PART 2: CHAPTER 10

REAL SELF-ESTEEM

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Happiness

The quality of one’s happiness depends on the quality of one’s thoughts.

The quality of one’s own happiness depends on the quality of one’s own premises. Plato’s and Kant’s premises make it impossible; Aristotle’s and Rand’s, make it not only possible, but produce happiness of the highest quality.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher and emperor of Rome said:

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts; therefore, act accordingly, and be careful not to dwell on notions unsuitable for virtue and reasonable nature.”

If the happiness of a person depends on the quality of his thoughts, the quality of his thoughts depends on the quality of his concepts.

Happiness is not possible if there are contradictions between the moral and the practical, between evidence and culture, between percept and concept, because contradictions produce cognitive dissonance, which derives into anxiety, and anxiety cannot coexist with happiness. Happiness can only derive from cognitive-consonance and logical-integrity.

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The Hero’s Success Derives from its Pride

Whoever practices pride becomes the hero of himself.

The consequence of practicing pride is what makes it possible to succeed in all areas of life, making man his own hero. This is illustrated in the speech of John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged novel, when he says:

“In the name of the best in you, do not sacrifice this world to the worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not allow your vision of man to be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the unconscious in those who have never achieved the title of human. Do not forget that the natural state of man is an upright posture, an uncompromising mind and a lively step capable of traveling unlimited paths. Don’t let your fire go out, spark by spark, each one irreplaceable, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the almost, the not yet, the never-ever. Do not allow the hero you carry in your soul to perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved but could never achieve. Review your route and the nature of your battle. The world you want can be won, it exists, it is real and possible, it’s yours.

But winning it requires total dedication and a complete break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal, existing only for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of the human being: his rational and sovereign mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and absolute rightness of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any greatness, any goodness, any joy that has ever been on this Earth. You will win when you are ready to swear the oath I swore at the beginning of my battle. And for those who want to know the date of my return, I am going to repeat it now, for the whole world to hear: ‘I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’.”

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Pride Versus Humility

Self-esteem derives from practicing the virtue of pride, not humility.

It is already known that genuine self-esteem derives from pride, that is, from the practice of all the rational virtues. Unlike the subject in Asch’s experiment, the first thing you need to do to achieve self-esteem is to be true to your own sensory perceptions, even though millions of people deny the evidence.

To achieve his self-esteem, man needs to honor his cognitive apparatus, otherwise, in the words of Ayn Rand: “He feels afraid because he abandoned his survival weapon. He feels guilty because he knows he did it voluntarily.”

How could he feel worthy of living if he knows he betrayed his own soul? He can’t, on the contrary, he feels guilty. This guilt is used by the rulers to rule the ruled.

Many religious texts contain premises that make the sinner feel guilty, and recommend the false virtue of humility, for them to repent of their supposed intrinsic evil.

But the truth is that humility is immoral, because it puts poverty, as wealth; weakness, as strength; ignorance, as virtue; guilt, as strength.

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When a man realizes that his self-esteem depends solely on his way of thinking, seeking the approval of the authorities no longer makes sense, as he discovers that his supposed guilt for being alive is false. That is when man frees himself from guilt derived from cultural tyranny, be it religious, political or social.

An erroneous guilt-moral-code aborts man’s self-esteem, as John Galt says:

“Your code begins by condemning man as evil, and then demands that he practice a good defined as impossible to practice. It demands, as man’s first demonstration of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof of it. It demands that he begin, not with a criterion of value, but with a criterion of evil, which is himself, through which he then has to define the good: the good is what he is not.

It doesn’t matter who ends up being the beneficiary of his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystical God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose festering sores are displayed as some kind of inexplicable claim upon him. It doesn’t matter, the good is not something he can understand, his duty is to drag himself through years of penance, purging for the guilt of his existence with any street collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is not-man.

