The Perils of Self-righteousness

One of the most psychologically and perhaps morally dangerous attitudes a person can have is self-righteousness, an attitude that despite its danger for psychological and moral health, has become very widespread. It is important, however, not only to recognize self-righteousness – first and foremost in ourselves – but also to understand something of its nature.

Though the notion of self-righteousness is present in the ancient world, especially in St. Paul’s Letters to the Romans and the Galatians, in the contemporary context, it can mean something somewhat different while carrying over something of that history. For St. Paul, self-righteousness, we might say, is the opposite of the acknowledgment that righteousness comes from God alone. That meaning of “righteousness” is not necessarily typical in contemporary English and means something like being counted as “just,” that is an ordered and virtuous person, one “justified” before God.

Consequently, the self-righteous person, on this account, is one who, rather than accepting that righteousness is at least in some measure a gift – a grace – from the divine, thinks or at least acts as if that “righteousness” is an achievement on their own part. For St. Paul, this was in many ways the attitude most opposed to Christian teaching, as a number of passages in the above noted Letters suggest.

Whether or not we accept either St. Paul’s or more generally a Christian narrative on self-righteousness, it is important to be aware of that ancient meaning because there are pieces of it that remain in a more current notion of self-righteousness, even in our generally secular society. For St. Paul, recognition of the gift of God described as righteousness brings humility, something at least meant to be a central virtue for Christians (as emphasized in early Christianity by St. Augustine). Self-righteousness is therefore considered the opposite of the properly Christian attitude because it is the opposite of humility, with the latter’s implicit recognition that, no matter how good, talented, or able we are, we still have limits written into our nature that can only be exceeded with divine aid. Self-righteousness, from this point of view, includes elements of grandiosity but can even suggest a kind of self-deification, as if one has become perfect through one’s own power, which, for St. Paul, would be tantamount to claiming to be God.

From a more contemporary and psychological point of view, we can say that self-righteousness does not necessarily depend on any specific theology and is by no means restricted to religious contexts. Nor does it necessarily pertain to religious ideals, though it must be acknowledged that organized religions are frequently a fertile ground for self-righteousness. Yet, in all cases self-righteousness tends to display a similar logic to what I have described as St. Paul’s picture of self-righteousness. For self-righteousness psychologically is always bound up with an absolute identification with some value or ideal, one that is considered beyond question and/or criticism, an identification that can breed anything from resistance on the part of the self-righteous person to opposing values or ideals, to hatred of those who might hold those opposing ideals, and even to violence against those who are experienced as opposing the self-righteous person, all in the name of that absolutized ideal. If that ideal is not some version of the divine, it is typically an ideal holding the same place in the self-righteous person’s psyche that the divine might hold, because it is held to be absolute and inviolable.

At the same time – and this is the key feature – the self-righteous person characteristically conflates the ideal itself and its (purported) absoluteness with their own specific understanding or way of living that ideal. In other words, though it is supposedly the value or ideal which is held as absolute, in practice it is the specific interpretation, understanding, or form in which the individual person (or institution) holds to that ideal that is the actual locus of self-righteous feelings and its associated psychological defenses. As in St. Paul’s conception, self-righteousness implicitly puts the onus of importance not on the ideal in terms of which the person’s convictions are described but on the self-righteous person’s own holding to those ideals.

Primarily because of this transposition of value from the ideal to the person holding the ideal, the self-righteous person simultaneously sees any difference or opposition to the ideal as if it is an attack on the ideal, while in practice -- and often partially unconsciously – the person takes that difference or opposition as if it is a personal attack. This latter situation shows it is not really about the ideal but about one’s own identification with the ideal.

To be clear, it is, for example, one thing to think that God should be honored and another to think that the only way to honor God is the way I think the divine should be honored; it is one thing to idealize patriotism but quite another to think only those who celebrate their country the way I do are patriotic; it’s one thing to extol one’s own particular way of life and quite another to assume that any other version of life than mine is invalidated thereby. In each of these cases, it is not really the absolutized ideal that is at stake but, at least unconsciously, the insistence that one’s own interpretation or articulation of that ideal or life choices in accordance with that ideal is as absolute as the ideal itself is purported to be.

In practice, values and ideals can be embodied in many different ways and a range of possible behaviors can be coherent with any given ideal. And, while it is true that some forms of life may be incoherent with some specific ideal, it does not follow from that that there cannot be multiple ways of respecting the same ideal: difference does not equal rejection. Nor should we assume that only existentially significant values, such as my examples of God, patriotism, and forms of life, are the only areas where self-righteousness can flourish. In principle, a person may identify with any value or ideal in such a way that some level of self-righteousness can arise. People are often susceptible to being self-righteous about anything which they hold as especially important in their lives, whether their families, political allegiances, professions, some “school of thought” within their profession, or even, say, their favorite sports teams. Whenever the values and ideals at stake are existentially significant or whenever they feel in some way absolute to the self-righteous person (whether or not they deserve such devotion in fact), we may find ourselves surprised not only at how tightly the self-righteous person adheres to their own way of relating to those ideals but even more surprised at how aggressive their behavior can be toward perceived opponents or enemies, justified in their own mind by the absoluteness of the ideal in question, but always at least unconsciously and more importantly by their own identification with it.

