by Geoff Olson

Greed drives the desire for profit at any cost. Envy is a mainstay of the fashion industry, and marketing as a whole. Anger is subtly exploited in the Army of One fantasies of video games and recruitment advertisements. Pride fuels the “high self-esteem” bandwagon. In the era of hypercapitalism, these and most of the other so-called deadly sins have been rehabilitated by the market as positive, even praiseworthy, states of mind. “Sin” has been spun. Hence, what I call The Deadly Spins.

A few years back I ran into a friend of a friend at a social event. I asked how things were going. “Great,” he responded. “I’ve only got seven left.” An awkward silence followed. “Uh, seven what?” I asked. He slowly brought his hands up to chest level, flipping me the bird in stereo. “Excuse me?” I replied. With a thin smile, he repeated the gesture. I burst out laughing. “Very diplomatic!” I said, slapping him on the back and then walking away.
Later I learned this fellow was referring to seven more episodes of a television series he was producing for a cable sports network. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t drunk. He was simply offended by my lack of awareness of his monumental multimedia work, and had no reluctance in communicating this. A little man with a Napoleon complex, and a show that everyone should know, he was sending me a message of social expendability. Simply put, our respective professions didn’t intersect, and there was no purpose – no utility – in his treating someone outside his sphere with respect. I could be safely written out of his script.
I discovered later from others who knew him that this encounter was consistent with his character. This guy certainly didn’t have any problem with self-esteem. In fact, he could have used rather less of it, and a more realistic assessment of his talent. I’d like to think of him as a bit of an anomaly, but the sad truth is he’s just another example of a personality structure that has gained some authority in the past few decades. After years of valourizing the individual, telling him or her to “look out for number one,” to “go for it” and to “just do it,” we’re now seeing the result: the ascendance of the just-short-of-sociopathic personality. The mental state at issue here is overweening pride. Arrogance.
“Superbia, ira, invidia, avaritia, acedia, gula, luxuria.”
Pride, or superbia, tops Pope Gregory’s Latinate list of the deadly sins. In the hit parade of crimes against body and spirit, pride beats out envy, anger, greed, sloth, gluttony, and lust. The last of two, gluttony and lust, are mere carnal sins. They are sins of the flesh – the body or lower self. Superbia, or pride, is the top sin of the higher self, or soul. Pride’s transgression is to make your own ego a personal god.
It’s obvious that a certain measure of self-interest and self-regard is necessary to function in the world. What’s not quite as obvious is that too much pride or “vainglory” can kickstart a fair bit of bad behaviour. Pride can lead to envy if you find you are not acknowledged or rewarded in the same manner as others. Envy can in turn lead to anger and melancholy, which may feed greed as you try to fill a hole in the soul with money and material goods. And should any of these gambits fail to caulk the opening, there’s always the other vices that may act as a temporary stopgap.
“Pride goeth before a fall.” The line refers to the worst career move in religious literature, described in the Book of Isaiah. Lucifer, first-born of the angels, was powerful and beautiful, but also proud and presumptuous. He aimed too high and defied God, who banished the original rebel angel from heaven. Lucifer’s crime in challenging God was the defining sin of the Judeo-Christian universe. The sin of pride, of ego.
The word “sin” itself is of Indo-European origin, going back 5,000 years, which is as far back as etymologists can trace any word with assurance. In a 1989 interview on the CBC Ideas series, Cambridge university theologian Don Cupit explained the beginnings of “sin.”
“People are told not to cross over lines. So many of the oldest words for sin in the Old Testament, for example, imply trespassing, transgression, overstepping the mark, crossing a boundary that you shouldn’t have crossed in some way. When you violate a line or boundary in that way, it creates a condition of ritual impurity that you’ve got to purge by some kind of sacrifice or compensation, and it’s from that primitive origin that the doctrine of sin develops…”
Cupit holds that the Judean concept of sin was elaborated further by Christianity into the idea “of the universe as a hierarchy, a divine order, rank above rank, and sin becomes a matter of not keeping to your proper place in the scheme of things.”
