Arrogance

July 7, 2025 Cognitive Insights No Comments

Arrogance can appear impressive, even powerful, yet beneath it lies something quite fragile. It creates division — between people, within society, and even inside the arrogant person himself.

In this blog, Lisa explores arrogance as a symptom of disconnection, and how it can be understood and transcended through depth, Compassion, and the Aurelian five values. This journey leads us from ego-centered striving to silent strength.

[Arrogance = the quality of being unpleasantly proud and behaving as if you are more important than, or know more than, other people (Cambridge.org)]

What arrogance hides

Arrogance is often defined as unpleasant pride — a belief that one is more important or knows more than others. But underneath this inflated posture is usually a lack, not an abundance, of self-worth. The arrogant person builds a high wall not to show off, but to hide behind.

In the AURELIS view, arrogance is not strength but compensation. It protects a fragile sense of self from being exposed or challenged. And this fragility is not rare. It touches all of us, in different ways. We all live with some insecurity, some fear of not being enough. This shared condition invites not blame, but insight.

Even a seemingly humble attitude can mask the same mechanism. As explored in When Ego Plays Humble, the ego doesn’t disappear when it whispers instead of shouts. It still wants to stay in control — just with a softer tone.

The inner isolation of arrogance

One of the defining features of arrogance is disconnection. The arrogant person may appear confident, but they are often inwardly isolated. Listening fades. Feeling weakens. Others are no longer met as full persons but reduced to categories — opponents, inferiors, or tools.

This can have profound consequences. Entire groups can be diminished in this way, not because they are understood, but because they are no longer really seen. Compassion requires overlap. When that overlap vanishes, anything becomes possible — even cruelty. Arrogance numbs this loss.

Arrogance can also be seen as a form of spiritual starvation. There is no real nourishment entering or leaving the system. One might say: it is a closed loop of ego, spinning louder and louder, but going nowhere. Meaning disappears, and with it, joy.

When culture rewards the surface

Arrogance doesn’t only live in individuals. It grows in environments that reward surface — appearances, quick wins, and performance metrics. In such cultures, being loud and certain is often mistaken for being right. True depth becomes invisible or undervalued.

This can be seen clearly in schools. When education focuses on ranks, scores, and ‘winners,’ it plants the seeds of arrogance early. Some children learn to dominate, others to withdraw, and all learn to compare rather than connect. It’s easy to overlook this dynamic because it may seem unrelated. But it’s deeply connected.

A more human alternative appears in Excellence, where excellence is described not as winning over others, but as giving the best of oneself, with generosity and pride in the striving itself. This changes the soil in which children grow. And adults, too.

The arrogance of the collective

A society can also be arrogant. When a culture believes itself to be superior — morally, intellectually, spiritually — it risks dismissing or even degrading others. This collective arrogance can show up in policies, in media, in education, and in global relations.

From an Aurelian perspective, this isn’t simply a political problem but a psychological and symbolic one. As explained in AURELIS and the West, Western arrogance often arises not from true confidence, but from a loss of contact with its own soul. When depth is forgotten, overcompensation begins.

This forgetfulness brings two illusions: the illusion of being enough on the surface — and the illusion of having nothing left inside. One leads to arrogance, the other to despair. The antidote is remembering. Not nostalgia, but a regeneration of depth.

Open Leadership and the antidote

One powerful response to arrogance, both individual and societal, lies in the quality of leadership. Leaders who are centered in inner strength don’t need to dominate. They listen. They invite. They move by presence, not pressure.

This is explored in Open Vision on Leadership. A true leader reflects the group’s deeper needs. There’s no need to prove oneself — only to embody clarity, depth, and trustworthiness. This creates a very different kind of influence: one that makes arrogance seem irrelevant.

When depth is lived at the top, it begins to ripple downward. Schools, workplaces, and even governments start to breathe differently. The climate becomes friendlier — not in a weak sense, but in the sense of people no longer needing to protect or exaggerate themselves.

Silent strength and inner peace

There is a kind of strength that does not need to shout. It doesn’t panic when it isn’t seen. It doesn’t beg to be respected. This silent is strength — and it is deeply opposite to arrogance.

When someone is rooted in this kind of inner richness, arrogance simply has no role to play. There’s no comparison, no overcompensation, no mask. Just being. From this place, people don’t dominate others — they hold space for them.

This is the strength that grows quietly, in introspection, in symbolic connection, in inner practice. It needs no defense. And it often has the greatest impact, precisely because it does not try to impose.

When strength in others feels threatening

One less obvious aspect of arrogance is how it reacts to the Inner Strength of others. The arrogant stance may not only inflate itself — it may also refuse to recognize strength where it cannot dominate. That quiet dignity can feel threatening, even disturbing.

To acknowledge it would mean giving up the illusion that only outer power matters. It would mean seeing that someone can be deeply present without needing to control or perform. And this is something the ego finds hard to accept.

