If pride comes before the fall, what comes before pride? I am putting my money on insecurity.

If this is true, it makes parenting or emotional education of children and ourselves that much more critical. How parents recognize and respond to a child's facial and body signals generated in stress has a lasting influence on a person's future potential of pride.

Think what insecurity brings to pride: a fear that drives the need to control; emotional neglect creating attention-seeking and show-off behavior; personal aggrandizement for the glory and honor of men, to compensate for feelings of inadequacy; increased neural tone that keeps the body on alert to be always ready to compete; loneliness, which prompts a disregard of others; difficulty asking for help, so humility is counterintuitive; and a desire for power, to counteract the whole sense of weakness.

Imagine a person from infancy who experiences pressures of pain, fear, hunger, sadness, and the caregiver doesn't recognize the external signals generated by the biological storm inside the brain. Not understanding the message of need, there is either no reaction or there is a wrong response to the child's distress. Now think about these emotions happening thousands and thousands of times. It becomes easier to see how with susceptible developing minds, such infants learn they are alone and have to do everything themselves. They struggle with stress, always on guard and in competition with others, and they need to gain recognition but never feel fulfilled.

C.S. Lewis, as only he could express it, wrote in "Mere Christianity": "The essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride ... It was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice: It is the complete anti-God state of mind.

"Pride ... is competitive by its very nature ... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others ... Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone."

This spirit of competitiveness fits nicely with the concept that the biological root of pride is insecurity. When a person is extra vigilant from lessened assurance, his or her fear mechanism for fight and flight is up-regulated to compete for survival.