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.

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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