The Concept of Pride
 

May as well start a thread about this to see if pride (in any shape or form) is a positive characteristic to have...

I think it's necessary to feel some for yourself, or I imagine you'd be feeling like a very depressed and worthless individual, particularly in a competitive world like we live in.

Individual pride I think makes sense, at least if you did something to achieve that pride.

Racial pride, national pride, and pride in a sports team (and anything like that) doesn't really make much sense to me though since your basically taking credit for what others accomplished just because you happened upon them by random chance. Though even so, I still take pride in my sports teams winning championships, willingly knowing I did nothing to get them there :)

you said everything I wanted to say in a nutshell

/thread

Oh yes. I had no pride in myself whatsoever, and I felt horrible for a good couple years. I had no care about school or doing much of anything. Eventually I came around, and now I feel fantastic. I'm gonna be an amazing designer.

Racial pride I don't understand. But being proud of your culture I completely understand. And as I said in the other thread, I don't see how you couldn't be proud about how we became a country and how we got here. It's not that I'm taking credit at all. I admire the people (founding fathers) who made it so that we are where we are today. And I am proud of them. And I am proud that we fought against oppression and won. Am I proud of McDonald's and Wal-Mart, our obesity rate and how fucked our education system is? No. So when I say I'm proud to be from here, I'm more referring to that than the current state of things. Now don't think that I have a U.S. flag hanging from my car, and automatically assume that every other country is inferior to us. That's not it at all. I enjoy culture as a whole, so I admire most all countries.

Self-esteem is necessary, according to psychologists, but let's forget about them for the moment. Self-esteem is just a form of recognition of the truth, in which the "truth" is your own value in relation to something else. I assume we are all interested in truth here, so I won't bother defending why we should seek it.

It is a "positive characteristic" to feel pride that is warranted, meaning that it is based in truth. Often times, people have a distorted view of value, giving value to things that are valueless. How does being part of a certain skin color give us more value? It doesn't, so any "racial pride" seems ludicrous. If someone is intelligent, though, then it is healthy and rational that they recognize it. It is a motivation to become more intelligent. Yeah, if they start saying, "I am the best," then we look at them like they're a ****, but that is because they really aren't the best. Plus, real pride isn't gained from saying something like, "I am the best." That is only an expression, whereas the actual source of the pride is in the accomplishment itself.

This idea was debated at length here.

To be fair, one could argue that accomplishments (that result in pride) aren't any more under our control then, say, our race or appearance since our genetics and environment are responsible for decision-making. That gets into the debate about free will though.

Hmm, that's a little too tenuous for my liking.

What do you mean?