Something Humility Is Not

It is almost always popular to at least try to appear to be humble simply for the social approval.  In fact, this trend can be so strong that people will think of almost anything as arrogant if only it makes other people uncomfortable or expresses authentic confidence or, far more importantly, philosophical certainty.  Like many ideologies and concepts, there are many ways that this faux humility is conditioned into numerous people, but all of them are logically invalid at their core and discourage rationalistic certainty, self-awareness, and self-assuredness.  These ideas are really just about believing subjectively appealing assumptions (yes, this might be philosophically or emotionally appealing to some people), trying to fit into superficial, irrational cultures that confuse anything other than self-deprication, glorifying extreme insecurity, or thinking more highly of others than oneself by default with arrogance.

Of all of these things, I want to particularly focus here on the stupidity and ironic arrogance of thinking that other people matter more than oneself just because they are someone else.  All irrationalistic beliefs are arrogant because a person must knowingly or unknowingly believe something false or at a minimum unproven, and only beliefs based on conscience, social pressures, or some other form of emotionalism or fallacious epistemological foundations would ever lead a person to hold to this.  What basis would there be for loving or respecting other people that would not also apply to oneself as a person, after all?  Since anything short of logical proof is epistemologically invalid because only reason dictates and reveals reality, someone would have to blindly assume that they are lesser than others for simply being themself or assume knowing it is irrational to assume anything at all.  Believing in that which cannot be known or which one could prove but does not is not humble.  It is irrational.  In addition to this, arrogance is always part of ideological irrationality.

Humility is not pretending or even truly believing that you have lesser or no value because oneself as an individual is not other people; this is arbitrary anyway because there is no reason to care about other people unless people matter to some extent simply because they are human, and oneself is also a human, leaving each individual person without basis for thinking highly of others just because they are others and thinking little of themself just because they are not someone else.  Now, if someone who thinks they matter little because it is only others who seriously matter happened to have been born as someone else, they would think the same thing, and thus the other person they could have been instead of themselves will still be perceived on the basis of assumptions to be deserving of recognition, respect, or affection just for being some else.  This misconception of humility is really just significant personal insecurity or sheer idiocy treated as something morally positive or intellectually noble.

There are people who love themselves, and this is not necessarily delusional.  Neither is refusing to believe that one has worldview errors, incompetencies, or some other negative trait when one does not have them.  Being honest about this is almost bound to offend a plethora of people who want to feel better about themselves by demanding that others not understand or acknowledge that their positive qualities are positive, but it is always possible and in many cases is probable that non-rationalists will be alarmed by logical truths.  To be humble, a person does not submit to cultural norms or subjective whims of others.  To be humble, people must intentionally avoid the fallacies and egoism connected with arrogance, and that is not necessarily a difficult thing to do unless they already are in the clutches of errors they allowed themselves to hold to.

Humility is nothing more than not being arrogant, and arrogance is nothing more than thinking of oneself more highly than one should (in a moral sense, which would partly be tied to one's basic value as a human, if there is such a thing, and partly be tied to one's rationality and moral character beyond this) or believing things that one could not prove or has not logically proven (in an intellectual sense, where one's metaphysical nature and epistemological recognition of or ability to know that nature is not distorted).  Illusions of humility can influence a stupid person to think that someone is arrogant because they are confident, arrogant because they do not belittle themselves or think negative but false things about themselves, or most importantly and erroneously, arrogant because they are rationalistic and thus have genuine absolute certainty, ideological consistency, and alignment with reality in at least some key ways.  A humble person just does not believe things because of someone else's preferences or their own.