Humbly Negative

Humility is most often defined in negative terms - not proud, not assertive, not presumptuous, not, not, not...

It seems difficult (as well as rare) to describe what humility is - what it looks like, how it acts, how it feels, without using a negative description.

We accept this because we've learned to associate humility with weakness (and virtue), submissiveness (and virtue), altruism (and virtue), and passivity (and virtue). Only in terms of humility are any of these dispositions virtuous.

And in The Truer Truth we've done that negative one better. Humility is not, not what most say it is.

Know what a cautionary tale is? An extreme, unfortunate, negative example - so horrific, so terrifying, so undesirable that just hearing the story of the misfortune of another would be enough to scare us out of similar behavior. We didn't have to make the same mistakes because we could learn from the mistakes of others. That is the power of a cautionary tale.

And cautionary tales are routinely negative (that is, after all, how the word 'caution' is used). And most tales about humility are cautionary tales.

So try this... try to discover a story, a tale, an instance of humility's positive example, its positive effects, its positive means to an end.

Look and let's see what we find.