February is International Self-Esteem Month, when we are encouraged to boost our morale, and to seize new challenges. Personally, I haven’t caught up with the old challenges yet, and I don’t think my morale needs boosting. I have exactly as much morale as I need to get through the day, and not an iota more.
If there is one thing in the world that we don’t need more of, it’s self-esteem. The daily news is full of politicians and entertainers who are almost exploding with self-esteem. It's not just annoying, it's also potentially dangerous. That’s why we have many negative words to describe it: pride (one of the seven deadly sins); egotism; narcissism; smugness; conceit; vanity; vainglory; and of course, hubris. They all lead to trouble because they are all based on false information. Self-esteem is always a mistake.
We hear a lot about the problem of young people who lack self-esteem. But if they haven’t done anything or achieved anything, their low self-esteem is completely appropriate. In any case they keep it well hidden. The young people I meet seem to assume that they are the masters of the universe. They have been fed self-esteem like candy from an early age, and they have forgotten or were never told that it has to be justified somehow, some time.
The ghost of Sigmund Freud hovers over this debate. Nobody likes Freud anymore because his theories challenge our current prejudices. He made a distinction between self-esteem and self-control, which he called the ego and the superego. A correspondent in The New York Times, P.M. Formi, expressed the distinction rather well: “Excessive self-esteem is a sort of drunkenness of the self. Self-control is our inner designated driver.”
What we need is an objective measure of self-esteem so that we could have it checked, like blood pressure. Zero would represent too much humility and self-doubt and a hundred would indicate a dangerous level of monomania, right up there in the autocratic/dictatorial range. The doctor would check our reading and say: “Self-esteem’s a bit too high today, you’ve been admiring yourself again. Go out and do something stupid.” The doctor knows that a reasonable dose of humiliation every day is necessary to keep the ego in balance.
Eventually, we may discover a medication for persistent high self-esteem, just as we have for high blood pressure. Meanwhile here are some emergency measures. You can always get some perspective on yourself from the Hubble space telescope, which has revealed fifty billion more galaxies out there, each one of which contain hundreds of millions of stars, and is hundreds of millions of light years across, which is more than the entire length of the New Jersey Turnpike. If the contemplation of that doesn’t put you in your place, try reading a college physics textbook, or “The Idiots Guide to Windows 10.” If even this fails, get some cats. You can’t have both self-esteem and cats.
We don’t continue to celebrate President’s Day or Halloween or Thanksgiving long after the date has passed. So we can quickly forget about International Self-Esteem Month. From March to January we can all get real.
Copyright: David Bouchier
