Egoism and pride

It is well known that the greater part of life's miseries originate in men's egoism. Since each one thinks of himself before thinking of others and is concerned above all with satisfying his own desires, each one naturally takes care to procure that satisfaction for himself at any cost, and sacrifices without scruple the interests of others, both in the most insignificant things and in the greatest, of the moral order as well as of the material order. Hence all social antagonisms, all struggles, all conflicts, and all miseries, since each one is concerned only with despoiling his neighbor.

Egoism originates from pride. The exaltation of the personality leads man to consider himself above others. Judging himself to have superior rights, he is offended by whatever, in his view, constitutes an offense to his rights. The importance that, out of pride, he attributes to his own person naturally makes him egoistic.

Egoism and pride are born of a natural feeling: the instinct of self-preservation. All instincts have their reason for being and their usefulness, for God could have made nothing useless. He did not create evil; it is man who produces it, abusing God's gifts by virtue of his free will. Kept within just limits, that feeling is good in itself. Exaggeration is what makes it bad and pernicious. The same happens with all the passions that man frequently turns aside from their providential purpose. He was not created egoistic, nor proud, by God, who created him simple and ignorant; it is man who made himself egoistic and proud, exaggerating the instinct that God granted him for his preservation. Men cannot be happy if they do not live in peace, that is, if they are not animated by a feeling of benevolence, of indulgence, and of mutual condescension; in a word: so long as they seek to crush one another. Charity and fraternity sum up all the conditions and all the social duties; both, however, presuppose self-denial. Now, self-denial is incompatible with egoism and pride; therefore, with those vices true fraternity is not possible, nor, consequently, equality, nor liberty, given that the egoist and the proud man want everything for themselves.

They will always be the gnawing worms of all progressive institutions; so long as they dominate, the most generous social systems, the most wisely combined, will crumble under their blows. It is beautiful, no doubt, to proclaim the reign of fraternity, but why do so, if a destructive cause exists? It is to build on shifting ground; it would be the same as to decree health in an unhealthy region. In such a region, for men to fare well it will not suffice to send physicians, for these will die like the others; it is urgent to destroy the causes of the unhealthiness. For men to live on Earth as brothers, it does not suffice to give them lessons in morality; it is important to destroy the causes of antagonism, to attack the root of the evil: pride and egoism. Such is the wound upon which all the attention of those who seriously desire the good of Humanity must be concentrated. So long as such an obstacle subsists, they will see all their efforts paralyzed, not only by a resistance of inertia, but also by an active force that will work incessantly to destroy the work they undertake, because every great, generous, and emancipating idea ruins personal pretensions.

It is impossible, it will be said, to destroy pride and egoism, because they are vices inherent in the human species. If it were so, we would have to despair of all moral progress; meanwhile, once one considers man in the different epochs that have elapsed, there is no denying that evident progress has taken place. Now, if he has progressed, he will naturally progress still. On the other hand, will not a single man be found without pride or egoism? Do we not see, on the contrary, creatures of generous disposition, in whom the feelings of love of neighbor, of humility, of devotion, and of self-denial seem innate? The number of these is positively smaller than that of the egoists; if it were not so, the latter would not be the makers of the law. There are many more such creatures than is thought, and if they seem so few, it is because pride puts itself in evidence, whereas modest virtue keeps itself in obscurity. If, therefore, pride and egoism were among the necessary conditions of Humanity, like that of nourishment for the sustenance of life, there would be no exceptions. The essential point, then, is to bring it about that the exception comes to constitute the rule; for this, it is a matter, above all, of destroying the causes that produce and maintain the evil.

Of these causes, the principal one evidently resides in the false idea that man forms of his nature, of his past, and of his future. Because he does not know whence he comes, he believes himself to be more than he is; and not knowing where he is going, he concentrates all his thought on earthly life; he finds it as agreeable as possible; he longs for all satisfactions, for all enjoyments; that is the reason why he tramples his fellow man without scruple, if the latter opposes him with some difficulty. But, for this, it is necessary that he predominate; equality would give to others rights that he wants only for himself; fraternity would impose on him sacrifices to the detriment of his well-being; liberty too he wants only for himself, and grants it to others only when it in no way injures his prerogatives. As all nourish the same pretensions, the result has been the perpetual conflicts that lead them to pay very dearly for the rare enjoyments they manage to obtain. Let man identify himself with the future life and his way of seeing will completely change, like that of an individual who has to remain only for a few hours in a poor dwelling and who knows that, upon leaving, he will have another, magnificent, for the rest of his days.

The importance of the present life, so sad, so short, so ephemeral, fades, for him, before the splendor of the infinite future that unfolds before his sight. The natural and logical consequence of this certainty is that man sacrifices a fleeting present to an enduring future, whereas before he sacrificed everything to the present. Taking the future life as his objective, it matters little to him to be a little longer or a little less in this other one; worldly interests become the accessory, instead of being the principal; he works in the present with the aim of assuring his position in the future, all the more when he knows under what conditions he can be happy. As concerns earthly interests, human beings can create obstacles for him: he has to push them aside, and he becomes egoistic by the very force of things. If he casts his eyes on high, toward a happiness that no one can hinder, no interest will present itself to him in oppressing whomever it may be, and egoism becomes for him devoid of object. Nevertheless, there will remain the stimulant of pride.

The cause of pride lies in the belief, on which man establishes himself, of his individual superiority. There too the influence of the concentration of thoughts upon corporeal life makes itself felt. In him who sees nothing ahead of himself, behind himself, nor above himself, the feeling of personality prevails and pride remains without counterweight.

