We all know how the story begins: In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
At some point in the story, He also created angels, and as the greatest angel watched God give the Earth form, he suddenly had a question.
I don’t think Lucifer started with hatred so much as curiosity. Before, it had always been God and the angels alone, so as Adam walked with God in the garden, Lucifer wondered where in this new hierarchy the angels stood.
Specifically, Lucifer wondered where he stood.
God walked with Adam frequently, perhaps even daily. Lucifer felt that his own position had changed, and so he asked. God had spoken the Heavens and the Earth into existence, and it would seem that when Lucifer questioned God, pride emerged.
We don’t know how many years on Earth God’s seven days lasted, but from our vantage point it looks like billions of years, giving pride a very long time to gnaw on Lucifer, twisting his curiosity into corruption and giving rise to new questions: “Why should God’s will define what is good? Why don’t I have a say in defining ‘Good’? Why does God need man? Why should my perfection bow to authority? Why should the most brilliant of angels bend the knee to anyone at all?”
And finally: “What if I corrupt man?”
Each question Lucifer spoke allowed a new sin to emerge until the entire architecture of sin stood before him.
At first sin felt wrong, but as the answers grew darker, pride helped Lucifer suppress his discomfort. “I am Lucifer, and my questions enlighten God’s order,” he justified.
As sin further twisted Lucifer, he began to reinterpret everything. Humility before God became humiliation. Obedience to God became bondage.
If God would not rule the ‘righteous order’ of Lucifer’s twisted mind, Lucifer decided he would rise up with the other angels and overthrow God. Lucifer then asked his final question from Heaven when he asked the other angels, “Who among you will follow me?”
The rebellion, of course, failed, but the story does not end there, as the fallen Lucifer, now in Creation, tempted Eve: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?”
As Eve then bit the apple, sin entered the world.
This essay is a case study of pride, how pride leads to evil, and how evil leads to ruin. Pride does not just take down individuals. It destroys civilizations. This essay will map out how.
Morality Requires Humility
We speak of morality as if it is something we construct, or a philosophical framework built from observation, intuition, cultural preferences, and social norms, but real morality does not begin with the self. If morality comes from intellect alone, then morality is subjective, and though a person with a subjective, personal morality can still be a moral person, a morality of the self does not extend to other people.
For a civilization to be functional, morality must be shared.
Those who reject a shared morality claim to do so out of tolerance, which invariably claims that tolerance is itself a moral good, but tolerance of what? How can we claim that Jeffrey Epstein did anything wrong if we are tolerant? Certainly it was tolerance that allowed so very many rich and famous people to go along with what Jeffrey Epstein was doing for at least fifteen years.
Even after Epstein was arrested in 2008 and given a sweetheart deal by the FBI, Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett was tolerant enough to text message back and forth with Epstein in 2019 while questioning Michael Cohen in a House of Representatives hearing. Epstein was guiding her questions to help her ‘get’ Donald Trump.
Stacey Plaskett knew that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile. He’d pled guilty in a plea bargain in 2008 to solicitation of prostitution, and to procuring someone under the age of 18 for prostitution, and yet Stacey Plaskett was friendly enough with Epstein to have his phone number and to text with him. She was tolerant of pedophilia if it meant ‘getting’ Trump.
Here is the dirty little secret of tolerance: people are tolerant of others not because they think the immoral behaviors of others are OK, but because they want the same tolerance shown toward their own immoral behaviors. Such tolerance is a mask. Under the mask we find pride.
In The Story of Civilization, Book 1: Our Oriental Heritage, Will Durant showed how similar morality was in different societies and tribes all around the world. He found it quite remarkable how we all have essentially the same conscience, regardless of where we are born or what culture we live under, at least toward what is considered the ‘in-group’.
When I was about three, I stole a candy bar from a store while out with my grandmother. I still remember the thrill of taking the candy bar and putting it in my jacket pocket, and the relief as we left the store that I did not get caught.
What I remember more was the guilt I felt when I finally ate the candy bar.
I did not need to be told that stealing was wrong. I knew it intuitively.
We all intuitively know right from wrong.
It does not matter where that sense of conscience comes from. It could be a biologically evolved trait programmed into our DNA, or it could be a gift from the divine. What matters is that we have it, and when we violate it, we know we are doing so.
