What is the is mid point between knowing you have done a good job and not really giving a toss about it beyond a justified sense of of personal satisfaction?
That is a great question. Is there a middle point between our socially compliant displays of humility and irritating (in context) manifestations of one's accomplishments? I do not think the question is as immediately salient as one might imagine at first blush.
Let me explain. For some insane reason, in our Wikipedia World, if we for instance are engaged in a dispute about how celestial navigation works, a person who actually is a celestial navigator and has employed it to sail around the world is supposed to keep silent about this during the discussion. The fact that they have first hand experience, renders them now inadmissible as a participant, in the eyes of the Wiki-faker. One must either cite an academic reference, or employ rhetoric as their argument artifice. All material must come from official (and of course suitably humble) sources. In other words, highly conflict-of-interest induced, academia. (Hence the business apothegm "Those who cannot do, teach.")
This social principle is exactly the reason why we are huddled into a small forum here today. Fakers, posing in retail store mannequin humility, inside an integral miasma of lack in genuineness. This 'displacement of the genuine/first hand' bears the negative outcome of social pressure to conform, and results in a high degree of ignorance with regard to many critical or foundational subjects such as spirituality and man's origins.
My point was that the ASD person, despite being an annoyance, is genuine if anything. I suppose La Rochefoucauld's point, and I agree with this, is not to be consumed over where others fall upon this pride-fake humility spectrum, as it was to encourage focus upon a person's genuineness. That falls along a different continuum. It is very easy to cast and portray a humble person in a movie - but very difficult to cast and portray a genuine person. The reason is precisely because the former can be play-acted, while the latter usually can not.
A 'humble' person who uses the social perception of humility to mock in punishment, is not genuine... it is a form of a most intense, quiet, seething, extreme in pride. La Rochefoucauld Pride. Humility is displayed in how one instinctively treats others (watch for the subtleties of the 'act'), and not in how one appears to regard self.
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