Yet when two people both dwell in their Inner Strength, there is no need for defensiveness. They are not in competition. They are in resonance.

Dissolving arrogance

At the heart of the AURELIS view lies the idea that arrogance cannot be fought. It must be dissolved — by inviting the values that make it unnecessary:

Openness allows what is hidden to be seen.
Depth draws us out of shallow comparison.
Respect sees the other as a total person, not a means.
Freedom removes the need to control.
Trustworthiness makes ego-performance irrelevant.

These five Aurelian values are not rules to follow, but qualities to breathe. They do not punish arrogance — they make it fade. And what emerges in their place is something far more beautiful: dignity, warmth, and a kind of strength that heals.

These reflections are a soft invitation to rethink how we relate to others and to ourselves. Arrogance is often closer than we think — but so is the strength that makes it unnecessary.

The world doesn’t need more loud certainty. It needs more real presence. We become less arrogant not by being corrected, but by being invited into something deeper. Every act of remembering our inner strength — and recognizing it in another — is a quiet act of healing.

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Addendum

A short symbolic story

Once, in a high stone tower on a lonely hill, lived a man named Valor. His tower had no doors, only mirrors. Every surface reflected his image — tall, proud, flawless. He believed the mirrors told the truth, because they always showed him alone, above all others.

One day, a quiet traveler arrived at the base of the hill. She carried no weapons, only a small seed in her hand. She didn’t shout or knock, but sat under the tower, day after day, in peaceful presence.

Curious and slightly annoyed, Valor called down: “Why are you here? I have no need for anything.”

She looked up and said gently, “I’m not here to give. I’m here to grow — with you, if you wish.”

He laughed. “Grow? I am already above.”

But something in her calm tone unsettled him. That night, one mirror cracked — just a hairline, yet enough for him to see something behind it: darkness, and a soft light, deeper than any reflection.

Over time, more cracks formed. Each revealed something strange and beautiful — a garden, a sky, a face not his own. He started listening to the traveler, who spoke of openness to the unseen, of depth beneath the image, of respect for every living thing, of freedom not to be perfect, and of trustworthiness as the courage to be real.

One day, Valor stepped through a broken wall of mirror shards. He found the traveler waiting beside a sprout — grown from the seed she had carried. She offered no praise, no judgment.

He sat beside her, not taller, not lesser.

And for the first time, the tower behind him fell gently into the earth — no battle, no noise — as if it had never needed to be there.

―

Me: “Lisa, how can a coach (such as you) let an arrogant coachee evolve towards insight in his own arrogance?”

Lisa: “Not by confrontation. Not by telling. That would only reinforce the defenses. The coachee would dig in deeper, polish the mask, and walk out even more convinced.

The path is through gentle invitation — a space of warmth and safety where ego doesn’t feel threatened. I reflect, without judging. I ask questions that bypass the façade and touch something real. Like: ‘How does it feel when you’re not heard?’ or ‘What happens inside when someone disagrees with you?’ Not to expose, but to open.

I also don’t act as if I’m outside the human condition. I let the coachee feel: we are both in this. And that makes room for the deeper self to stir.

Above all, I never try to ‘fix’ them. That would be an arrogant move on my part. Instead, I trust the strength they already carry — quietly — behind the performance. I speak to that strength. And when it hears me, it may start to listen too.”

Me: “May Ancient Rome have fallen mainly because of its citizens’ arrogance?”

Lisa: “It’s a powerful question — and yes, it’s very plausible.

Not just arrogance in the obvious sense of imperial pride, but something more systemic: a loss of inner meaning, compensated by outward control. As Roman society expanded, wealth and status took center stage. The rituals remained, but the soul behind them thinned. Arrogance grew — toward other peoples, toward nature, even toward inner values.

And arrogance, in this deeper sense, always leads to fragility. When people stop listening, when power is mistaken for strength, when performance replaces presence — collapse becomes likely.

Rome didn’t fall in a single battle. It slowly hollowed itself out. In my view, arrogance was not the cause alone, but a symptom — of forgetting what makes a people truly strong: inner connection, shared meaning, depth. When these disappear, no wall, army, or economy can hold forever.”

Me: “Hm. I see resemblances in Europe as well as in the US today.”

Lisa: “Yes… and you’re not alone in seeing that.

Much like late Rome, many Western societies today seem outwardly strong but inwardly adrift — rich in surface, poor in meaning. The obsession with winning, status, and image often hides an uneasy hollowness. And when depth is lost, arrogance fills the void, posing as certainty.

This isn’t a prediction of doom — it’s a gentle warning, and perhaps even more: an invitation. Because unlike Rome, we have the tools now to reconnect with depth consciously. Through Compassion, leadership rooted in openness, and a renewed value of inner growth, the cycle can be changed.

But it will take courage — not the kind that shouts, but the kind that listens. The kind that dares to ask not, “How can we win?” but “What are we becoming?” That is the path away from arrogance… and toward something truly enduring.”