Pride and insignificance are the foundation of sociality

In conversations about psychology, you can often hear the common formulation that, they say, man is a social animal, and therefore by nature needs to communicate with his own kind. It sounds philosophically beautiful, but is it really so? What if there is no social instinct?

In ancient times, when people lived in small tribes, for what reason did they unite? Was there any need for social contacts there or was it just a strategy for communal survival? What keeps us together now? Do we really need communication or is this just a symptom of a general social neurosis?

In this article we will talk about the adhesive basis that forms and holds all kinds of social connections. Some points may seem unsightly and not entirely obvious, but the bitter truth is this: sociality is more of a disease than a person’s genetic nature.

To get to grips with this complex topic, we can start with Freud and his idea of two basic psychological complexes. Freud believed that the child's psyche is formed under the influence of two figures - maternal and paternal. Usually, these are living mother and father, but this is not necessarily the case, since “mother” and “father” in the psychoanalytic concept are more likely a certain type of relationship, rather than specific living people.

The maternal type of relationship can be established by seven nannies, and the paternal type by a priest from the nearest parish together with the neighbor’s janitor. It does not matter who exactly acts as the psychological mother and father, the main thing is the specific relationship that is formed between them and the child.

The role of the “mother” is to provide psychological support to the child. In its natural form, there is nothing reprehensible in it. The child really needs to feel supported by someone more adult and experienced.

And if the mother’s psyche were sufficiently balanced, then there would be no talk of the maternal complex as a psychological problem. But since in the real world, the maternal psyche is usually far from balance, the support provided is colored by infantile emotions and turns into pity.

A mother with a distorted psyche cannot truly love her child. In fact, she replaces love with pity, and when a child behaves inappropriately, she uses her “love” as a means of manipulation: “If you are good, I will love, if you are bad, I will not love.”

Thus, a child, raised on a compassionate surrogate of maternal love, finds himself in a difficult psychological state. He does not know how to love either himself or anyone else - he simply was not shown the appropriate example.

For this reason, from the very first years of conscious life, an internal conflict forms within him - a feeling that something is wrong with him, a feeling of his inferiority. The mother cannot resolve this conflict, and the child is left alone with his misfortune - now he is doomed to seek love and acceptance in relationships with other people.

In simple words, this situation is called “disliked.”

This is how the first pole of internal psychological tension is laid - nonentity. It's inescapable self pity and the constant search for love. But it should be understood that such a person does not yet know what love is, because he only knows pity. This means that he will demand pity from other people, and, having met love, most likely, he will not even recognize it.

When they say that every person needs love, we are talking about this very problem - about the mother complex, about the search for approval, about self-pity. No love is implied here. Such reasoning is just a form of justification for the general feeling of one’s own inferiority, nothing more. A person does not need love.

If the mother teaches the child to interact with his inner world, then the father’s role is to prepare the child for survival in the outer world. But, as in the case of mothers, fathers usually do not do what they should. Instead of being mentors, they act out their own mental problems on the child and turn into supervisors with a whip, in the form of a feeling of guilt.

The father’s task is to teach the child how the world around him works and by what laws he lives. Just like an experienced hunter teaches a young one. In such preparation there is no place for moralizing, but, being just as “disliked”, the father usually reduces all education precisely to the separation of good from evil, right from wrong, good from bad. And from the position of his seniority and power over his child, he takes upon himself the right to judge him. He becomes the one who decides whether the child is guilty or not.

In this situation, the child, instead of learning to survive in the real world, is forced to learn to survive in the fictional world of his father's laws and rules. In an effort to avoid feelings of guilt and punishment, the child learns to lie, evade, or, with a different mental structure, conflict and fight for power with his father. And then, when he already has his own children, he dumps all his accumulated grievances on them, and the cycle continues.

Thus, the father complex is a mess of guilt and attempts to cope with it. One way is to deceive the father, avoid responsibility and evade punishment, the other is to defeat the father, seize his power and thereby deprive him of the right to pronounce a guilty verdict.

