Pride Comes Before a Fall

"Take pride in yourself" it is a cliché used often by the proud and the meek alike as if it were the key to success.   History however, begs a different conclusion to be made.   King Solomon, believed by Jews and Christians to be the wised man ever to live said pride comes before a fall.   That this proverb is accredited to a man of such credential is testament to its validity however, one does not have to be religious to see the worth of this claim.

Marie Antoinette was the wife of King Charles XVI of France. She ignored pleas from advisors that she could not keep up her excessively luxurious lifestyle while her people starved, but in her pride she ignored them thinking she was untouchable in her palace and did not concern herself with such matters. As a result Marie Antoinette was a sacrifice to Le' Guillotine and the last queen of France.

No matter how rich you are, if you are the most powerful leader, posses the vastest knowledge, if pride is wrapped up in there, it is only a matter of time before you find your downfall. Pride, however, is not only instilled in individuals but it can be that a whole community, or even nation can be so tied up in their self absorbing pride that they walk right off the cliff.

When the white settlers came to Australia, they brought with them not only rats and disease, but their ideologies from the United Kingdom.   This may have been advantageous to building a community had such ideologies been superior to all others, however, this was, and is never, the case. Since settlement, white people have instead of either realising that this land already had inhabitants and leaving them be, or in the very least learning from them as to how to survive in a land that was their home for 40 000 years they killed, oppressed and marginalised because their pride told them that British life, that is the life of a white person, and the British way of life was superior that that of these savages. More than 200 years later we are paying for...