Pride | Competition | Superiority

“God opposes the proud, but He gives generously to the humble” (James 4:6)

A wise old man of business once said, “Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”

Similarly, C.S. Lewis wrote that the sin of pride is “the utmost evil” — because, he says, it is essentially competitive. Lewis explains:

Pride is competitive by its very nature. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next person. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking, there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest; the pleasure of knowing that the rest have less than you do; the pleasure of knowing that the rest are inferior…