myself. That quality along with honesty is very well engrained into me.

So to me, I was initially puzzled at Aristotle choosing Pride as a virtue but as the lecturer explained later, Aristotle meant that pride was: a reverent love for the truth (taken from a quote from an instruction booklet for getting closer to god for monks). That makes sense; a person should know thyself, so that you understand your own special abilities and your weaknesses.

For me though, intellectually, I could understand the argument but as I live my life at university, I realized that I had a self-esteem problem – I did not appreciate myself as I should. Maybe I should have realized this earlier. There were many cases where I was listening to my parents talk about my successes to other parents (which is THE favourite past time of Asian parents). The problem was that I felt embarrassed not joy or happiness at hearing of your achievements. Perhaps my parents over played the “pride is bad, modesty is good” mantra too much for me. Whatever.

Even though, looking back, I have overcome many, many challenges, socially, personally, academically but I havn’t really appreciated myself enough. I did not have a reverent love for the truth. As a result, sometimes at medical school and especially around the release of test/exam marks, I do feel small sometime. I see friends, kind of effortlessly understand topics that take me a lot of time to go through. I see some other people who are very good with their time, they somehow get time to fit a lot of things into their life and still succeed. In the midst of this, sometimes, when the day isn’t going so well for me (everybody has those kind of days) I do feel down… it seems I am shrinking.

The problem I think is that I have not realized to accept who I am. I do lack a sense of self confidence sometime and that I think is because I forget… how much I have gone through and achieved.

If I can remember myself as a socially inhibited student at high school where even talking to a familiar teacher my speech was nervous to a far more outgoing and confident person that I am now. I once was so nervous that when I went to my neighbour’s house to ask for possible sponsorship of the school work day (fundraising for the school by working for other people) I was so nervous that I couldn’t pierce together a sentence! This was not in 5^th form, this was 7^th form. In exactly one year at university, I have developed socially enough that I was capable of getting through the rigorous and dreaded Medical Interview. I have gone a long way!!!

(more later)