Pride is supposed to be the worst of them, you know. In the classical ordering of the seven deadly sins, pride occupies the top spot, not merely one of the gang but the ringleader, the sin from which all others flow. Saint Thomas Aquinas thought pride was the root of sin itself, the gravitational center around which every other moral failure orbits; pride is the ur-transgression that caused Lucifer to fall from Heaven and from which no subsequent angel or human has been fully safe. Indeed, a remarkable number of biblical stories (Old Testament and New) fixate on pride as a cardinal sin: the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve ate of the apple to be like God, the Tower of Babel, the arrogance of Pharoah, the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, James and John’s demand to sit the left and right of Jesus. Holy Writ is a document determined to turn you off of pride.

And yet, of all the deadly sins, pride is probably the one we celebrate most openly, the one we’ve most thoroughly rehabilitated, the one our culture has essentially decided to promote from vice to virtue. Just look at social media if you doubt me. We’ve erected the entire edifice of self-help culture for the purpose of valorizing pride. We drape social media with justifications for floating around in a constant state of self-love; correspondingly, we treat a lack of inherent and deep pride in oneself as an inherently pathological state. We tell people to take pride in their work. We insist that children develop pride as a bulwark against the various cruelties awaiting them. Somewhere between Dante’s Inferno and a motivational poster in an elementary school hallway, pride went from the deadliest sin to a wellness imperative. How did that happen?

Part of the answer is that pride is unusually hard to define. With the other sins, you at least know what you’re talking about. Lust is unmistakable. (It means being horny.) Gluttony announces itself at the table and in your very body. Sloth is what you feel when you can’t get off the couch. Envy arrives with its particular sour aftertaste, and indeed often proves very difficult to get rid of. Pride is more slippery; it shades almost invisibly into self-respect, and we’ve all agreed, reasonably enough, that self-respect is a good thing. What separates pride-as-vice from pride-as-virtue is not entirely obvious, and the people who are most guilty of the former tend to be exactly the ones who are most certain they’re practicing the latter. This is pride’s most insidious trick: unlike envy, which makes its victim feel bad, or sloth, which inspires some degree of self-hatred, pride often feels like clarity. Pride presents itself as a correct and lucid appraisal of your own worth; it feels like knowing who you are. It feels like standing up for yourself. It takes extraordinary self-awareness to recognize it for what it actually is. And if I wanted to make it harder for people to recognize and embody that self-awareness, I would come up with something like modern self-help culture.

What pride actually is, in its full theological and psychological sense, is a systematic distortion of reality, a chronic overestimation of one’s own value and what one deserves thanks to that value. The proud don’t just feel good about themselves; they feel good in a way that cannot be revised by evidence, in a way that is essentially insulated from the kinds of information that the world is constantly, if imperfectly, offering. The proud sometimes know they’re talented. They know they deserve what they have and probably more besides. But when the evidence suggests otherwise, they discount that evidence. They blame external factors; they blame the people delivering the news; they shoot the messenger. They do everything except the one thing pride cannot permit: they do not revise their self-assessments downward. Pride may be a condition of self-love, but before that it’s a condition of self-fixity, a snapshot the proud have decided to treat as an unchangeable document.

That’s why pride is so destructive in relationships, and why it tends to accumulate damage quietly rather than all at once, which is another way in which it differs from the more dramatic sins. Wrath explodes in rages and lust is embodied in unwise or immoral sexual encounters, while pride just quietly refuses to apologize. Pride will sooner end a friendship than admit to a mistake, sooner let a marriage erode than acknowledge a wound it caused. The proud are not unkind, necessarily; in certain ways they can be very considerate. Often they simply can’t perform the basic relational maintenance that requires acknowledging their own human fallibility. To say “I was wrong” is to open the aperture of self-assessment, even briefly, and pride will not allow that. Pride mistakes the admission of error for the surrender of self. The result, accumulated over years, is a peculiar loneliness: a person surrounded by people who have learned, by long, painful experience, that the proud person cannot really be reached.

Like envy, pride both predates its contemporary cultural context and is dramatically worsened by it. You can find pride doing its worst work in the oldest stories we have: Agamemnon, Achilles, Oedipus, a dozen other tragic heroes who came to grief not through malice but through an inability to receive the information the universe was trying to send them. Hubris, the Greeks called it, which means something like the overreach of a person who has forgotten that he is not a god. The gods in those stories punish hubris reliably, if sometimes extravagantly, and you could argue that the entire moral project of Greek tragedy is an extended tutorial in what happens to proud people. This is not, in the Greek imagination, a complicated lesson—the proud person gets brought low, and the audience learns from this, and everybody goes home with the sense that appropriately modest self-assessments are in order.

