IN THE MINDS OF OTHERS
1 We live in the minds of others
Our greed covets images that catch our eye. And our pride strives to sculpt our self as an image to catch the eye of others. Our vanity makes us feel that we glow for them, and our avarice makes all that we crave glow for us. Our self justifies our wants and all that we do to sate them. And our wants justify our self and all that we do to serve it.
We love ourselves more than others, but what we love is the image of ourselves which we carry in our minds and which we hope to make them share.
What we long for most of all is that others should bear a bright likeness of us in their minds. ‘We want to lead a fictive life in the minds of others,’ as Pascal says. Each of us is no more than a thought flitting briefly through the brains of others. Our existence is only hypothetical till proved by their attention. ‘We only begin to live,’ writes Houellebecq, ‘through the eyes of others.’ And the person who matters most to us is doubly unreal. It is the person that we fancy others fancy us to be. It is our false notion of the false notion that they hold of us.
How could we doubt that there are other minds, when it is only other minds that give us a sense that our own is real?
Of all things reputation exists most in the mind, but it exists in the minds of others. So it seems more real to me than everything else, which exists solely in my own mind.
2 We take pride in the contemptible
How viciously I will vie with rivals that I don’t regard, to net prizes that I don’t want. And how in thrall I am to opinions that I claim not to care for. I can’t resist my greed for the baubles that I can’t quite respect. And I’m glad to gain the notice of those whom I rate so low.
If I can’t get what I do value, I will still fight as hard to get what I don’t. I have to learn to esteem more than I in fact do, since I can’t refrain from craving more than I esteem.
How low our souls must be, that such trifles can raise them so high.
People are willing to act contemptibly to buy a good name, and to do demeaning things in order to win praise. To win high honour in this world, you have to be quite shameless.
We spend our lives slaving to get hold of things that we don’t need, so as to gain the good opinion of others, which we don’t value.
Those who are not engaged in a grand quest are still nettled by the small comparisons they make with the people around them.
Others’ opinion of us means more to us than our own. And yet our own still means so much to us that we feel obliged to deny this.
3 The pride of great and small egos
‘It astounds us to come on other egoists,’ Renard said, ‘as though we alone had the right to be selfish.’ Ordinary people grudge that the extraordinary should lay claim to so much. And extraordinary people grudge that the ordinary should strive so unrelentingly for such mean ends. A little talent is determined to go a long way, and this world is the right place for it to do so.
The robustness of our attachments is not matched by the size of the objects to which we are attached. And the ferocity of the selfishness bears no proportion to the quality of the self that it is fighting for. The smallness of our ego sets no limit to the grossness of our egoism. Many people chase a cheap prize as relentlessly as they would a grand one. Those whose egos make do with mean rewards are not the less egoistic for that. They strive to aggrandize themselves in the most trifling ways.
How are they able to stay so self-absorbed, who have so small a self to absorb them? How do they rear such a vast selfishness on the base of so thin a self, and lavish such a trove of self-love on so botched an object? A few anecdotes, a fixed routine, some petty vanity seem quite enough for them. The smaller the mind, the larger it takes its own little world to be.
4 Pride and disdain
I have no doubt that people esteem me much more than they do, and that I care for their esteem much less than I do.
How could renown be what I thirst for, when all I taste is the sickening indignities that I have to choke down to get it?
I want to show that I outshine others by showing that I don’t need to, and that I set too low a price on them to try to prove it. ‘We particularly wish to be praised,’ says Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘for giving the impression that praise means nothing to us.’
High-minded people don’t deign to try to please, yet they grow exasperated when they fail to. They prefer to disappoint than to presume. At least that proves they have the power to move people in some way, or that they don’t think it worth their while to please or impress them.
Treat things with the scorn that is their due, and you will end up scorned by all. How much trouble you cause yourself when you take yourself too seriously. And what a beating the world will give you if you fail to take it seriously enough.
What tolerant disdain we feel for others, just because they are not us, and want differing things, and think differing thoughts. But our sneaking self-interest mantles the sneering which our dismissive self-regard would parade naked.
SEEKING RESPECT
5 Pride is pretending not to care
Haughty people want to win the race, yet ridicule it a touch in case they don’t. And they display a slight scorn for their own victories, to show that they are worth more than these too. If I can’t win, I make sure that I lose ostentatiously, to prove that I’m not trying. ‘Since she was not winning strikingly,’ George Eliot commented, ‘the next best thing was to lose strikingly.’
