Just to give you some insight into my thought process, I am writing these sections while simultaneously thinking, “Maybe I should stop listening to Kanye West.” This thought holds so much true when it comes to arrogance. I’ve always seen Kanye’s confidence as confidence. I didn’t see anything bad about what he had to say in music and interviews. It wasn’t until taking on this spiritual path that things didn’t start to feel right. There’s nothing wrong with being confident, but when we’re confident about things that are not real, it can easily turn into arrogance. With arrogance, the things that come out of our mouths and behavior can be interpreted as rude.

Arrogance is much like boasting if boasting is an action in time while arrogance is a state of being. An arrogant person has an exaggerated sense of one’s importance. It’s the manager who believes she built the company because she’s been working there for 25 years. It’s the husband who puts his wife down because he works and she stays at home with the baby. It could be me, thinking that my opinion carries more weight than any other opinion. The arrogant person will do everything for themselves and not care who is negatively affected by it. There’s no way that this could be love.

We’ve already talked about how our opinions don’t matter. Arrogance becomes a factor when we believe our thoughts are true, but the thoughts of others are not. We separate ourselves from others when believing that our thoughts are true only because we are the ones who think them. If we only trust ourselves to tell the truth, we’ve reached peak arrogance. It’s my way or the highway and there’s nothing you can tell me to change my mind. 

With an arrogant mind comes rude behavior. By rude we’re saying that we shouldn’t act in a way that is offensive or dishonorable toward other people. Rudeness can come in the form of speech. Rudeness can also form of giving a worker a task that they’ll have to finish at the last minute, or during their own free time. It’s the action that comes with believing that we are more important than what anyone else is thinking or doing.

One can be subtle and still be rude. It’s the words that we use that can demean or take for granted the other person. It’s kind of weird that the people we are supposed to love the most are the people we are the rudest. I lean towards the parent/child dynamic. In my experience with parenting, parents see themselves as superior so when they demand something from the child, they take little consideration for the feelings of the child. The same thing could happen when the child gets a little older and decides to hang out late at night without calling their worried parent. The antidote to this kind of rudeness is respect and dignity for all parties involved.