This is not, it should be acknowledged, how things actually work.

Proud people often flourish, and not just incidentally; if anything they tend to be rewarded for their arrogance. The Greek gods insisted that the proud would be treated badly. Life is not so convenient. But the Athenian cultural insistence on the danger of overreach spoke to something real about the internal dynamics of pride even though its appealing theory of certain and tangible cosmic punishment was wrong.

Contemporary culture hasn’t settled on a single response to pride the way Athens did. Most of us participate in two distinct contradictory moral frameworks: the therapeutic one, in which self-esteem is always good and shame is pretty much always bad and you should never stop loving yourself fiercely and without qualification; and what I will call the “residual moral tradition,” present in nearly every religious and philosophical lineage, which considers excessive self-regard a spiritual and ethical problem of the first order. Most people (most Americans, anyway) carry both of these around at once and switch between them depending on context, which produces some genuinely strange results. We can spend our therapy sessions working on valuing ourselves more and an hour later on social media publicly savage someone we see as having an inflated sense of his own importance without obvious internal conflict. We have a whole philosophy based on the horror of pride we see in others, an entire lexicon for it, a conceptual vocabulary of narcissism and arrogance and airs and pretension. This exacting analysis of the excessive pride of others co-exists peacefully with our deep investment in our own selves.

Social media has made this worse in ways both subtle and obvious. These networks provide the infrastructure for an unprecedented level of self-presentation and self-promotion that would have been recognized as pride in almost any previous cultural context. This infrastructure has made self-presentation feel not like pride but like labor. Maintaining a “personal brand,” curating your image, crafting the narrative of your life for public consumption: these are understood today as necessary skills, survival strategies for the attention economy, practically vocational. It’s very difficult to object to pride when pride looks like productive work. And yet what the social media age has produced is not a nation whose citizens exhibit a healthy sense of hard-won self-worth but instead an epidemic of what psychologists sometimes call fragile self-esteem, self-regard that is higher on baseline than the average Joe’s but also wildly reactive to any perceived slight or challenge. Fragile self-esteem is a pretty good functional description of pride’s psychological signature: it looks like confidence from the outside, it feels like strength from the inside, but it shatters under any real test. Real confidence, the non-proud kind, can absorb a setback. Pride can’t. Pride needs constant external confirmation precisely because its internal foundation is not as solid as it insists.

The object of pride is, like the object of envy, rarely what we claim it is. We say we are proud of our work, our family, our values. But the deepest, most tenacious pride is usually pride in self-narrative, that is, pride in the story we tell about who we are and how we got here. This is the pride that is hardest to give up, because giving it up requires not just revising your opinion about a particular decision or achievement but revising the whole organizing myth by which you understand yourself. I knew someone who had built his entire identity around the story of having overcome great adversity through sheer force of character. It was true! He had done that, more or less. But over time, the story calcified—it had become so central to his sense of himself that he couldn’t acknowledge any subsequent failures or limitations without feeling that his foundational story was under attack. His pride was not in particular expressions of his great narrative, the actual meritocratic successes, but in the narrative itself, the sense that the story of his life had a coherent moral arc: that he was always, at bottom, the author of his own fate. Am I talking about me? Well, I’m not not talking about me.

There’s also a public face to pride, a social performance that’s worth examining. Certain professional and institutional cultures reward the public display of pride in ways that make the sin almost impossible to resist. Some industries have made self-promotion so thoroughly a condition of success that you’d be naïve to attempt to opt out of promoting yourself. Academia promotes a false, studied modesty while quietly expecting you to advocate for yourself ceaselessly. Corporate culture speaks the language of teamwork and collaboration while inevitably structuring all incentives around individual visibility. Politics is essentially a form of competitive pride, a system in which the willingness to insist publicly on your own fitness for power is the baseline entry requirement, which is probably one reason it attracts the people it does, and the same reason it disappoints us as consistently as it does. In any of these environments, the cultural sanction for pride is so strong that not projecting pride reads as weakness, as imposter syndrome, as the failure of self-advocacy. You perform pride to survive whether you really feel it or not. And the trouble with performing something long enough is that you stop being able to tell the difference between the performance and the person. (As John Updike said of celebrity, theatrical pride is “a mask that eats the face.”)

