Self-esteem Or Self-respect?

Paul Elam has penned this article on the difference between self-esteem and self-respect, and I think it's worth a look.

For those who don't know Mr. Elam runs a Canadian organization called "A Voice For Men." AVFM is a men's rights organization. If you would like to have a conversation with or debate a men's rights activist you will find good hunting ground at their site. I'd prefer not to here. I will just say that I read widely, and that I have found some useful ideas in Mr. Elam's article.

Elam has some harsh things to say about the mental health industry's relationship with self-esteem, things which a reasonable person might disagree with, but what really stands out, for me, is this:

"Self-respect, on the other hand, is about how you treat yourself and what kind of treatment you will tolerate from others. It is clearly and unmistakably measurable. And more importantly, it is completely attainable regardless of outside influences."

That strikes me as a very stoic paragraph. Our philosophy teaches us that we are all a part of a great whole, that we are designed by nature* to exist in community, but that we ourselves are responsible for ourselves. We ourselves are sufficient. We have the power to bring ourselves in line with nature.

Self-respect must be a part of that. Mr. Elam has it exactly. If we value self-esteem as the more important of the two concepts then we place our fate in the hands of emotion, and emotion is subject to our impressions, not to our reason. If we value self-respect as the greater of the two then we place our faith in a set of principles. Principles are less subject to outside influence, and if they change the change is more apt to result from reasonable consideration of the evidence.

Mr. Elam follows this up with:

"That truth leads to an unassailable fact. You can instinctively handle most anything life throws at you if you respect yourself enough to keep your own best interests at the forefront."

I'm not sure that I should keep my own best interests at the forefront, but let's continue:

"In fact, I think it more than fair to say that you could take the average man, put him through a gender studies program, send him through a nightmare marriage with a personality disordered basilisk, take his children and his assets in the divorce and drive his own family and friends to blame him for the entire mess, and his self-respect would still be within relatively easy reach."

The meat of what he is saying is that self-respect is always attainable, no matter one's circumstances. That is deeply Stoic and I think it's true. It's a deeply reassuring thought.

How do we attain it? How do we reach this thing that is always within reach? According to Epictetus we achieve self-respect through the exercise of our own will. We just decide to do it and then we do it.

In Book 4, Chapter 9, Versus 15-18 of the Discourses Epictetus compares the student of Stoicism to an athlete being trained by a wrestling master:

"The boy has taken a fall: 'Get up,' he says, 'and resume the fight until you grow strong.' You too should think in some such way as that: you should know that there is nothing more tractable than the human mind. You only have to exert your will, and the thing comes about, and all is put right; whereas on the other hand, you only have to doze off, and all is lost. For ruin and deliverance alike come from within.

"'And after all that, what good will I gain?'"

"And what greater good could you seek than this? Where once you were shameless, you'll have self-respect; where once you were faithless, you'll become faithful; where once you were dissolute, you'll have self-control. If you're looking for anything other than things such as that, continue to act as you're now acting; for not even a god could still be able to help you."

Elam's hostility toward what he considers to be the excessive influence of modern feminism is what it is, and his views are not my own. His insights into self-esteem and self-respect, however, are a revelation to me. He has taken something which was hovering just beyond my ability to articulate and articulated it, and for that I am very thankful. 

*Whether it be conscious or unconscious