Besides the issue of psychological (over)identification, which is essential to self-righteousness, there are usually other signs that self-righteousness at work in ourselves or in others. Among them are:

(1) Self-righteousness typically functions as a compensation for a lack of self-esteem or, in other words, wounded narcissism. In essence, the purportedly high value that the self-righteous person is defending is being used as a crutch for wounded self-esteem, as if to say “I am important because I am identified with something that is important.” Needless to say, such compensation does not work in the long term because, in the end, self-esteem – or what I might rather call “healthy self-affirmation” – can only be both given and received from oneself. No crutch will work because there is no ultimate surrogate for self-esteem. This feature of self-righteousness is in some ways parallel to the quotation often attributed to Jung, “Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt,” in that the fanaticism is compensating for hidden doubt, like self-

righteousness compensates for wounded narcissism or self-esteem. Also, this factor is important for understanding various fundamentalisms – not only of the religious variety but similar fundamentalisms that pervade politics, economics, and other areas of life. In practice, the more intense the fundamentalism, the more a person’s wounded narcissism is implicated.

 (2) Self-righteousness usually includes a tendency toward what is often called “defensive splitting,” whereby the self-righteous person experiences those who agree with them as entirely good and those who do not as entirely bad, due supposedly to others’ attitudes toward whatever value or ideal functions as a surrogate for their self-esteem. Consequently, whoever does not agree with the self-righteous person is generally considered an opponent who needs to be corrected, refuted, or – worse – punished in some way. In practice, however, though the supposed importance of the value identified is given as the reason for sometimes aggressive reactions to purported opponents, unconsciously it is not the value itself but the value’s usefulness as a crutch for self-esteem that is the primary, if often unconscious, motive for the aggression. This is incidentally an important reason why religion and politics are areas where such defensive splitting occurs at both the individual and collective levels. Though the values each carry are of the utmost importance for human life, often one’s attachment to them is not entirely for those values and ideals themselves, but also, in terms of wounded self-esteem, an attempt to solve that problem through identification with a group identified with the same ideal. Each of us, as a rule, has some work to do in this area and, when we are honest with ourselves, we see that we often slide into self-righteous attitudes when those attitudes are confirmed by the group and its associated “echo chamber.”

 (3) Consequently, it is typical that, wherever in our lives we are susceptible to self-righteousness, we are also susceptible to what some philosophers have called “value blindness,” that is the tendency to be blind to certain values because they are deemed (consciously or unconsciously) to be unrelated or inimical to the values that we assume to be the most important. Thus, self-righteousness by necessity closes off horizons of potentially important value experiences that might expand our lives and our perceptions of things, often out of an unconscious fear that a broader perspective will show us that our crutch for self-esteem is not quite what we thought it was or, even worse, not quite as important as we thought.

 (4) Finally, in tandem with St. Paul’s understanding, we can say that self-righteousness is opposed to humility. Humility, like the virtue of kindness that humility helps foster, doesn’t necessarily get good press in our time, mostly because humility is often confused with slavishness or obsequiousness – neither of which is authentic humility. Authentic humility is the deep recognition that no matter how much we believe in some ideal, in some practice, or in some principle, we must always, at the same time, account for the fact that we are finite and always and only have the point of view on something that a finite being can have. Indeed, authentic humility is the antithesis of slavishness or obsequiousness because it is a conscious response to the reality that being human is to live in the “in-between,” that is, we are both animal organism and personal spirit and consequently must live with a conscious awareness that even our highest abilities are coupled with finitude. This point takes us back to St. Paul and St. Augustine in that lacking a sense for one’s finitude is the attitude correlating to self-righteousness: when we are living in the form of consciousness we call “self-righteousness,” we at least implicitly believe we are more than human, sometimes even to the point of confusing ourselves with God, and, truth be told, when we confuse ourselves with God, we have a tendency to act more like the devil.

As a rule, it is this link between a perceived ideal and the use of that ideal as a crutch for missing self-esteem that makes the self-righteous person so often incorrigible. In such cases, the self-righteous person is, from a psychological and emotional perspective, “holding on for dear life” due to their unwillingness to face their wounded narcissism and do something more positive with their own inner life than they are doing. It will often feel to such a person that to lose this emotional identification with their pet value is to lose themselves. It is, therefore, an unfortunate consequence of self-righteousness that the self-righteous person projects their inner brokenness on others, which is one reason why self-righteousness often lies at the root of truly heinous acts. The hidden self-esteem wounds that drive the self-righteousness become projected onto others, leading the self-righteous person to aggress in others what they actually hate in themselves – especially when what they are hating is that they lack what the other person possesses. For the person suffering from this unfortunate psychology, it is only by means of a committed and courageous facing of the shadows of their own wounded narcissism that meaningful healing can occur and a broader outlook on life can be attained.

NOTE: This essay was uploaded to Academia.edu: October 19, 2026