This is one of the deeper cruelties of pride as a sin: it can be externally induced. You can arrive at pride not through genuine overestimation of your own worth but through the accumulated effect of having been required, professionally and socially, to project confidence you didn’t entirely feel. The performance becomes a habit, then a defense, then a fixed position. And now you have all the pathological features of pride (the resistance to feedback, the insulation from self-criticism, the inability to apologize) without any of the pleasures that an actually self-satisfied person might take in his or her own admirable qualities. This might be the saddest version of pride. When we are genuinely full of ourselves we at least enjoy the sense of inflation; the performatively proud are stuck, trapped in fortresses that have become prisons.

Can you resist pride? With more difficulty than your therapist is likely to tell you, sure, because pride has this weird recursive quality: any self-inquiry into your own pride runs through the very cognitive system that pride corrupts. Forgive me for engaging in crude folk postmodernism, but there is no Archimedean point outside your own perspective from which to objectively assess your perspective. The proud are exactly as unable to recognize their pride as they are unable to see anything else about themselves clearly; that inability—that helplessness—is just . . . what pride is. The standard advice is to seek feedback from trusted others, to cultivate intellectual humility, to practice saying “I was wrong” about small things so you can do it about big ones. All good counsel, and all, predictably, resisted most fiercely by the people who need it most. Pride makes feedback feel like an attack, humility feel like self-erasure, and the straightforward acknowledgment of error feel like a confession of total inadequacy.

What helps, I think, is not trying to eliminate pride but trying to make it less central to your self-conception. Pride becomes pathological when it is doing too much structural work in the self, when too much of your sense of yourself depends on a fixed, favorable narrative that cannot be revised. The cure is not to think worse of yourself, or to go in the other direction and wallow in self-criticism, which is frequently just pride’s photographic negative. The treatment is to make your sense of yourself more dynamic, more process-oriented, less contingent on any particular fixed assessment of your worth. A person who understands that we are all always in the process of becoming—which, yes, is Instagram wisdom, but follow along with me—is someone far less likely to feel terrified by evidence that he is not fully cooked yet. To those who are not too eager to be finished building themselves, evidence of weakness is just information, feedback, material for the next development. Again, I know this sounds like the kind of thing that a Peloton instructor says between sets, and I’m sorry for that. But underneath the banality, there’s a real distinction between a conception of one’s self that is open to revision and one that can never be. Pride, or the deadly form anyway, is what happens when that gate closes permanently.

There is, finally, something worth saying about the relationship between pride and fear, because pride almost always has fear hiding within it, fear in its viscera. The fear, specifically, is the fear of being seen as less than you are. The proud person’s refusal to revise, to admit, to be seen in error, at root is the terror of inadequacy. The armor of pride is protection against that terror. And like most protective strategies organized around what we fear, it tends to produce the outcome it was designed to avoid. People who cannot admit being wrong, who cannot tolerate appearing fallible, become inflexible in exactly the way they most fear. They become, over time, someone we tiptoe around, someone who has purchased the appearance of invulnerability at the cost of actual strength. Real strength, it turns out, includes the capacity to be known (known as an imperfect being, uncertain, a human work in progress) without that knowledge destroying you. That capacity is what pride forecloses.

There is a basic nomenclature issue here, which is that the English word pride does not intrinsically separate healthy feelings of self-worth from unhealthy and deluded braggadocio. (This is why hubris is such a useful word.) I mention this because, yes, it’s easy to throw out the self-worth baby with the narcissism bathwater here. We are all, obviously, proud of things we should be proud of, and self-deprecation is often an undesirable activity. The goal is not to become so aggressively self-doubting that you can’t function, to collapse into a puddle of false modesty every time someone offers you a compliment. But there’s a difference between taking appropriate satisfaction in genuine achievement and organizing your interior life around a fixed story of your own worth that will not admit revision. One is sustainable; the other is a kind of perpetual emergency, the self in a constant posture of defense against the world’s indifference. It’s exhausting and lonely, and in the end it accomplishes very little.

Pride is fundamentally the sin of worshipping a false god, no less than those who fell at the feet of Aaron’s golden calf. Pride promises what only genuine self-knowledge and genuine connection with others can deliver, namely a secure sense of being worth something in the world. What the sin of pride delivers is counterfeit. The security it promises is rigid where real strength is flexible, brittle where it should be durable, closed where it needs to be open. And the cruelest part of it, the part that explains why Thomas Aquinas ranked it first among the capital vices, is that pride is pleasant to experience right up until the moment it destroys something you love. Pride’s destructive power is legible only in retrospect. That’s why it’s the sin that consumes you most quietly, most efficiently, most completely.