The name of that monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

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A sin without will is a slap to morality and an insolent contradiction: what is outside the possibility of choice is outside the realm of morality. If man is bad by birth, he has neither the will nor the power to change; if he has no will, he cannot be good or bad; a robot is amoral. To consider as a man’s sin an act that is not in his sphere of choice is a mockery of morality. Considering the nature of man as his sin is a mockery of nature. Punishing him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. Declaring him guilty in a matter where there is no innocence is a mockery of reason. Destroying morality, nature, justice, and reason through a single concept is a feat of evil hard to match. Nevertheless, that is the root of your code.”

The following real-life example shows the damage of this harmful code on a person. A boy made his first communion at age nine, though he studied at a secular school. A priest prepared all students for three months, reading the Bible once a week. When the priest said that God had furiously expelled man forever from Paradise because Adam and Eve had eaten an apple, the boy felt immense indignation and wanted to fight God.

Why was God depriving him of Paradise when he wasn’t even born? Was God a violent nut? Obviously, he concluded. His cognitive dissonance was so great that his brain erased the event from memory. From then on, he lost strength and confidence, and he no longer performed well in sports.

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This story is worse than Harry’s story at the beginning of this book, but it is real and mirrors the experience of many people.

Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist who dedicated his life to studying and treating self-esteem, explained that a child faced with the irrationality of culture invents a lie about himself to find a logical cause explaining an illogical world. This reaction, called functional self-deception, preserves the child psychologically but comes at the cost of self-esteem.

Faced with a violent or irrational authority, the child thinks: “There must be something wrong with me,” or “I am a sinner,” or “I am not enough,” or “This seems absurd now, but when I grow up, I will understand.” It would be too frightening to accept that parents, priests, teachers, or God are irrational. So the child blames himself to survive and maintain sanity. This builds a poor self-opinion that freezes in the subconscious and shapes his destiny.

The good news is that any adult can unfreeze these irrational childhood premises, replace them with objective ones, challenge the illogical rules of authority, and embrace the morality of reason — a necessary condition for true self-esteem.

The process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing is lonely and uncomfortable. Each person must take responsibility, act carefully and nonviolently, but it is beneficial to leverage others with the same purpose. Becoming an exceptional mind is difficult but possible, and the reward is worth the effort.

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Sex as Something Metaphysically Natural

Full sexual pleasure is metaphysical, because it is love that integrates the body and the mind.

If someone with self-esteem admires their partner’s values, if they have any, the result is intense sexual desire.

A man or a woman cannot love their partner if they do not have values; sexual pleasure without love or love without sexual pleasure both degrade the human being.

But for most people, sexual pleasure, instead of being heroically glorious, tends to be either wildly instinctive or romantically boring. In the words of Ayn Rand: “Only the man who exalts the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”

In that case the body of a person exists, but without his mind; and his mind exists, but without his body.

When a person’s values get into bed, with his body, his sexual act is complete and his joy is full. Man’s sexual pleasure, is his capacity for physical enjoyment at the service of his spiritual need; the joy of celebrating his bodily existence, but together with his rational values.

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In addition to instinctively desire his woman, a man needs to admire her for her rational values, so he needs to find one who shares his.

“Tell me what a man is sexually attracted to and I’ll tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me who he sleeps with and I’ll tell you his self-assessment. The man who knows his own worth with certainty and pride, looks for the best type woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer, because only the possession of a heroine will give him a sense of success, not the possession of a foolish whore.” These are the words of Francisco D’Anconia in the novel Atlas Shrugged.

Leonard Peikoff says in his book Objectivism, The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

“Respecting sex means approaching it objectively. The guiding principle should be: choose a partner you love based on values you can identify and uphold; then do what you want together in bed, as long as it is something mutually desired and that your pleasures are always reality-oriented… (Fantasy, in sex as in other fields of life, is a form of imagination and therefore both is legitimate, as long as one does not forget the distinction between fantasy and reality.)

The guiding principle of sex should be: appreciate sex as an expression of man’s reason and life in the full and moral sense of the term, then, with that context in mind, pursue that value avidly.”

If man is a rational animal and wants to fully enjoy sex, he needs to go to bed with their partner, not only with a healthy and beautiful body, but also with a superb mind, superb in the sense of beautiful and well made.

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