our confidence in ourselves as we operate in the real world.
Primitive pride takes no account of the real world. It always refers back to the person, and it needs no outside evidence to support it because it is a fantasy. Personal pride requires some thought, such as, ‘I think I can be proud of myself for getting that degree. Working full time and studying wasn’t easy.’ Primitive pride is immediate and unthinking.
All of us have been in a situation where someone has insulted or humiliated us. We had to disregard our immediate impulse to strike the person down, but directly and unbidden comes the thought, ‘What else could you expect from a —’, and here we insert some pejorative word for the nationality, race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, or class of the person who has insulted us. We might have taken personal pride in our generous and impartial attitude to all our fellow human beings, but primitive pride can always dip into that drive to survive, no matter what, and draw from it some fantasy that proves to us if to no one else that we are superior to all other people. Primitive pride often masquerades as personal pride. When I was researching for my book What Should I Believe? I soon lost count of the number of religious groups I found who claimed to be God’s Chosen People. Beliefs reside in our heads. Simply believing that you have been chosen by God does not make you superior to others. Getting a first in maths does entitle you to feel that you are better at maths than most people.
Primitive pride is indifferent to the truth, and very adept at producing lies that we are reluctant to see as lies. For instance, anyone who has been responsible for a young child has had the experience of the child suddenly doing something very dangerous, just at the moment when your attention was elsewhere. Perhaps the child suddenly rushed across a busy road, or fell over in his bath. You retrieved the child and no harm was done, but you were very frightened. Fear itself can be a threat to the sense of being a person, especially when the event that led to you being frightened has revealed that you are not the person you thought you were. You thought you were vigilant and careful, but you are not. Realizing this can be so destabilizing that primitive pride comes immediately to your aid. It was not your fault that the child was put in danger. It was the fault of the disobedient child. Your fear turns to anger, and you berate – or slap – the child.
What you have done is to lie to yourself and to the child. The truth was that the child was too young and impulsive to understand the possible danger, and that you were not paying attention to the child. You cannot accept this unpalatable truth, and so you lied to protect yourself.
The actual events in such a scenario are simple. The child was suddenly in danger but was saved. What created the complications that led to your lies were the discrepancies between what you thought yourself to be and what you were shown by the event to be.
Within our sense of being a person are many ideas concerning what kind of person we are. I wish I could say that we all know who we are, but I cannot. We can all describe our likes and dislikes, and what improvements to our talents and circumstances we would like to see, but, while some people are very familiar with the person that they are, there are people who experience an emptiness inside them, a space where their sense of being a person could be. They describe themselves in terms of what they do, the roles they play, but they have limited or no sense of being anything more than these roles. When in an interview the actor Bill Nighy was asked, ‘Who do you think you are?’ he replied, ‘I have very little contact with myself. When people talk about knowing who they are or having access to their feelings, I never know what they’re talking about. I have this sort of commentary that natters on in my head, which I suppose is me, but apart from that I’m just this sort of slightly misarranged organism.’8
Even if we start our life with a sense of who we are, the adults around us soon make it clear to us that as we are we are not satisfactory. The word ‘ought’ enters our life. We ought to do as we are told, eat our dinner, wash our face, not hit other children, not be greedy. In short, we ought to be good. If we have not formed a satisfactory bond with a mothering figure in the first months of our life, we might not see any reason to become what the adults around us want us to be, but, if we have formed a bond, we want to maintain that bond because then we shall be looked after. We do not want the bond to be broken, and so we try to please the person with whom we have formed the bond. We set our feet on the path of becoming good in the way the people looking after us want us to be good. Thus, most of us have a collection of meanings that we can lump together as ‘the person I ought to be’. Some of us make every effort to live up to these ‘oughts’, while others make more of a show than a real effort, and often resort to lies to maintain the appearance of being good. The most popular lies in this situation are, ‘I’m sorry’, and, ‘I feel so guilty.’ Whether we are actually good, or pretend to be good, most of us can distinguish clearly between ‘the person I am’ and ‘the person I ought to be’.
However, some children are so frightened by their mentors over not being what they ought to be that they lose sight of who they are. If they happen to catch a glimpse of the person they are, they condemn this person for not being good. They never feel that they are entitled to what they achieve, and, if successful, they see themselves as an imposter whose base character will soon be revealed.
When we grow up being familiar with the person that we are, we are usually aware that there is something within ourselves that needs to come into being in order for us to be fully the person we can be. Becoming the person that you are brings the greatest of all satisfactions because you no longer have to pretend that you are someone else. Failing to become the person that you are is to many people their greatest loss. Many adults who, to the outside observer, lead secure and comfortable lives, experience a kind of heartache or angst to which they cannot put a name. Often they know the cause of the heartache, but they dare not say it aloud because the family and friends would not understand. Perhaps they became a civil servant instead of spending their life experiencing the danger and exultation of climbing mountains; or they may have had just one child instead of the six they intended to have. People like these have settled for less than what they might have been. One of the most poignant scenes in the history of the cinema is in On the Waterfront where Marlon Brando, playing Terry Malloy, a failed boxer, says to his brother, played by Rod Steiger, ‘I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am.’ Terry had been persuaded by his brother to throw a fight so that his brother’s criminal boss would win a bet. In real life, Terry would have remained a bum, but in true Hollywood style, he found redemption, that is, became the person he knew he had it within him to be, not just by being courageous but by telling the truth.
In real life, some people find themselves by lying.
Tobias Wolff is world renowned for telling the truth through fiction – his great short stories and novels – but he also wrote two volumes of autobiography which are a truthful account of lies and liars. His mother’s lies were fantasies of about-to-happen happiness. In the next town, when she gets her next job, when she meets the right man, she and Tobias will be happy, while all the time she moved from place to place without a clear plan or aim, working at whatever she could get, and unerringly finding the wrong kind of man. Tobias’s father lied to impress others, and to avoid paying any bills. Children learn from what their parents do, and so Tobias learned how to lie. In his youth and early adulthood he lived a formless, chaotic existence, acting out his emotions and not understanding what he was doing. He knew that he was disobedient, lazy, aggressive and careless, responding without thought to whatever he encountered. He was a poor student, but in his early teens he decided to become a writer, and never wished to do anything else. Within the chaos of his life he had some misty awareness of the person he could be. He saw that if he stayed at Concrete High in Chinook near Seattle, oppressed and used by his stepfather, he did not have a future that would be worth living. So he created a plan made up entirely of lies, yet these lies contained a truth.
He set out to win a place in one or other of the best private schools in America, even though there was nothing in his school record that would recommend him to any of these schools. He wrote to each school, requested application forms, and filled them in. He wrote letters of support supposedly from his teachers. ‘The words came as easily as if someone were breathing them into my ear.