A. Pride and Egalitarianism
The proud person, subject to another’s authority, hates first of all the particular yoke that weighs upon him.
In a second stage, the proud man hates all authority in general and all yokes, and, even more, the very principle of authority considered in the abstract.
In a second stage, the proud man hates all authority in general and all yokes, and, even more, the very principle of authority considered in the abstract.
Because he hates all authority, he also hates superiority of any kind. And in all this there is a true hatred for God.
This hatred for any inequality has gone so far as to drive high-ranking persons to risk and even lose their positions just to avoid accepting the superiority of somebody else.
There is more. In a height of virulence, pride could lead a person to fight for anarchy and to refuse the supreme power were it offered to him. This is because the simple existence of that power implicitly attests to the principle of authority, to which every man as such – the proud included – can be subject.
Pride, then, can lead to the most radical and complete egalitarianism.
This radical and metaphysical egalitarianism has various aspects.
Lenin making a speech in the Red Square
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (York, PA: The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, 1993), p. 47.