Those who spurn the world still care so much for it that they want the world to know it. And those who hate the world still want it to love them. What brag could be more arrogant than Landor’s line, ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’?
Some people are so perversely proud, that they won’t rest till they’ve been nominated as members of an exclusive club, so that they can thumb their nose at it without being accused of sour grapes.
We want to look down scorningly on success from the high citadel of our impregnable triumphs.
Proud souls disdain to conceal anything, save the craft that they use to conceal their pride.
6 Who cares
We don’t guess how highly people think of themselves, and how meanly they think of us. ‘If we saw ourselves as others see us,’ Cioran remarked, ‘we’d vanish on the spot.’ And if we thought as well of them as they do, we’d burst with envy. Most of them give us no consideration, unless to confirm that we are not worth considering. But we take so much offence that is not meant, because we don’t see how little thought they give us.
Whatever people think of you, you can be sure that it’s less than you think.
7 Trying to impress the indifferent
‘We are so vain,’ said Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘that we care for the regard even of those we don’t care for.’ I toil night and day to win the notice of those who never think of me. And they don’t think of me because they’re in such a sweat to win the notice of those like me who never think of them.
My own talents satisfy me, but my own approval fails to suffice for me. No matter what the world may think of me, I still think that I am all in all. And yet it is only the world’s regard that makes me think that I am anything at all. I persist in thinking well of myself irrespective of what others may think of me, but I still can’t bear not to seek their good opinion. And yet there are a lot of people whose respect I would not much care for, if I didn’t think I might be able to win it.
8 The exchange of counterfeits
Though you spend no thought on others, you still want them to spend all their thought on you. And you may scorn all the rest of their opinions, but not the one they form of you. ‘The notice of others,’ Hazlitt said, ‘is as necessary to us as the air we breathe.’
My self-regard, which is the most real thing that I feel, craves the respect of others, which is the least real thing that they feel. Of all their opinions, they give least thought to the one that they hold of me. But that is the only one of theirs to which I give any thought at all. But having gone to such great pains to win their approbation, it may be that in the end I care no more for it than they do.
We all know that the world is a sham. Yet we all still hold that its good opinion of us is the one truth worth proving.
We scarcely think people’s good opinion worth winning if they don’t hold a very high opinion of their own worth.
9 We want to be respected in our own way
I want to win the approval only of those whose good sense I respect. But how could I not respect the good sense of anyone who approves of me?
All of us want the same thing, to be well thought of. But each of us wants it in our own way. I want to be valued for the one accomplishment that I see most value in. And I think nothing of any kind of reputation save the one that I have set my heart on. But don’t we all cheerily make do with whatever one we can get? How pliantly I adjust the narrative of my self-satisfaction to follow the ebb and flow of my fortune.
I don’t think much of a goal if I’m not in the chase for it. Yet I don’t think much of myself if I have no hope of reaching the goal I choose. So I take care to choose only those goals that I know I might reach.
Neither myself nor my ends amount to much on their own. But when paired they make up the miniscule infinitude for which I would gladly torch the plenteous world.
Futility is the lives of others. The goal that is worth aspiring to is the one that happens to lie within my grasp.
10 We want the respect of those we don’t respect
In our inmost hearts we scorn the world and esteem only ourselves. Yet in our inmost hearts we scorn ourselves and esteem only the world. ‘Deep down in his heart no man much respects himself,’ Twain said. But deep down in their hearts none respect anything but themselves. I may think little of the world and of the view it holds of me, and yet I think of little else apart from the world and the view it holds of me.
There’s no soul so mean but I think more of myself for being thought better of by it, and would think a lot more of it if it thought a shred more of me.
It is said that no one is a hero to their valet. But each of us is a hero to ourselves, and we are all the valets of our own ego.
Those who see that the world is false and empty still crave its false and empty regard.
A fool cares nothing for the wisdom of a sage. But a sage still craves the accolades of fools. So who is the bigger fool?
Like all the rest of the cheap stuff that I pine for, the less I prize their good opinion, the more I crave it, and the more I crave it, the less I prize it. And no matter how slenderly I may value a fine name, I don’t value myself less for prostituting my best gifts to woo it.
11 We can’t bear the scorn of people that we scorn
If I didn’t think so slightingly of some people, I might not go to such lengths to impress them. It galls me that those for whom I have such low regard should have such low regard for me. And though they have disappointed me so many times, I dread being a disappointment to them. ‘Man seeks to acquire a rank among his fellow men,’ Kant wrote, ‘whom he detests but without whom he cannot live.’
