the editor talks with you

Can we avoid our own stupidity? Maybe not. Think about it. All of us do stupid stuff, many of us daily. Sadly, we don’t know it’s stupid until we blunder in and do it. A friend of ours read this in our Page A2 Business Blog, laughed and said, “the SCE&G brass should have read this.” Unfortunately, many SCE&G executives were too arrogant to ask for or heed advice. That’s how they wasted $9 billion on a nuclear power plant that may never produce a kilowatt of electricity. Yet they charged 727,000 of us $2 billion of that.

C.S. Lewis, best known as author of the “Chronicles of Narnia” fantasy stories, considered arrogance – as the greatest sin, He said none of us are free of it and loathe it when we see it in others. “I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards,” Lewis wrote. “I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of pride or self-conceit. The virtue opposite to it in Christian morality is called humility. “It was through pride that the devil became the devil,” Lewis wrote.

If you remember “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” this little tale exposed arrogance in action. For those unfamiliar with the story, a charlatan offers to make the emperor a magical suit of clothing so radiant that only the chaste and wise can see it. Being neither chaste nor wise, the emperor fell for the ruse and paid handsomely for a suit of clothing that did not exist. And he had the poor judgment to parade before his subjects in his birth day suit. Lewis wrote that the more pride one felt, the more one disliked pride in others. To find out how proud you are, ask yourself, “How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, refuse to take any notice of me, patronize me or show off?” Were you annoyed that someone else was the life of the Super Bowl party?

Pride is competitive by nature. It takes no pleasure from having things – only by having more things than the next man. We aren’t proud of being rich, clever or good-looking. We are proud of being richer, or cleverer or better-looking than others. If all of us became equally rich, clever or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It’s the pleasure of being above the rest that makes you proud. One of the problems the plutocrats at SCANA had was their pride in their cunning. They truly thought they were the smartest guys at Public Service Commission hearings. They thought they could trot out their charts and statistics and whatever else they had up their sleeves to bamboozle the commissioners. And they did, It wasn’t a question of if they needed another rate increase, the money was just to make a 10% profit off every dollar they charged their ratepayers. They asked themselves, could we get away with it? And, yes, they did.

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