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wingedbeastPride, along with feeling good, is very useful for a society. It can bind people to a society in general, make them feel good about being members of that society for reasons beyond mere survival. That's all good, things that you will need. So, for the obvious bit of advice, encourage and model pride in your community and society.
In so doing, you will want to be careful about the kind of pride you encourage and model. You want positive pride, rather than negative. Positive pride includes pride in personal or shared accomplishments and values. This can include the quality of life built, contributions to wider community, and, at first, basic survival against long odds.
Negative pride operates by lowering esteem in others. History, particularly the early part of the mid-20th century, has some stark examples of what happens when negative pride takes the foreground of national pride.
The difficulty, for you as leaders or influential members of your society, is to distinguish between the two. Negative pride often apes the language of positive pride. If you were at all socially aware in pre-apocalyptic society, you will have heard racism recast as "white pride" and "pride in the accomplishments of white people", even though that pride always comes along with belittling everybody who doesn't perfectly count. Or, you might have been aware of religious factions that were proud of their godly morality... in comparison to everybody else.
Positive pride will sometimes use the context of negative pride. Two city Mayors, for instance, will often gamble when their respective sports teams face off. One Mayor will gamble their own city's signature food against that of the other city. Sure, somebody has to lose the competition, but both are placing value in the unique and worthy pride of the other.
To distinguish, carefully examine the pride and examine a scenario in which others have, without being any different from reality, worth of the exact same pride. In that scenario, does your pride seem less proud? If so, you've got some negative pride to think about. (Just part of why "white pride" shouts racism but "English pride" doesn't.)
If you're facing a rag-tag collection of survivors and looking to pull together a society so that people can continue to survive, this distinction might seem nice (bigotry being bad) but pie-in-the-sky. You've got to pull these people together. If they have to believe that they're the great ones because the rest of the world is made of evil losers, so be it.
There are a couple problems with negative pride that can drastically reduce your chances of surviving, let alone thriving, as a society.
The obvious problem is that you will come into contact with other people, sooner or later. If you have the only survivors left on earth in one group... you might seriously consider the question in the first tip of this series.
You will come into contact with other people and you will want things they have. You will want to trade with them. You will want some alliances. You will, at the very least, want them to not kill you. All of that becomes much more difficult to achieve if your society is unready to acknowledge that the people you meet aren't evil losers.
The more insidious problem is that negative pride doesn't move people to build. Positive pride has specific accomplishments to look to, accomplishments to be added. Negative pride sees others as lesser and leaves the only necessary accomplishment that of bare existence. Further accomplishment means not adding, but subtracting from those that exist, or at least exist in any sphere that influences you.
Positive pride builds schools. Negative pride only builds schools if previous schools won't exclude the evil losers. The result is either stagnation or self-destruction.
For your new society to survive and thrive, you need the members of your society to be motivated to build that society, but also to react to others of similar accomplishment without finding their own pride threatened.
In so doing, you will want to be careful about the kind of pride you encourage and model. You want positive pride, rather than negative. Positive pride includes pride in personal or shared accomplishments and values. This can include the quality of life built, contributions to wider community, and, at first, basic survival against long odds.
Negative pride operates by lowering esteem in others. History, particularly the early part of the mid-20th century, has some stark examples of what happens when negative pride takes the foreground of national pride.
The difficulty, for you as leaders or influential members of your society, is to distinguish between the two. Negative pride often apes the language of positive pride. If you were at all socially aware in pre-apocalyptic society, you will have heard racism recast as "white pride" and "pride in the accomplishments of white people", even though that pride always comes along with belittling everybody who doesn't perfectly count. Or, you might have been aware of religious factions that were proud of their godly morality... in comparison to everybody else.
Positive pride will sometimes use the context of negative pride. Two city Mayors, for instance, will often gamble when their respective sports teams face off. One Mayor will gamble their own city's signature food against that of the other city. Sure, somebody has to lose the competition, but both are placing value in the unique and worthy pride of the other.
To distinguish, carefully examine the pride and examine a scenario in which others have, without being any different from reality, worth of the exact same pride. In that scenario, does your pride seem less proud? If so, you've got some negative pride to think about. (Just part of why "white pride" shouts racism but "English pride" doesn't.)
If you're facing a rag-tag collection of survivors and looking to pull together a society so that people can continue to survive, this distinction might seem nice (bigotry being bad) but pie-in-the-sky. You've got to pull these people together. If they have to believe that they're the great ones because the rest of the world is made of evil losers, so be it.
There are a couple problems with negative pride that can drastically reduce your chances of surviving, let alone thriving, as a society.
The obvious problem is that you will come into contact with other people, sooner or later. If you have the only survivors left on earth in one group... you might seriously consider the question in the first tip of this series.
You will come into contact with other people and you will want things they have. You will want to trade with them. You will want some alliances. You will, at the very least, want them to not kill you. All of that becomes much more difficult to achieve if your society is unready to acknowledge that the people you meet aren't evil losers.
The more insidious problem is that negative pride doesn't move people to build. Positive pride has specific accomplishments to look to, accomplishments to be added. Negative pride sees others as lesser and leaves the only necessary accomplishment that of bare existence. Further accomplishment means not adding, but subtracting from those that exist, or at least exist in any sphere that influences you.
Positive pride builds schools. Negative pride only builds schools if previous schools won't exclude the evil losers. The result is either stagnation or self-destruction.
For your new society to survive and thrive, you need the members of your society to be motivated to build that society, but also to react to others of similar accomplishment without finding their own pride threatened.
