Self-discipline and Self-esteem

If you’re raising kids, you’re much more interested in their self-control than their self-esteem. They’ll be a much better human being if they know how to control themselves than if they think well of themselves. And by the way, if they can’t control themselves, they will think well of themselves.

- Dennis Prager, in an interview with Candace Owens

So refreshing to me, because I've been fighting in my head the battle between self-discipline and the modern idea of self-esteem. I think self-esteem is a myth. There is the self-possessed person, which I think some believe is a person with self-esteem, but I do not agree. A self-possessed person is humble, which is not the same as having-self-esteem.

Self-esteem used to mean 'self-respect', but now has gone on to mean something like loving oneself in most people's vocabularies, and because it is in most people's vocabularies, we ought not to use 'self-esteem' when we clearly mean self-respect- it does not help the case for holding yourself to the standards of objective virtue. It seems wrong to believe that for a depressed person to lead a productive life, they have to fill themselves with messages of how wonderful they are. I think that we don't really believe we're wonderful until we prove it to ourselves, so the first step is simply to act, and it is not easy- we cannot invent anything that will make being a fully developed human easy. All of this self-esteem rot seems like an attempt to ease ourselves into maturity, but it just isn't easy- it is always an upstream battle until you build the muscles.

What if those who think highly of themselves (who do not have self-control as Prager mentions) are the ones who need to be told they should think well of themselves? It sounds counterintuitive, I know, yet I would not have such hatred of myself if at the same time I did not think incredibly highly of my abilities. I wouldn't be afraid of voicing my opinion if I did not think highly of myself. I wouldn't fear the disapproval of others if I didn't care how brilliant they think I am.

Yet I do care. And that paralyses me, keeps me from saying what I think. It was freeing recently to realise that I actually think that I ought always only to say what is 100% correct... that I am paralysed and cannot speak my mind because I think I need to be perfect.

I know that no human can know everything, yet for some reason, isolated as I am, I imagine that I do know a great deal, and so when I find out I said something inaccurate, I feel so ashamed, you can't imagine (though to be honest feeling an emotion is pretty nice after numbness). My shame is partly because I imagine I ought to have known better and I cannot stand that I didn't. I just really want to have been smarter than that; to have seen what was going to happen and avoided it. I desire control, I think I am God.

So perhaps we only need self-love and self-esteem now because everyone is incredibly conceited, and those who are conceited need their egos stroked. People who are narcissistic cannot sustain their egos without having others worship them. You do not think highly of yourself without paying the price of your independence- you cannot think yourself wonderful without depending on the rest of the world (including the inanimate products of your labours) to keep that afloat.

If a self-loving person ever realised they were did not live up to their own standards (for which they could love themselves), their balloon would be burst, and they would crash into true hopelessness. Not merely self-hate, but the loss of hope and meaning in life. This is why we cannot start with love of ourselves- it depends on our being worthy of our love and that is not possible.

--

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated these things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

- C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Should We Teach How One Must Feel?

Finally I'm reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. He's certainly making the rounds on my blog, and he'll probably keep doing so for awhile yet.

It reminded me of a question in my mind, one that's been here ever since I was a child. I was raised rather a bit in the world of classical education. For me, there was an aura of there being better things and worse things- that not all art is equal, not all literature is equal, and not all actions are good. There are standards of excellence. There is Truth.

I love all this. Maybe I was brainwashed or conditioned, but if so, I like what I was brainwashed into because it certainly makes sense to me. It felt to me as if I was being welcomed into what I really wanted the world to be like, warts and all, because believing that excellence and truth exist, that means you have to live up to them, and it implies that people often do not (what reason is there for a standard if it is the status quo?).

It's always been an intriguing question to me whether these Classical ideas are really better, or whether that's brainwashing, illusions, so on. In The Silver Chair (by Lewis, again, what must you all be thinking?) the Witch is enchanting the characters to believe that what they came from (the surface of the earth) is not real; that only under-the-surface is real. The Sun they invented by looking at her lamp and imagining a bigger and better lamp. If I am wrong and Truth is made up, I would far rather believe in it than not, as they replied to her about their apparently made-up world.

So, is classical music actually such a great form of music? Is Dickens such very good literature? What of the great, classic painters? Is The Lord of the Rings such a great story? Are these better than pop culture? Could there be a hierarchy of music, values of worth?

I have always felt that we have left Excellence. It is not a value in our society anymore. Beauty no longer is a standard that art should aspire to. It is as if we don't believe in beauty, truth, or any of the other standards we used to think existed. Yet, underneath it all it seems that the desire for all this is still there, and I wonder if we are creating generations of very lost people by divorcing ourselves from these standards. They were our life and breath. They make us Man. We will turn ourselves into only animals if we keep on the course we are in... and we really have forgotten our roots. We really have. Even I have, yet still wanting to believe this. It's very hard to firmly plant yourself in these old standards when everyone around you so obviously doesn't feel the same- people now want to live 'their truth' and feel their own sensations and not judge themselves. I wonder if by not judging ourselves, we are going to lose any respect we could ever have for ourselves.