This is how the second pole of psychological tension is formed - pride. This is a person’s need to prove his worth and rightness to everyone around him. In this way, a person tries to assert his independence and get rid of the feeling of guilt for himself and his lifestyle. The important thing here is that a person is not able to “forgive” himself, and therefore he is forced to seek forgiveness from the outside.

As in the case of a lack of true maternal love, when a child is not able to love himself, in the case of a father complex, the child is not able to establish his own laws in life, and therefore tries with all his might to comply with or fight with the laws of others. To do this, he has to find authorities among people, and either follow their orders and receive their approval, or overthrow them and destroy their “law.”

All social competition and struggle for power is based on this principle. Each successive victory creates a sweet feeling of calm - the winners are not judged, which means the winner is right. In this way, the internal conflict is relieved for some time. But the effect of external victory always wears off. The feeling of guilt inherent in childhood requires new victims.

I've already made this disclaimer, but I'll repeat it just in case. Now we were not talking about specific living mothers and fathers, but about those people who took on this or that role. For example, a single mother may be torn between two roles. Or, with living parents, the father's role can be played, for example, by a grandfather. Therefore, when applying what has been said to yourself, take into account your own situation.

Thus, it is the need to act out pride and insignificance that requires the establishment of social contacts.

We need other people not because we like them so much and not because such a need is inherent in us by nature, but because they give us the opportunity to at least temporarily relieve the internal conflict - to come to terms with ourselves and get rid of the feeling of guilt.

Let's look at this in more detail.

Pride or vanity

The most obvious manifestation of the problem of pride is the struggle for power. This includes everything from childhood arguments about whose dad is cooler to presidential elections. Any power, real or nominal, allows you to calm down the feeling of doubt about your own rightness. Everyone is familiar with this type of leader for whom the sense of power is much more important than the reason for which this power was given to them.

The problem of pride also includes all possible competitions - everyday, sports and political. Victory over an opponent, even in a game setting, pleases vanity just as much as having power over people. And right there are all forms of empathy for competitors. People join parties and root for their favorite teams only to join in someone else’s victory and experience it vicariously.

The same can be said about any idea and form of social success - business, science, creativity. Wherever there is a comparison of one person with another, we can talk about vanity. If people didn’t have problems with pride, they would be content with what they minimally need. But how would this affect a modern state, which lives only by provoking its citizens to strive for new horizons and reach new heights of success?...

In relationships with people, pride manifests itself, for example, as a tendency to make judgments. In its crudest form, this is primitive criticism and humiliation, which is so easy to observe on any forum or in the comments of any blog.

A more subtle form of pride is, on the contrary, praise. It may seem that praise is elevating the other person, but in reality the connotation is completely different. After all, in order to praise, you need to have the right to give an assessment, and in order to give an assessment, you need to put yourself above the person being assessed. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what Moska does - barks or licks - in both cases she acts out her pride.

In the relationship between a man and a woman, pride also unfolds to its fullest. Women conquer and subjugate men - they form their retinue, drowning in the euphoric feeling of their own irresistibility. And men play the role of a hero-lover, whose main task is to get as many women into bed as possible and, thereby, prove their worth.

You can give a lot more examples, but I hope you have already caught the main idea and can continue the list yourself, based on your own experience.

Unworthiness or feelings of inferiority

The most famous manifestation of the pole of insignificance is playing the loser. Having recognized himself as a failure, a person refuses to achieve success and finds a wonderful way for himself to forever wallow in a feeling of self-pity. Thus, the internal conflict finds a way out and loses its tension, especially if you manage to find a grateful listener and cry into his vest.

Sensitivity, a tendency to doubt, the desire to please everyone, servility, subordination - all this is at the pole of insignificance. Behind all this is the desire to be loved, the desire to receive outside confirmation that I am good, that I am worthy of love, that I have the right to live in this world.

Here, on the side of human feelings of inferiority, there are many religions that protect the orphaned and wretched from life in the real world. The most striking example is modern Christianity, which with all its passion defends the humiliated and insulted, giving them consolation in its bosom and blocking any of their mental and spiritual development.

