I have to give credit to those Chinese. They have this other dating system. I don’t understand it, probably never will, but what I do know is that it’s different from our year and they’re still sticking to it. You just have to love their tenacity for ancient stuff. I especially love it because I get today off work.
Koreans cling to the same heritage too you see, with surprisingly more tenacity. Take chopsticks for example. Now, if they were just a preference, I could easily understand it. However their shunning of the fork is suspiciously total. Once might expect some acknowledgment of it’s practical superiority when eating, say, steak. However the Koreans would sooner bring in scissors and tongs to cut up the meat than to admit defeat by letting the knife and fork take a place on the table.
I guess it’s just a matter of pride.
Pride affects us all. It starts to come into play during the late teenage years and more and more asserts itself as a factor to be considered. It’s simply the basis of a lot of dumb decisions. It’s consciousness’ side-effect, for while consciousness gives us a self-awareness, pride turns this awareness against us, forcing us to recognize the internal instead of focus on the external.
It’s effects are damaging. How can you be a student if you are too proud to admit someone knows more than you? How can you take criticism? How can you fix a problem if you are too proud to admit that there’s anything wrong?
I find it happening to me. I was browsing a writing seminar online. It required you to submit your work online for the instructor and other students to critique. I found myself dreading this. I heard a voice and it said “who are they to critique you?” No, I didn’t believe that. They were experienced, they knew a great deal about good writing. “You are going to look like a stupid idiot, who doesn’t know anything,” the voice continued. “You will appear lower than them.”
As a teacher, I notice it in class. The best students are the ones who put their own feelings aside and concentrate on learning as much as they can from me. The students who are too proud to try, never learn anything. It’s especially noticeable when teaching a language because if you don’t speak it regularly, it will never come. Those who are shy or proud (in the end, they’re about the same in their damage) can’t speak, whereas those who shut down that negative internal dialog improve in leaps and bounds.
Pride is not all bad though. If you do something great and people start clapping at you, pride is going to give you a bucket load of endorphins as a present. Pride will also make you look strong to others, initially. Just before they become infuriated with your inability to compromise or see reason, they will see you as someone of strength and character. Those who have pride, seek dominion over something. Not everyone can be the top dog, but all the lower dogs can be the top dog of the dogs lower than they. Pride serves to make you feel better about yourself, while at the same time demanding of others that your way is the right one.
All of this may not make complete sense. If pride’s goal is to make you look strong to others, but always succeeds in making you more stupid and too stubborn to change with the times, then it obviously doesn’t work. But then, nobody said that pride was an exact idiocy, after all.
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