You (or someone you're watching) nurse a grievance and you want to test whether it's genuinely about fairness or about injured pride wearing fairness's clothes.

Milton names the engine of the rebellion in one phrase: "high disdain from sense of injured merit." The logic runs: I am his equal in merit, therefore his power over me is illegitimate. A loss of status becomes a moral injury — not "I wanted to be on top" but "I was denied my rightful place." Pride, re-narrated as grievance, becomes self-righteousness, and the endgame is the line everyone quotes: "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Miserable sovereignty, preferred to subordinate dignity.