We aren’t born racist. Those who become racist are taught to be. We aren’t born criminals. Those who become criminals cast their conscience aside. Only rarely is someone born evil. The vast majority of the time, evil is learned.
We are born with morality baked into us. We lose it over time, and when we ‘teach’ children that tolerance of immorality is somehow virtuous, we are turning their pride against them, just as Lucifer did to Eve.
Genuine morality requires humility, as humility forces us to say that we are smaller than something else. As a Christian, I try to be humble before God, but it is just as acceptable to put the needs of society above oneself and to accept our societal morality, even if for no other reason than that it is the morality that has held our country intact for 250 years, and held Western Civilization together for far longer.
Humility accepts limits. Pride rejects them. Pride is the entry-drug of evil, convincing people that they are exempt from the constraints that bind others. Allowing others to also be exempt is but an excuse to let oneself be unconstrained by morality.
We have seen this play before: history’s greatest evils never begin with hatred or cruelty. They always begin with pride.
Pride as the Psychological Portal to Evil
Almost no one sees themselves as evil. The tyrant, the revolutionary, the extremist, and the zealot, all believe they are acting in the service of a good that weaker souls cannot comprehend. Evil whispers that being restrained by conscience is a form of cowardice, and that the limits of morality are for smaller people, safer times, or lesser circumstances. Evil justifies itself, and then compromises the soul.
Pride reinterprets conscience as a barrier to greatness. The man who overcomes conscience persuades himself that he is only “doing what must be done.” Hitler believed that his ability to violate moral norms in pursuit of his fascist ambitions made him uniquely moral. Hitler would often say that he and he alone had the moral courage to lead Germany into a new age, and Hitler believed that the greatest act of evil was cowering behind morality as an excuse against duty.
Hitler knew what he was doing. We see it as evil, and of course it was, but Hitler was convinced he was doing good.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say Lucifer is ugly, stupid, or unwise. Ugly is easy to see. Stupid is easy to stop. Unwise has no long-term plan. Hitler had a long-term plan, and Lucifer is portrayed as beautiful, intelligent, and wise beyond human measure.
Evil does not slap you in the face. It whispers, and it does not whisper just anything. It whispers what your pride wants to hear.
Hitler believed that ruthlessness was proof of higher moral courage, and that while others shrank from difficult decisions, he possessed the iron will to do what history demanded. Stalin viewed himself as the surgeon of history, cutting out diseased elements so that society might heal. Hamas views slaughter as liberation, cloaking brutality in the language of resistance. The alt-right admires authoritarian strongmen because they appear “unafraid” to use force. The radical left rationalizes violence as the tragic necessity of revolutionary progress. Modern authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin live inside self-created moral mythologies in which their dominance is not only justified, but virtuous.
Pride convinces people they are morally superior precisely because they are willing to do what conscience forbids.
Moral relativists have no defense against this, as once truth becomes subjective moral authority becomes whatever fluid thing those in power declare.
To make matters worse, unrepentant sin snowballs.
According to the movie Nefarious, possession begins with invitation. That invitation can be small, confused, or indirect. It need not be explicit. Next comes infestation. The demon begins to influence the person’s thoughts and emotions. In this step, temptation multiplies.
Next comes obsession, where the demon begins to dominate the person’s life. Next comes oppression, where the demon begins to assert authority, crushing the will of the person.
The final step is full possession. In Nefarious, the final stage is explicitly described as a legal and moral takeover, where the demon claims: “I own him.”
Nefarious is a great horror film, but here is the thing: demons do not have to be real for sin to overpower the soul in exactly the same way the movie describes. Some people may be born evil, but most who give up their morality do so slowly, one sin at a time, followed with justification instead of repentance.
I’m a Christian, so I believe in God, but one need not be religious to see how justifying immoral behaviors over time kills conscience, and turns hearts evil. This is not a single step, but a long process of many steps.
Individual Redemption vs Civilizational Redemption
Redemption works differently for individuals than it does for civilizations, and confusing the two is one of the great modern errors.
A person can choose humility at any moment. The turning is internal and immediate. It requires only one will bending back toward the moral order it previously abandoned.
Civilizations don’t work that way.
Civilizations have no singular conscience, and no single heart capable of repentance. They are aggregates of millions of people, systems, habits, laws, incentives, and competing interests. They do not fall all at once, and they do not rise all at once. They decay slowly, often invisibly, through countless unchallenged compromises.
