9 votes

Modesty means more, not less

2 comments

  1. Icarus
    Link
    I read this essay while drinking my morning coffee and found that I agreed with a lot of the authors conclusions. I think i have similar conclusions to them but would add a couple more points:...

    I read this essay while drinking my morning coffee and found that I agreed with a lot of the authors conclusions. I think i have similar conclusions to them but would add a couple more points:

    • Modesty is driven by a person's sense of ego. From the Buddhist perspective, I feel that as one understands the dependent origination (pratitya samutpada) of the self, the less a person will be driven to feed their ego on external, fleeting things. They also touched upon understanding modesty when you frame it as understanding what immodesty is, which I thought was interesting from the perspective of only being able to understand things when we have a contrast to what it isn't. Modesty would not exist if immodesty didn't exist, and vice versa.

    • I think what you find to be modest/immodest can be a good indicator of the things that drive your own ego. I feel very strongly that our characterizations of others says more about the values and the types of people we are, than the actual people we are judging. You can say that someone is being immodest about something but there is a chance that it is you the perceiver that is incorrect about your judgment of others. So in essence, modesty/immodesty is not something that lies within the judged but rather the judge themself.

    Anyways, probably still have quite a bit more to think about with this piece. It's a good read!

    4 votes
  2. unknown user
    Link
    There was an article linked to on Reddit (pretty sure it was posted on Tildes, but I can't find it) that suggests that humility is about treating others as equals, regardless of how highly one...

    There was an article linked to on Reddit (pretty sure it was posted on Tildes, but I can't find it) that suggests that humility is about treating others as equals, regardless of how highly one values themselves. It's one of the options listed by author under "what if modesty is not ignorance of oneself".

    4 votes