Humour is a Serious Business

... our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

- C. S. Lewis, from the essay The Weight of Glory

Merriment can be had between people who take each other seriously, and I believe the same is the case with merriment about things: you cannot laugh at something until at first you took it seriously; it wouldn't seem absurd otherwise.

The quote struck me when I first read it. I have always felt that really wise, serious people are the ones who are most funny. It doesn't surprise me, but I realise how ironic it may seem. I think of it as like Christ turning everything upside down; the last shall be first and all that. But it is no contradiction.

People who really understand how things are can see the humour best. Cynical people (whom we often call serious or some other such word) are not understanding, though they really think they are. Not being able to see the good is not 'understanding'. Yet, there is bad in life, and being blind to it will not help you laugh at life.

The merriment and humour I mean I will lamely call the good humour. I don't care for cheap humour, where people are trying to get attention in any way, and don't care about the joke that much. These people, especially in more apparently-prudish times, might use other than crass humour, but now it is very common to be crass. I know many people do it because others do it, at this point, but I suspect it is a kind of Inner Ring thing, where you desire to be in and so you do what everyone else is doing (I think Lewis has an essay on that in The Weight of Glory, which is where The Weight of Glory essay comes from. How confusing.).

Those people who have been really fun to listen to, and knew how to enjoy the absurdities of life, have often gone through the worst in life. It doesn't surprise me - perhaps a sign of my numbness - but it is amazing, beautiful, anyway. Meeting people like this, seeing this, lifts my mood more than most things can. There is nothing like seeing the formed pearl, the purified silver.

Die to Yourself

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be truly yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sticking this here because I ought to think about this now, and it helps if I publicly spit it out so that I can't avoid it.

I love the truth that if you look for yourself, you don't find anything good, but when you look to God and Truth, you gain yourself- your true purpose, and all the capability God meant for you to have, which is substantial. That capability in moments of feeling it seems infinite, perhaps because it is, due to its being God's strength in you, or perhaps it's because it's so vast compared to what we're used to that it seems infinite. But I bend towards the former because God is behind everything we contain and something like capability and strength given us would be in a way infinite... in that all choices of what we are logically capable of (and what is morally good) are open to us.

Ramble, ramble.

Can Masculinity Be Bad?

The phrase 'toxic masculinity' gets me thinking.

It implies that some of masculinity could be bad, if not that masculinity is bad entirely (but that's the sense I get because of how people talk about masculinity/men nowadays). But like one's identity, I think of the words 'masculinity' and 'femininity' as talking about the core and good nature of men and women.

We talk of aggression as a trait of masculinity now, but it just seems utterly wrong to call that a masculine trait. Maybe it is a perversion of the masculine trait of strength/guard-doggishness/protectiveness. But I'm not sure it actually is- it seems to be like that good trait, but really something else entirely. (If I ever gather my thoughts properly on why I think this way, I will write about it- it relates to a lot of other topics as well, like sins-and-virtues. Proceed now to a load of waffle...)

The negative traits I can think of right now of both men and women appear always to be true perversions of human nature as God intended it. The examples I can think of right now seem cases where a person wishes to be seen as something- when there is a selfishness in him. Aggression and recklessness show up when people want to show off. Always to be seen as something, to their gods or to other people. They are not any more the useful traits humans possess to get through life holistically- they are self-serving absolutely with no practical end (we can rationalise them, of course). As an example, recklessness is not 'taking a risk'- a risk is only a risk if you are weighing the pros and cons, which if you're thinking of pros and cons, you've lost your 'reckless' status.

So then the traits that really define a true man, and thus are those that are truly masculine, are those neutral-and-good ones which are necessary to his life, and promote his and others' health.

There's this sense in mainstream dialogue that if you use 'masculine' descriptively, or goodness! as a compliment, you must be, uh, toxically masculine yourself, or for the Patriarchy.

It just makes me actually want to run around complimenting men for being masculine when they actually are, because masculinity seems on decline and I miss it, or the memory of it left in stories and history.

Some people do have a bad picture of what men should be like. But why, oh why, should them define 'masculine' for us? They are misdefining it. Do not give them the floor. Fight back and say what being a proper man really is. Saying 'be a man' doesn't necessarily mean 'impose your strength over all weaker people.' Some people mean 'take the initiative and find out when people need help and give it.'

Beauty, Poetically

The Lord of the Rings revealed to me the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Before that I thought that wanting things to be beautiful (which to me includes goodness and truth) was asking for perfection and too much. But also too much to ask for, without it being the true and the good as well. Asking for life to be too good. I must expect the worst.

Beauty awakens desire for goodness and truth and even beauty itself, in a circular way it calls up more desire for itself. Beauty strikes you and makes you notice something good, and somehow there is an expanding, and you find you see after that more things that are beautiful- you grow bigger and bigger, with more room to appreciate. You see more things around you that once you hardly noticed, or didn’t notice at all- you see how beautiful they are. Your eyes are opened. And you see how small you are, how little you do see, and are awed by how much more there is to see, and very glad, too. It is exciting when there is always more to find out. You are not ashamed of being small and mean, but simply glad that there is so much to gather, to collect, to appreciate.