A civilization does not repent. It corrects, but only when enough individuals recover the humility necessary to reforge the societal morality.
The individual’s fall begins in the heart, with pride whispering permission, but a civilization’s fall begins in its institutions, where its elites no longer believe they are accountable to anything higher than themselves. When truth becomes negotiable, when morality becomes optional, and when power becomes the only shared value, civilizational decline has already occurred.
And unlike individuals, civilizations rarely realize they are falling. They will, in fact, ‘teach’ the tolerance of immorality in schools to corrupt future generations.
Simply put, where individuals feel guilt, civilizations feel momentum.
I’ve written that renewal is the rule and collapse the exception, and we see this throughout history. Rome didn’t collapse until it exhausted itself, after many periods of renewal. The same is true of ancient Israel, England, and a host of other civilizations.
A civilization can be renewed through the cumulative humility of its people. Often some kind of specific threat causes the return of moral seriousness, the rediscovery of objective truth, and the willingness to be a part of something bigger than the self.
Civilization is redeemed only when individuals are redeemed in large enough numbers to recalibrate the culture.
Individual redemption is an act of grace. Civilizational redemption is a generational struggle, and no civilization in history has long survived once its people collectively refused to live under a shared moral code.
The Birth of the Elite
Pride does not remain trapped within individuals. It naturally produces political structures that reflect its assumptions. If morality is rooted in intellect rather than universal law, then those who claim superior intellect must become the interpreters and enforcers of morality.
Whose morality do they enforce? Certainly not God’s. The elite do not believe in God.
If there were one thing I wish I could make even the self-professed intellectual understand, it is that the Bible need not be literally true to be a legitimate attempt at describing truth through the vantage points of those who wrote it.
Some religions are attempts at finding truth rather than subverting truth to establish control. This is, in fact, the difference between a religion and a cult.
The Bible has thousands of years of earned wisdom in it. We ignore that wisdom, and the moral order stemming from it, at great peril.
Every pride-based ideology requires an elite, or a caste of moral and intellectual superiors whose authority is assumed. This is true of the radical left, which divides society into oppressors and the enlightened; it is true of the alt-right, which admires those who dominate; and it is true of every totalitarian movement in history. Pride demands hierarchy.
The elite also have a natural distrust of systems in which wealth or influence can elevate people outside their ideological base. They cannot tolerate rivals to their moral authority. Their pride needs concentrated power.
Pride does not simply demand hierarchy. It demands performance. To maintain the illusion of elevated moral status, the elite must be visibly elevated above the masses.
This is why every pride-driven regime develops rituals of dominance and submission, with propaganda, slogans, public confessions, mandatory displays of loyalty, and obeisance to leaders becoming normalized. Subjugation becomes not only a political mechanism, but a moral performance: proof that the elite have succeeded in lifting themselves above ordinary humanity, thus giving themselves the right to rule.
The logic is unspoken but ever-present: “Look how far above them we stand. That is the measure of our greatness.” Vanity is the psychological fuel.
We often assume totalitarian economic models do not work, and in many cases that is true, but this explanation misses the deeper reality: poverty is not only a consequence of these systems. It is a functional requirement. The subjugation of the masses into poverty separates them from the elite, justifying the elite’s role, whereas a people not impoverished are apt to think for themselves and question the elite’s dominance.
The perfect elite-based society, from the perspective of the elite, is one where the masses are totally dependent upon the benevolence of the elite. Where the masses grovel, the masses cannot rule.
Even in systems where incentives exist to make the economy function, as in fascist or hybrid authoritarian economies, the ruling class still maintains deliberate disparity. The impoverishment of the masses is not incidental, but essential. Totalitarian poverty is not an accident of bad economics; it is the psychological scaffolding of a prideful elite.
Pride Constructs Hierarchies of Human Worth; Humility Asserts Universal Dignity
Pride divides humanity into castes: rulers, elites, cadres, masses, and expendables. Every pride-based ideology produces a moral hierarchy of human worth. Some are deemed fit to rule; others are assigned roles of obedience; still others may be discarded entirely.
Humility, by contrast, asserts universal dignity. The Christian concept of imago Dei, the natural-rights tradition, the foundations of constitutional liberty – all of these things rest on the premise that every person possesses equal moral worth. Some say “Endowed by their Creator,” but the creator can be evolution as long as we agree that human rights do not come from the state, and cannot be taken away by the state.
