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The Disease of Conceit

 The Disease of Conceit


“There’s a whole lot of hearts breaking tonight from the disease of conceit…

Steps into your room eats into your soul…

Conceit is a disease that the doctors got no cure…

Give you delusions of grandeur and an evil eye

Give you the idea that you’re too good to die

Then they bury you from your head to your feet

From the disease of conceit” – Bob Dylan


Wow, what a song from the ‘Oh Mercy’ album, from the late 80s (produced by the superb Daniel Lanois).


What a timely song too

In this age of internet ‘virtue signalling’

From what we’re told 

Are ‘the 2 sides of politics today’.

Social media self-aggrandizement.

What Irving Goffman

Had so beautifully written about

Decades ago

As “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life”.

If Goffman saw that then

What would he have thought about the ‘Social Media’ age?

All of us are ‘trippin’, as my Rasta brother pointed out the other day.

No one more nor less.

All of us.

Each of us.

Even those few opting out

Defining themselves as comparatively

‘superior’ to those ‘on’ it,

& vice versa.

A virus, as Bob continued

“They’ve done a lot of research on it

But what it is, they’re still not sure.”


‘I’m a real man because I drive a V8’

Versus ‘I’m a superior man because I drive electric’.


‘My soul is superior because I do yoga & mediation’ versus

‘I’m no hippy, I’m a straightforeworward girl’.


All of it: CONCEIT


“Turn you into a piece of meat” Bob says, an object without a subject’s empathetic & hospitable capacities.

A lack of humility and generosity.

Earlier, Peter Tosh had said “A poor man’s wealth is in a holy place.”

The traditions in folk cultures in poor counties was always one of hospitality.

Now I’m not saying that I wish to take a vow of poverty.

That would no doubt be couched in a conceited view about the ‘virtues of simplicity’.

It is indeed, as Dylan saw, a “disease.” 


To end then – 2 lines from the song,

& I’m thinking of the current battle of the sexes, oftentimes occurring between ‘spouses’ or so called ‘partners’ and the mass proliferation of divorces and relationship breakdowns, exacerbated by social media, internet porn, polemical ‘news/current affairs’, individually targeted programing aimed to divide us further:

“There’s a whole lot of hearts breaking tonight from the disease of conceit

Whole lot of hearts shaking tonight

From the disease of conceit.”


©Malachi Doyle 2023.


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