Most people assume self-esteem is a good thing. However, most people do not know what “self-esteem” actually is.
Most probably assume that self-esteem refers to feeling good about yourself. That’s not wrong. But exactly how does one arrive at feeling good about oneself?
No answer is ever given. Teachers, counselors, and many parents of young children often assume, “If you just tell the child good things about him- or herself, the child will feel good.”
But such an approach is wrong. It’s indiscriminate. It teaches young children that they’re good — actually, great — no matter what.
It’s basically a lie. Or at least a half-truth. Parents and teachers won’t criticize, not even constructively. This is just as bad as always putting down a child, never building the child up or telling him what he does well.
The child comes into young adulthood with a sense that everyone should be telling him or her how great he or she is. After all, that’s what all those teachers did. That’s what parents often did. “So why isn’t the rest of the world greeting me that way?”
It creates a crisis of confidence. And how could it not? We wonder why more and more young people grow into adulthood feeling entitled, or afraid. Or thin-skinned, “politically correct,” insisting that everyone walk on eggshells. They often lack ambition, which is really nothing more than a sense that, “I can — and should — take on the world.” Why do they lack ambition? Because they never got an accurate picture of themselves. They never learned: This is what I excel at; this is what I’m terrible at; this is where I sometimes go wrong; this is where I’m good, or great.”
This does not describe all young people, nor even (necessarily) most of them. But there are more young people like this than ever before, or at least (many will agree) it seems that way. It’s ironic for a generation where self-esteem was considered an important value, if not a mainstay.
Self-esteem can only arise out of an accurate and objective sense of reality. This includes reality about oneself, the world, and others. Reality is filled with facts. Reality is objective. This means, while feelings and self-perception are not irrelevant, you cannot lie to a child (or yourself) that you’re greater (or worse) than you really are.
Not all children are taught the phony platitudes about, “You can be whatever you want to be,” and “You deserve to be happy, no matter what.” Some who are taught these platitudes manage to eschew them, and replace the psychobabble with a sense of reality and reasoning.
The real question here is: What causes self-esteem?
Is self-esteem the result of feeling good about yourself, and as a result of feeling good about yourself, going out and taking on the world? Wrong. If this were true, you wouldn’t have a generation of young people bred to believe that happiness is their entitlement, and then floundering when confronted with the steps required to achieve (much less maintain) happiness.
If that’s not what self-esteem is, then what is?
Is self-esteem conditional upon achievement? In other words, until you master your profession, or make a lot of money, or achieve whatever you consider valuable and important, are you not able to have self-esteem?
No. That’s wrong too.
Self-esteem refers to a sense that, “I have the equipment to attain in life.” By “equipment” I don’t mean money or external things. Those things certainly can matter. But they will never substitute for self-esteem.
Real self-esteem means knowing and therefore believing that you have the cognitive/mental/intellectual tools for understanding reality, and therefore being able to achieve things in reality — including, but not limited to, basic survival, making money, having professional success, and just generally being what one wants to be in life.
Many people have the self-esteem “equation” wrong. They feel that because others always told them they were great, and were always treated as if they were great, then the rest of life must work out that way. Not so.
Or, they feel that they’re not entitled to even have self-esteem until they achieve something of worth. But this isn’t valid, either. If self-esteem is a requirement for achievement and ambition, yet you cannot feel self-esteem until you first achieve, then how are you supposed to ever achieve anything? It’s impossible.
Self-esteem is the result of confidence in your own mind’s ability to achieve what it realistically can achieve. It’s a pervasive sense that, if it could talk, would say something like, “I have a mind. I can think. I can reason. I can figure out what’s true and right. I can learn from my mistakes and always improve. I can evaluate what anyone tells me, and don’t have to accept anything blindly or on faith. Facts and logic are my best guides.”
“Achievement” is objective, but it’s also personal. You don’t need a high IQ to achieve. You only need what’s required for (1) your survival and (2) your personal happiness, as you take responsibility for defining it.
It’s not necessary to lie to yourself that you’re perfect and great at everything, when you’re certainly not, and don’t need to be. It’s not necessary to hold your life and self-esteem hostage until you achieve something, either.
Self-esteem means knowing and therefore believing that you have the mental, intellectual and character tools to survive and flourish in life. Twenty-year-olds are capable of having self-esteem just as eighty-year-olds are; or not.
I hasten to add that without political freedom and rationality pervasive and encouraged throughout a culture, it’s much harder to attain self-esteem than it otherwise would be. Today’s dominant cultural trends involve movements away from freedom, individualism, reason, objective reality, and all the things that foster self-esteem. We really can’t be surprised that there’s so little self-esteem in the world. And the entitled, arrogant narcissism we see in most of our leaders and celebrities is not representative of self-esteem, either. These are the inauthentic qualities of people just as lost and as deeply afraid as those who blindly follow them — if not more so. The phrase “the blind leading the blind” has probably never been so true as it has been of our own era.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Freedom and self-responsibility do not guarantee happiness. But only self-responsible and free people have any hope of achieving real happiness.
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