She takes her superiority as a skater as a justification for arrogating special privileges she feels entitled to boss other skaters around disrespectfully.
We can easily imagine that she looks with contempt on less talented and less disciplined skaters, especially the ones that are closer to her skill-level, and brags and emotionally triumphs over lesser athletes, taking pleasure in their mistakes and moments of clumsiness. Is she therefore humble? Not with any certainty. Let us imagine that this athlete succeeds in evaluating herself accurately and, partly for this reason, becomes a very prominent skater, one of the very best. She trains herself according to the rule, if you want to win, you’d better self-evaluate rigorously. We might also imagine that this strategy generalizes to other competitive areas of her life. To this end she decides to listen attentively and as objectively as possible to the coach’s criticisms, and to “swallow” any tendencies she may have to justify herself when he criticizes her, or deny the truth of his criticisms. An athlete might realize that if she wants to dominate in Olympic skating competitions, she needs to be ruthlessly critical in evaluating her skating. It’s not the same thing as humility, though we sometimes mistake the one for the other. If accurate self-perception is a mark of humility, Hendrika seems to be short of humility.Īccurate self-perception doesn’t guarantee humility. She feels that she is the righteous one (wants to be the righteous one) in the scenario, but it seems obvious that she is guilty of libel. She thought her evidence was strong enough (wanted it to be strong enough) to win the court case, contrary to what seemed immediately obvious to family members and to the judge after careful examination. She thinks she knows (wants it to be so) that Silvia committed the crime, but she doesn’t know that. And the lock is made of her own will: she doesn’t want to see what’s on the outside. She has locked herself in a room of her own pride so dark that she can’t find her way out. She seems to be in deep darkness about some things connected with herself.
In our parable, the deeper Hendrika gets in her tug-of-war with Sylvia, the more “face” she has to lose if she admits being wrong. Some of the marks that psychologists have used to investigate humility are accurate self-perception, other-orientation, openness, low self-focus, and modest self-presentation.Īccurate self-perception doesn’t guarantee humility. Marks are observable qualities that indicate the presence of humility-either because humility always exhibits the mark, or because the mark is typical for humility. Psychologists who are interested in “measuring” humility use testing instruments to probe for marks of the trait. But Hendrika never ceased to believe in Silvia’s guilt. As family members suspected, the result of a drawn-out and expensive court case exposed the weakness of Hendrika’s case, and Silvia was declared innocent and awarded compensation for the affront to her reputation. But Hendrika dug in her heels and counter-sued Silvia for the horrible domestic crime. Seeing that she needed to rescue her reputation, and having by now the resources to hire a lawyer, Silvia sued Hendrika for libel, hoping that a short court case would bring the facts to light. Nevertheless she continued to spread rumors about Silvia’s supposed delinquency, to the point of seriously tarnishing Silvia’s reputation. Silvia was extremely distressed by the accusation, and she begged Hendrika to help her understand its basis, but Hendrika said it was too painful to discuss. She made a decent living performing around town and giving music lessons. When they were younger, they were a musical duo and performed a bit around town, but then they went their separate ways and Silvia became a world-famous performer, while Hendrika never rose above a certain local renown. Her evidence for the accusation was extremely weak, and some of the more insightful family members suspected that behind it was Hendrika’s envy of Silvia’s success as a performer.
Hendrika accused her sister Silvia of a horrible domestic crime.
0 kommentar(er)