The feelings of encountering beauty awaken a desire to get inside beauty; a desire to manifest beauty. To become beautiful so as to continue the communication of beauty to other people and the world. To praise God.

But no- perhaps it is not to communicate that one desires to manifest beauty. It is desired in itself, somehow. If you desired only to communicate it, perhaps you wouldn’t be wanting it at all. But then, in desiring it, you desire to communicate it; the love of it overflows in a loving desire for others to have it, too. You want others to feel as you do, because it is so good. So then you hope that you will become exactly and rightly like it just for that purpose: because it must be shared, it cannot be kept for one’s lonesome.

I don’t believe the encounter with true beauty can result in a selfishness… we cannot hoard it. Perhaps it is that it cannot be hoarded; one loses it as soon as one tries to hoard it. It cannot fit through the door into our hoard, and so must always be shut out when we go inside our hoard, even if we don’t realise we’re leaving it behind. So therefore when we love beauty, we never can hoard it, or else we immediately lose it. We then begin to love the things that shone with beauty rather than the beauty itself… we lust after the thing we thought contained the beauty- the beautiful picture, or piece of music. But those things are only the offspring of true Beauty, but are not Beauty itself. When we seek them, to hoard the beauty, we idolise the thing that glittered, but not the light that made it glitter. It is somehow easy for us to forget the beauty in our lust for the thing that evoked it, our desire to control and keep that beauty for ourselves. We are incredibly forgetful of our visions of God’s paradise.

This is why when we are wrapped up in God, we desire to share, but left in our own devices, in our sin, we cower and hide from sharing anything and lose our bounty. We diminish and fade, even to ourselves. But when we let beauty come inside of us and overflow out of us, we become fountains of richness, wholeness, light. We overflow with God’s glory as He fills us. For if we desire to be filled with beauty, we will be filled with it. I ought to know this by now, but I forget, and I doubt, even after such glimpses as I’ve had.

For some reason to me manifesting the beautiful is the only way to communicate truth, goodness and beauty perfectly. One must become beautiful to be whole with God. Not in one's own power, but from an invitation by God to be beautiful… to be our true selves. We must not feel we must do it; we are allowed to do it.

Must We Learn That Truth Is Beautiful?

Glancing over my post titles, it occurred to me how it seems to take awhile for someone to find Truth beautiful in itself.

When I was a child, I didn't have any particular appreciation for Truth as a thing. I guess I liked trueness; I liked to know how things stood. But that isn't the same as loving Truth.

There were some things in my childhood that I just loved how beautiful they were. Not lovely, or charming, or glorious even, but just beautiful. Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and other very good book illustrations- real adult ones, as I saw it then. Of course these were for children, but they were illustrations you could love throughout your life. I loved that. And of course, they were beautiful... with the added benefit of not always liking his artistic choices and getting to disagree. There's nothing like disagreement to make you appreciate a thing. How strange.

So, I appreciated art. Of truth, though, I thought it was only about not lying, and all that. So it was at best unfreeing, if not downright restrictive. That is all in the connotation of a word, though- if I'd known that that word is what I now see as 'Truth', I would have loved it.

The plot device in all my stories will be 'Then I read the Lord of the Rings.' I'm in danger of losing people's interest, but that's, well, the truth.

I did read the Lord of the Rings, and it did seemingly rewire my thinking a bit. I guess I began to think of Truth as a great and wonderful thing, without realising it. I just realised I had always thought so. Those beautiful artworks I had liked- I liked them... because of Truth. I still don't know how else to describe this. The love of the things I love is a love wrapped up in Goodness, Truth and Beauty. It's a holistic thing. It is not even mine. It seems that it has come to be part of me, but it is not mine.

The funny thing is that it seems that one doesn't get to loving Truth until one has seen Beauty. I'm not certain of this yet, but what Stephen Turley has said makes it seem I'm not the only one to feel this way. Being hit by Beauty seems to have happened first to me, and it took a book analogising it for me to see Truth. I wish I could define Truth, but right now I feel the best way would be in some form of poetry. It is a very big thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is all that is good, which is to say all that really Is. It seems to me the very best way to talk about it is in poetry. And I've never cared greatly about poetry, likely because I was never interested in the poetry I read.

I feel I've gone and done a very bad job of saying what I mean to say. But the title helps: I feel I had to learn that Truth was beautiful by seeing true things and their beauty. It took being struck by the aesthetic for me to eventually, somehow, see beneath it to what was looking so wonderful.

How on earth can I explain it? The Lord of the Rings was like a guide to what is so beautiful, why anything is beautiful, because I wanted to know so badly ever since I was a child- I wanted to EAT the beautiful things, to consume them, to be one with them. What was beautiful? Truth. And of course, it would not be so beautiful were not Truth intrinsically Good. If Truth were bad, somehow it could not be beautiful. Somehow. I don't know why. It seems to be as plain as day, anyhow. Unnecessary to analyse. Or is that just me? And so I must analyse it, somehow.