Why do we long for applause which we know is unworthy of us, yet feel unworthy if we fail to obtain it? We may think nothing of a person’s praise, and yet think nothing of ourselves if we don’t win it. And though we may not think much of their good opinion, we can’t bear to lose it. Cicero points out that ‘many people scorn glory, who are still mortified by unjust reproach.’
It’s harder to bear the scorn of the people that we don’t respect than of those that we admire.
12 The perspective of pride
My ego frames the perspective by which I gauge all that I think good and estimable. ‘Egoism is the law of optics in the realm of our feelings,’ as Nietzsche wrote. ‘What is closest appears large and weighty.’ Anyone who dwells far from me and from the world that I project seems to dwell far from reality. ‘Whoever lives at a different end of town to me,’ Swift said, ‘I look upon as persons out of the world, and only myself and the little scene about me to be in it.’
I exist only in the minds of others, but they exist for me in my own mind. Anybody not lit by the sun of my presence must live a gloomy spectral life in the shade.
The world is a smudged backdrop, from which I stand out as the one glowing figure who deserves to last and be happy. The persians had no doubt that they were the greatest people in the world and that the rest were of less and less worth the farther they dwelt from them. The navel of the earth is always situated in our own backyard.
13 We care and don’t care for the approval of others
I use up my life vying to win the praise of people whom I barely know. But in the end I may not much mind what people say of me, so long as they don’t say it to my face.
We don’t care how people think of us in towns that we pass through, as Pascal showed. Why would you go to great trouble to impress either your friends, whom you see each day, or strangers, since you will see them no more? Thus Gaskell’s Cranford ladies would ask, ‘What does it signify how we dress here at Cranford, where everybody knows us?’ and if they were absent from home, ‘What does it signify how we dress here, where nobody knows us?’ So the tactic that we opt for is to try to dazzle our friends when we are in company with strangers whom we hope to dazzle. Does the respect of each, of no worth on its own, make the other’s worth the winning?
If we were not so vain, we would not take the trouble to avoid being disgusting to others.
14 The self and society
The self is everything and nothing. We are all in all to ourselves. But we are nothing by ourselves. Our aims and ends are egoistic through and through, but our egoism is social through and through. The worth that we have in our own eyes comes from the regard that others have for us. We have faith in ourselves, but we depend on others. I barely exists, but me is the nave of the world. I scarcely exist for myself, but I don’t doubt that everything else exists for my sake.
Self and the narrow worlds that it nests in each weigh not an ounce on their own but an infinity when twinned. And these low worlds raise the self to a priceless me rather than a lone and worthless I. Society beams on us like a glad sun. All our desires are selfish yet social. ‘It is easy to live for others,’ Emerson wrote, ‘everybody does.’ Our egoism finds its purpose only in a group, though the group means something solely because we are part of it. Even the most selfish person lives for others. And the most selfless people love others for their own ends.
There is so little to this self of ours, that it must absorb itself in something outside itself. And to be absorbed in some other self may be just as selfish as to be absorbed in anything else.
15 Pride is not ashamed to seek praise
We have such a rich store of self-esteem, that we can afford to spend a large sum of it to buy a crumb of others’ esteem. And yet some fling away all the world’s regard, to banquet their own yawning self-regard.
Some people market their golden gifts to purchase a moment of the dull world’s attention. To snap up the refuse that they want, they sell all that they cherish. They are in such a rush to reach a goal, that they lose their way. If they didn’t have so much self-regard, how could they bear to trade it for the paltry awards that they crave? What low dodges we sink to, in our campaign to prop up our high opinion of our own deserts.
A whisper of others’ praise is enough to silence what slight shame I might feel at the mean shifts I had to stoop to on the path to attaining it. And the fake acclaim that I gain is enough to cool the slight bruise to my vanity that I incur by having stalked it so doggedly.
16 We respect whatever wins us respect
Most of us think as well of the world as we think it thinks of us. And we think as well of a thing as it allows us to think of ourselves, unless we might think even better of ourselves by disdaining it. We are pleased with anything that makes us pleased with our own lot. And we extol any skill that we excel in.
Nothing seems small to me that shows me a hair taller to the small people whom I hope to impress.
We don’t think much of any kind of talent that we don’t have, unless we believe that it has been conferred on others to aid or amuse us.
It’s amazing how much respect we gain for a club that has the sense to admit us.
