Understanding Temperance: The Balance of Pride
Temperance evolves out of a certain moral comfort in identity, ordering pride to evoke more measured responses to change. It is a humility born of self-knowledge, a balance achieved through Honesty’s Propriety moment. This virtue measures the world and the self, increasing order through pride in that equilibrium in ever greater amounts.
Temperance does not suppress desires but channels them appropriately. This is important to the dynamics of other virtues: such as providing stability for Loyalty’s emergence, the next virtue. In Temperance, Reason manifests more externally than in just ‘being the bigger person,’ influencing actions and decisions beyond mere introspection.