In a relationship between a man and a woman, feelings of insignificance are directly acted out through mutual emotional consolation. A woman plays for a man the role of a “loving” mother who will stroke, kiss, blow on the wound and hide him from all troubles. And the man does the same for her - he feels sorry for her, calms her down, wipes away her tears.

In social life, a feeling of inferiority dictates an extremely fearful model of behavior - suspiciousness, excessive caution, fear of conflicts, compliance. Anything to earn someone else’s love, or at least avoid someone else’s non-love. Therefore, such a person constantly seeks understanding, makes excuses, explains his actions. At the same time, we are very tolerant of other people’s behavior, forgiving others for what we could not allow ourselves under any circumstances.

Pendulum of pride and insignificance

Everyone is swinging on the pendulum of pride and insignificance. The difference between people is only in amplitude and which pole becomes a support in conscious life, and which acts predominantly unconsciously.

We are talking about a pendulum because there is always an energy balance between the poles. If a person excessively sticks out his pride, then with all confidence we can say that deep down in his soul he suffers with the same intensity from a sense of his own insignificance. Conversely, if a person diligently plays the role of a loser in need of love and understanding, it can be argued that the other side of his soul is torn to pieces from the desire to assert his pride.

Definite the difference can be seen between introverts and extroverts. Extroverts, because they are outward looking, tend to focus on acting out their pride. It is more important for them to achieve recognition from other people, achieve social success, and defeat all enemies and friends.

And introverts, being focused on their inner world, focus more on satisfying their feelings of inferiority. They are not so interested in social success; it is much more important for them to establish such relationships with people that everyone loves him (read, pity and console him).

At the same time, every extrovert, from time to time, needs a break - someone to reassure and console them, after the assertion of their own pride has failed for some reason. Then, the extrovert is forced to lick his wounds and, for this, usually finds support in another camp - among introverts who are excellent at feeling sorry for themselves and others.

And the same thing happens with introverts. Self-pity alone is not enough for them and, at least occasionally, they need injections of praise and public recognition. To do this, they turn for help to inveterate proud people - extroverts.

This is the basis of all sociality. The internal confrontation between pride and insignificance finds its energetic release in relationships with other people. We need friends, lovers, relatives because we cannot balance our inner world on our own., and therefore we rush from side to side - we establish ourselves and are consoled in each other’s arms.

The entire society is based on the internal disorder of people. Money, pop culture, science, wars, religions, relationships - wherever you look, everywhere we will find a confrontation between the poles of pride and insignificance. Remove internal discord from the equation, and, deprived of its cementing composition, the temple of sociality will collapse at the first breath of wind. But, since everyone participates in the creation and strengthening of the described game, the building of sociality is so strong that it can withstand any hurricane.

Way out

The sages say: “Don’t try to change the world - change yourself.” There is no point in fighting windmills in an attempt to change anything in the world around us.

All you can do is stop swinging your own pendulum, and when it's close to stopping, just jump off it.

The practical side of the issue is too individual to describe in detail. It is important to understand the main principle - trying to establish yourself on any of the poles does not solve the internal equation, but only increases the psychological imbalance.

It may seem that once a certain milestone in social success is reached, relaxation will set in and the struggle will cease by itself. But that's not true. With each step on the path to strengthening pride, the pole of insignificance and feelings of inferiority only becomes stronger, and therefore with each step new and larger victories will be required. Therefore, the pursuit of achievement and success will never stop - it can only gain speed, like the flow of a river before a waterfall.

It's the same with self-pity - you can never have enough of it. Consolation, no matter how complete it may be, leaves the internal conflict unaffected - the other half of the soul will continue to strive for social heights, splitting the psyche in half.

There is no other way out of this game other than to stop playing it. But imagine how difficult it is, because in attempts to stop, the same demonic forces come into play. Self-pity will demand the continuation of the banquet, and pride will defend the right to self-affirmation. And even when a person understands that the game leads to a dead end and in all seriousness tries to get off this train, he again finds himself in a trap - pride now plays out through the feeling of being chosen and special, and the feeling of insignificance will play along in order to protect this self-deception from revelations.

It's easy to change the scenery, but it's very difficult to leave the stage...