People know that the boss who fills the place one rung above them is a fool. And yet when they are at length ensconced in it, they have no doubt that it proves how savvy they are. My success is proof of my own merit. Their success is confirmation of the world’s conniving boorishness.
How could I doubt the value of any triumph that I’ve won?
17 We love the world as much as we think the world loves us
We love the world as much as we judge that the world loves us. And so it’s just as well that we judge that it loves us a lot more than it does. And no world is so small that we don’t think it worth trying to cut a big figure in it.
‘No one,’ as Leopardi says, ‘is so wholly disenchanted with the world, that when it begins to smile on him he does not become in part reconciled to it.’ I will kneel to kiss its foot, as soon as it shows me the least favour. I judge its prizes unfulfilling and deceptive till I have won a small clutch of them. And I don’t see what good sense some people have till they come to share my own point of view.
The soul is a beaten dog, now growling, now whimpering, which at last learns to fawn on the brute world.
The one sure way to persuade self-believing people to think more highly of your own merits is to show how highly you think of theirs.
CONCEIT
18 True and false pride
You need not be undeserving to be vain. And you need not be worthless to feel entitled. Vanity dogs pride wherever it goes, as hyenas tag a lion. No one has a monopoly on conceit. But some blowhards manage to squeeze more profit out of it than the rest of us.
Our smugness shields us from humiliations which would prove fatal to true pride.
Proud people pay too dear for good turns. But braggarts deem that all the favours people do them are no more than their due, and so they pay them back too stintingly.
How could our self-regard be undermined, when it’s based on nothing at all? If it weren’t so groundless, it might not be so hard to shake. No success reared it, so what shock could topple it, or even leave a dent in it?
19 Pride torments, conceit comforts
Pride is obnoxious to itself and all the world. The proud are dangerous, but the complacent are disarmed by their own complacency. They are more straightforward, less poisonous and too vain to be vindictive. The false pride that makes them deaf to real derision makes them receptive to feigned praise. Stroke their ego the right way, and they will purr like kittens. So long as they are flattered as they like, they will be quite amicable. And since they’re always flattering themselves, they are friendly and accommodating.
Pride is a querulous radical, conceit a smug tory. Pride is solitary, conceit is clubbable.
I’m stung by my pride, since I have to justify it. But I’m comforted by my conceit, because it justifies me. ‘Pride, a noble passion,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘is not blind to its faults, but hauteur is.’ The independent weigh their own and others’ worth by their intrinsic merits, the vain by the prestige that they have won in the eyes of the world.
How could pride please others, when it is so displeasing to itself?
20 Equal in conceit
We are all born equal in conceit. And so we are obliged to avow that we are all born equal. ‘There are no grades of vanity,’ as Twain points out. We have each been apportioned the same sum of it, to offset the manifest disparities of our talents and fortunes. Conceit cuts us off from others, and yet is common to us all. It makes us think we must be extraordinary, but it is one of the most ordinary things about us. It is the great leveller, which clips us all to the one size while congratulating us on how unique we are. Each of us now has an entitlement to the security of being equal and the vanity of feeling special. If I weren’t so like others, I might not feel so sure of how different from them I am.
Now that we are all equal, we each have to compete feverishly to show that we are an inch more equal than our peers.
21 Conceit and illusion
Pride pioneers new concepts. But conceit contents us with the rusty banged-up idols of our tribe. False pride makes do with humbug, but honour will make do with nothing short of the truth. Most people have enough front to support all their trumpery. But few have the pride and courage for an assault on it. Principled people give up their chance of happiness to serve the truth. And the vain give it up to serve a lie.
Most people don’t have the pride to seek deep truths. But their vanity piques them to take part in petty squabbles over small details.
Our pipedreams cost us nothing but our true pride. And we are always ready to shop that in order to serve our sham self-belief.
Who isn’t blinded by the limelight of their own self-admiration?
22 Cohort conceit
We are gratified both by our enemies, since we know that we are not like them, and by our friends, since we are sure that they are not like us. We feel that our friends are better than everyone else, and that we are better than our friends. And so they give us a double reason to think well of our own worth. Two will jog on well together, so long as each feels superior to the other in some respect. And as Chesterfield wrote, ‘most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.’
We judge that those above us are arrogant when they assert their preeminence over us, and that those below us are presumptuous when they assume an equality with us.
A group is maintained by a corporate vanity of its own which feeds but exceeds that of its several members. Being part of a crowd adds to your egoism, but dilutes your individuality.
