...where the Two become the One
I sometimes joke, deadpan, “I’m the most humble person I’ve met—but I’m not modest.” It’s not a flex; it’s a pointer to a common confusion many people never examine. We often applaud the quiet performance of modesty while missing the sturdier virtue of humility. When truth matters more than optics, that mix-up becomes hard to ignore, because people reward the surface and punish the substance. Socratic humility is the intellectual virtue […] Read more »
Pride in one’s past means taking credit for one’s specific achievements, pausing to recognize oneself with either “I did it,” or “This is good.” It means taking credit, as a self-made being, for simply being who one is. This includes taking credit for one’s accomplishments of character and personal development. […] The two perspectives of pride in the past and pride in the future are inseparable, because one cannot achieve […] Read more »
Transactional Love is a conditional exchange where affection or care is offered with the expectation of receiving something in return, such as validation or reciprocation. It operates like a contract, driven by external motives and often tied to a sense of obligation or debt. Non-Transactional Love is given freely without expecting repayment, rooted in genuine care and intrinsic motivation. It prioritizes authentic connection and truth, unbound by calculations or external rewards. The […] Read more »
Pride, in a virtuous sense, is the rational recognition and celebration of one’s earned achievements and self-worth, grounded in personal integrity and effort. It fosters confidence and resilience, enabling individuals to stand firm in their convictions without veering into arrogance. Socratic humility is the intellectual virtue of recognizing and embracing the limits of one’s knowledge, fostering openness to learning and growth. It counters arrogance by encouraging a continuous quest for […] Read more »
Has your depth ever been misunderstood to the point where you are personally shamed, judged, or attacked by shallow people? Getting misjudged, straw manned, and ridiculed by superficial and shallow people is a lot like children playing in a kiddie pool, where the children are judging a submarine navigating the depths of the ocean as if it was evil, mean, and scary due to its capacity and size. If such […] Read more »
Pride, humility, and dignity emerge as authentic virtues when they arise from an internal locus of identity, shaped by self-awareness and rational integrity. These internalized traits stand in sharp contrast to their externalized distortions—arrogance, pretentiousness, and a superficial mimicry of dignity—which depend on an external locus of control or identity for validation. Ayn Rand, the creator of Objectivism, extolled pride as a moral summit, while rejecting humility as a flaw. […] Read more »
I often joke around and tell people “I’m the most humble person I’ve met, but I’m not modest”, but I say this to poke at them because I also know that society doesn’t encourage people to develop their inner humility in a quest for unerring truth like I do, nor do most people approach life through the lens of the Socratic paradox of “I know that I know nothing” as […] Read more »