Pride demands human rights, but only for the self. For others, pride creates a moral caste system. Pride is always selfish. Even when pride is assigned to a group, it is at the expense of other groups.
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and yes – Donald Trump, don’t claim to disagree with their political opponents. Listen to them when they speak. They claim to be above their political opponents.
The politics of the day are reduced to “Me smart – you stupid,” “Me brave – you coward,” and “Me good – you evil.” Once politics is reduced from a battle of ideas to a battle of pride, compromise is impossible and one side must impose its will over the other.
Elites consider themselves above the moral order, so they inevitably place themselves above truth as well. Truth becomes something to manage, manipulate, or weaponize. To the elite, truth is not a standard to obey. This produces a cascade of behaviors familiar across authoritarian systems:
- censorship
- propaganda
- media capture
- speech controls
- forced narratives
- historical revisionism
- ideological intimidation
- purity tests
The masses become permissible targets of deception to help the elite maintain control. Control maintains hierarchy, and hierarchy reinforces pride.
Pride is a false feeling, and false feelings are hollow. Being hollow, pride constantly needs to be reinforced, often through purges.
Humility reacts differently. Humility acknowledges fallibility and carries substance. Humility seeks truth even when truth is painful or inconvenient, and humility elevates others.
It is ironic that those seeking a universal moral code also seek individual liberty, whereas those who seek individual morality seek control, but of course this is true. Where people share and follow the same moral values, control is not necessary, but where people have no shared values, tribalism leads to conflict, and such conflict can be bloody. Moral relativism requires totalitarianism to prevent the public from tearing itself apart.
Domination is always easier to justify when morality has no fixed point.
Humility places the individual above the state, and places even the ruler beneath the moral order. It creates equality before God, and equality before the law.
Pride, by contrast, places the state above the individual and places the ruler above the state. It centralizes power, erodes freedom, builds machinery of subjugation, and distorts the word ‘truth’ into a vehicle for control.
Civilizations do not collapse all at once. They decay through a predictable sequence that is as old as Lucifer’s first question. Pride begins the process by placing the self above any higher moral authority. Once pride becomes the lens through which morality is interpreted, truth becomes relative, and when truth becomes relative, no shared moral law can survive.
Humility, when practiced by a people rather than just a person, is not weakness. It is the strength to accept limits and to anchor ourselves again to a shared moral law. National humility begins when leaders stop treating power as a substitute for virtue and instead submit themselves to the same standards they demand of others.
Our nation must reject the impulse to divide humanity into moral castes, and instead restore the idea that every person bears equal worth. You and I may not be the same, but we are equal under God and must be treated accordingly.
Lucifer’s fall began with a refusal to accept his place in the order God created. Our civilization’s fall begins with the same refusal, only we disguise it as enlightenment, progress, or some other such thing. We tell ourselves that morality is ours to invent, and that meaning is ours to assign. We forget that the first creature to believe those things started a war in Heaven.
When a people reject humility, they inherit Lucifer’s logic. When they throw off the limits of conscience, they inherit Lucifer’s rebellion. When they imagine themselves wiser than the God who made them, they inherit Lucifer’s ruin. None of this relies on God being real either. With or without a literal Creator, the logic and wisdom hold.
Pride is a civilizational contagion that corrodes families, institutions, governments, and nations until nothing remains but power struggling against power. Once truth is no longer fixed, justice collapses into preference, and society descends into its lowest moral denominator, just as surely as Eve fell the moment she trusted the serpent more than the voice of God.
This is not where the story must end, though. We have a choice.
The same God who judged Lucifer has never stopped calling creation back to Him. From Israel to the Church, from exile to redemption, from the Fall to the Cross, the story has always been bent toward restoration. God loves us and wants us to love one another.
We can end it as Lucifer did, justifying ourselves, elevating ourselves, and collapsing under the weight of our own self-worship, or we can end it as Adam eventually did, naked before God, ashamed, but willing to walk in His presence once again.
Civilizations rise and fall. Empires fade. Ideologies burn themselves out. The story that began with “In the beginning” continues, and the God who spoke creation into existence has not fallen silent.
The final chapter is being written now by our humility, or by our pride.
How the story ends is up to us.