Incredulity not only lacks the means to combat pride, but stimulates it and gives it reason, by denying the existence of a power superior to Humanity. The incredulous man believes only in himself; it is therefore natural that he should have pride. Whereas, in the blows that strike him, he sees only a work of chance and rises up to combat it, he who has faith perceives the hand of God and submits. To believe in God and in the future life is, consequently, the first condition for moderating pride; but it does not suffice. Together with the future, it is necessary to see the past, in order to form an exact idea of the present.

For the proud man to cease believing in his superiority, it is necessary to prove to him that he is no more than others and that these are as much as he; that equality is a fact and not merely a fine philosophical theory; that these truths stand out from the preexistence of the soul and from reincarnation.

Without the preexistence of the soul, man is induced to believe that God, if he believes in God, conferred upon him exceptional advantages; when he does not believe in God, he renders thanks to chance and to his own merit. Initiating him into the prior life of the soul, preexistence teaches him to distinguish, from corporeal, transitory life, the spiritual, infinite life; he comes to know that souls all come forth equal from the hands of the Creator; that all have the same point of departure and the same finality, which all will reach, in more or less time, according to the efforts they employ; that he himself only came to be what he is after having, for a long time and painfully, vegetated, like the others, on the inferior degrees of evolution; that, between the most backward and the most advanced, there is only a question of time; that the advantages of birth are purely corporeal and independent of the Spirit; that the simple proletarian may, in another existence, be born on a throne, and the greatest potentate be reborn a proletarian. If he takes into account only planetary life, he sees only the social inequalities of the moment, which are those that impress him; if, however, he casts his eyes upon the whole of the life of the Spirit, upon the past and the future, from the point of departure to that of arrival, those inequalities vanish and he recognizes that God conceded no advantage to any of his children to the prejudice of the others; that he gave an equal part to all and did not smooth the way more for some than for others; that he who presents himself as less advanced than he on Earth may take the lead from him, if he works more than he does to perfect himself; he will recognize, finally, that, since none reaches the goal except by his own efforts, the principle of equality is a principle of justice and a law of Nature, before which falls the pride of privilege. Proving that Spirits can be reborn in different social conditions, whether by expiation or by trial, reincarnation teaches that, in him whom we treat with disdain, there may be one who was our superior or our equal in another existence, a friend or a relative. If he knew it, he who encounters him would treat him with attentions, but in that case he would have no merit; on the other hand, if he knew that his present friend was his enemy, his servant, or his slave, he would no doubt repel him. Now, God did not will that it should be so, wherefore he cast a veil over the past. In this way, man is led to see in all his brothers and his equals, whence a natural basis for fraternity; knowing that he may be treated as he has treated others, charity becomes for him a duty and a necessity founded upon Nature itself. Jesus laid down the principle of charity, of equality, and of fraternity, making it an express condition for salvation; but it was reserved for the third manifestation of the will of God, for Spiritism, by the knowledge it affords of spiritual life, by the new horizons it unveils, and by the laws it reveals, to sanction this principle, proving that it does not enclose a simple moral doctrine, but a law of Nature that man has the utmost interest in practicing. Now, he will practice it once, ceasing to regard the present as the beginning and the end, he understands the solidarity that exists between the present, the past, and the future. In the immense field of the infinite, which Spiritism allows him to glimpse, his capital importance is annulled, and he perceives that, by himself alone, he is worth nothing and is nothing; that all have need of one another and that some are no more than others: a double blow, to his egoism and to his pride. But, for this, faith is necessary to him, without which he will remain in the routine of the present, not blind faith, which flees from light, restricts ideas, and, in consequence, nourishes egoism. He needs intelligent, rational faith, which seeks brightness and not darkness, which boldly tears the veil of mysteries and widens the horizon. This faith, the basic element of all progress, is what Spiritism provides him, robust faith, because it rests on experience and on facts, because it furnishes him palpable proofs of the immortality of his soul, shows him whence he comes, where he is going, and why he is on Earth, and, finally, establishes his ideas, still uncertain, about his past and about his future. Once he has decisively entered upon this path, no longer having anything to incite them, egoism and pride will be extinguished little by little, for lack of object and of nourishment, and all social relations will be modified under the influence of charity and fraternity rightly understood.

Can this come about by the effect of a sudden change? No, it would be impossible: nothing operates abruptly in Nature; never does health return suddenly to a sick man; between sickness and health there is always convalescence. Man cannot instantaneously change his point of view and turn his gaze from Earth toward heaven; the infinite confounds and dazzles him; he needs time to assimilate the new ideas.

Spiritism is, without contradiction, the most powerful element of moralization, because it undermines egoism and pride at their base, affording a point of support to morality. It has worked miracles of conversion; it is true that these are still only individual cures, and not rarely partial ones. What, however, it has produced with respect to individuals constitutes a pledge of what it will one day produce upon the masses. It is not possible for it to tear out the harmful weeds at a single stroke. It gives faith, and faith is the good seed, but it is necessary that it have time to germinate and to bear fruit, which is why not all Spiritists are already perfect. It took man in the midst of life, in the fire of the passions, in the full force of prejudices, and if, in such circumstances, it worked prodigies, what will it not do when it takes him at birth, still virgin of all unhealthy impressions; when the creature sucks charity with the milk and has fraternity to rock him; when, finally, an entire generation is educated and nourished with ideas that reason, developing, will fortify, instead of falsifying? Under the domain of these ideas, which will become the common faith of all, progress no longer colliding with egoism and pride, institutions will reform themselves of their own accord, and Humanity will advance rapidly toward the destinies that are promised to it on Earth, while awaiting those of heaven. Allan Kardec.

[1]

[See: Egoism and pride in Posthumous Works.]