23 Conceit speaks
Some vainglorious people babble to you about all the wonderful things that they’re up to, and some take it that they are so well known that they don’t need to. They don’t want to insult you by implying that you alone of all the world are ignorant of it.
‘One speaks little,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘when vanity does not make one speak.’ Some people have nothing to say of a thing if they have no part in it. But most of us can find something of our own to talk of in everything.
Smug people tell themselves the self-serving lies that most of us know we have to tell others. And they dare to tell others the mad self-glorifying lies that most of us keep locked in our own breast.
The words that I quote with most relish are my own. And the words that I remember best are my own, and I feel sure that these are the ones that others remember too.
24 The self inflated by its trappings
‘A man’s self,’ says William James, ‘is the sum total of all that he can call his.’ It takes in all that pertains to us, from our body and attire and belongings to our spouse or child, clan, car, club and address, firm, homeland, faction or church. The self that my vanity fancies I fill up juts out much further than the self that others can see. So without purposing to they are all the time bumping and bruising my phantom being. We use words to fix the outline of our shape, and they stretch it farther than we reach.
I reckon myself richer for each of my possessions. And I reckon my possessions so rich because they are mine. Custody is nine-tenths of how we rate a commodity. Our beaming self-satisfaction gilds all the dross that we make shift to scoop up.
25 Everything adds to our pride
I have such a strong need to think highly of my own gifts, that it’s lucky that I find it so easy.
We so hunger to think well of ourselves, that we would starve if such stingy rations failed to fill us. We thirst for praise, yet such quick sips of it slake us.
False pride is a most efficient organism. It can draw nutriment from the driest crumbs, and yet digest the most noxious toxins.
Self-belief can induce us to do anything at all. And anything at all is apt to swell our self-belief. Our mere performances lend us a false sense of proficiency. We gain more reason to rate our deftness favourably just by doing a thing than we lose if we do it ineptly.
I think so well of myself, and others think so little about me, that nothing I do could make either think any better of me.
Our smugness is an ever-flowing fountain. It can’t get any fuller, but nor can it run down.
26 First in all comparisons
It is our curse to be all the time comparing our own merits with those round us. But we are blessed to come out first in all our encounters.
Those who don’t know what I didn’t know till yesterday I deem disgracefully benighted. And I jeer at those who fear what I was frightened of till yesterday.
I weigh my own worth by what I aspire to, but others’ worth by what they have achieved. I dignify my own purposes, but discount their accomplishments. So I trust that my aborted undertakings will vouch for the value of those that I got done. If this is what I had to leave aside, you can guess how great are the things I finished.
We size our own stature by those near to us. If we live with pygmies, we judge that we must be giants. And if we live with giants, we judge that we must be giants too.
A snob is anyone whose pretensions exceed my own. I want to act like a snob up to the threshold of my pretentiousness. But I lambast as a snob anyone who dares to overreach it. Anyone more punctilious than me must be a pedant, anyone less is lax and neglectful.
THE PRIDE OF KNOWLEDGE
27 The pride of knowledge
I don’t doubt that my ideas are unique. Yet it still shocks me when no one else seems to share them. I flatter myself that I differ from others, but that they must be like me.
Numbers are always on our side. If all are of the same mind as me, then I must be right. And if no one is, then I am not merely right but bold and far-seeing.
Most of us swallow the same slop and poppycock as everyone else, but we are sure that we do so for deeper reasons. We like to feel both the security of belonging to our herd and the smugness of presuming that we stand at the forefront of it. I glance to my flank at all of them galloping in the same direction as I am, and I pity them for blindly stampeding the way that I chose by reflection.
Messengers bulge with the weight of their news. They ought to be shot now and then, to lance their tumid pomposity.
28 Pride in what we don’t know
Some people glory not just in what they do know but even in what they don’t know. And they are vain of what they don’t know, since it seems to certify the value of what they do know. They feel like great landlords, who don’t deign to attend to all that occurs on their vast estates, and are too grand to seek to grasp such trifling details. What they modestly pretend tops their competence they in fact judge falls below their concern.
If you can’t take pride in your good sense, you can at least take pride in your folly. We pique ourselves on our lazy preconceptions as much as we would if we had found out strenuous reasons.
I think little of what I don’t know, so that I won’t have to think less of myself for not knowing it. ‘We scorn a lot of things,’ Vauvenargues says, ‘so that we won’t have to scorn ourselves.’
People who don’t know what they do are still proud of themselves for doing it. They plume themselves on the mannerisms of which they are not even aware.