Over the past 500 years, the western world’s attitude toward pride, and our place in the universe, became less damning and much more dynamic. This transformation is central to the construction of the modern secular psyche. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars rediscovered the ancient Greek conception of the autonomous individual as the measure of all things. A hugely liberating social transformation swept across a continent still reeling from the plague and feudalism’s collapse. The rise of mercantilism, freeing believers to pursue personal wealth without guilt, allowed the rise of a secular money-economy in which the individual was central.
The Catholic church, which historian Lewis Mumford once described as the “tomb built on the body of Christ,” no longer functioned as the sole arbiter of everyday lives. Protestantism transformed the individual’s relationship with God to a more personal dynamic, in which a deity could be gloried through Good Works and the acquisition of personal wealth, further pushing the individual to the center of all things.
Science delivered the coup de grace. The stiff Aristotelian universe inherited by Christian clerics, where change was equated with corruption, was shattered into pieces by a succession of thinkers, from Galileo to Einstein. There have been obvious gains from this intellectual freedom (and especially freedom from the guilt and fear pitched by the church), but at a price. The individual has been reduced to a free agent adrift in a dynamic, but fundamentally meaningless, universe. A cosmos where morality is as relative as the observer’s point of view offers freedom, but it is largely the nightmare freedom of the void.
The irony is that over time one set of chains – dogmatic, anti-intellectual – was exchanged for another set – individualistic, technocratic, and materialistic. Science and spin entered into a Luciferian relationship, pitching a new kind of fear and limitation to the citizen-consumer, with a mass market responding to newly-created desires. From the early twentieth century on, psychology, organizational management, and the dark arts of public relations combined to valourize the individual, even while making him or her greater prey to the hypnotic forces of mass persuasion. There was – and is – much to enjoy from the triumphs of hypercapitalism, but the deal has a dark side. From the Aztec collapse to the Belgian Congo’s slave trade to the resource wars of the present day, the West has bought its pleasures largely on the back of others, in places where market forces have meant more stick than carrot.
Today the citizen/consumer of the West has become the deciding unit of social measurement, and pride is no longer considered a sin. Quite the opposite; it’s just another word for high self-esteem – the more the better, in theory. As I noted earlier, a certain healthy amount of pride, the defining trait of the ego, is necessary to mediate the world. But it’s all the negatives attached to the ego – fear, envy, and greed – that fuels the money culture of mass desire. Community gets reduced to isolated atoms of consumption, resonating to advertising’s ceaseless signal: “me.”
Yet in most cultures throughout history, “looking out for number one” would land the true believer into a hut on the outskirts of the village, or even outright ostracism from the rest of the tribe. Too much pride is toxic to the social mix of indigenous people, but here is the irony: it is the very foundation for consumer culture. This is the psychopath writ large, the idiot monster that is ravaging the biosphere and threatening our future survival.
Ironically, the finger-waving acquaintance mentioned at the beginning had no shortage of self-esteem. In fact, you’d be more likely to call him boastful and arrogant – qualities that aren’t necessarily a hindrance to success. Society often rewards those who convincingly carve out a false idol with the aid of a mirror.
(The self-aggrandizing hip-hop scene is one of the more obvious manifestations of this. The narcissism is hammered home so often it’s become a kind of pop-culture white noise. In a scene from the MTV music video awards two years ago, white rapper Kid Rock took the podium, declaiming his triumphs as a “badass pimp” with the “bitches.” A succession of posturing superstars stepped up to the podium, all with equally colourful descriptions of their awesome selves. “It’s all about me,” each star declaimed in so many words. The crowd, living vicariously through these swollen egos, roared assent.)
What do you tell someone who believes “me” to be the whole show? Do you tell them that if everyone else is thinking the same thing, it can’t be anyone’s show? In spite of what they may think, those who have built a temple to themselves aren’t unique, autonomous beings – they’re link sausages. The system cranks out personality after personality just like theirs. As they flip the bird to the world, you can only shake your head at these agents of ego, and how powerful the illusion of separation that they have bought into.

Next month we’ll take a look at how pride has been spun by the self-esteem industry. Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist. gefo@telus.net

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist gefo@telus.net