Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
How can self worth not be a self defeating concept?
The human being is a social animal, and interacting with others is very important to them. A person's happiness, access to resources and even physical safety is determined by both their belonging to a group and their social position within that group. When a person feels that they have little worth and are downbad because of it, others around them will respond with platitudes such as "you need to improve your self worth" or "you to be confident!" Yet often, a person has low self worth or confidence because others assign low worth to them. This treatment need not come in the form outright abuse - if a person is repeatedly ignored or passed over then they end up attaining a low level of worth simply because they can see that others are recieving positive affirmations when they themselves are not.
Most things people do beyond fulfilling their immediate biological needs, such as eating and urinating, is to work to increase their social standing, which may happen immediately or over a long period of time. A person aware of their low worth must convince themselves into believing that if they perform certain actions they can accquire greater worth from the positive reinforcement provided by others. For example, that they dress in a way that will be more accepted by others, or that they act in a happy and upbeat manner even when they are not feeling so. A person must not act as though they have a high worth when this is not valued by others - you cannot for example go to a job interview and say that you are worth some 6 digit salary if this is transparently not the case. This is the fastest way to decrease the view of oneself in the eyes of others.
Hence, a person's motivations cannot ever concern themselves alone, unless you have the strength to withstand spending large parts of your life alone in very bad places. What good is prefixing self to worth if, for a healthy, adjusted human being, worth comes from places other than the self?
By feeling inadequate, some people start sending signals associated with low value, and other people pick up on these signals and assume that they're true. Other people don't know the real you, they only get what you show them. So the worth of a person is sort of a collective agreement, and every individual has some influence in what the conclusion is going to be. People who are more based/grounded in themselves, and more certain without external approval, will paradoxically get more positive external approval. Those who need it the most won't get it because they ask (and in extreme cases, beg). This is why fishing for compliments fail. Bragging fails too (we recognize that it's a desperate attempt for validation). Some people even give up getting a girlfriend, and then manage to get a girlfriend because they stopped looking desperate.
Real confidence comes from within. But it may be dangerous to have much more confidence than actual skill. There's also advantages to being pitied. Some people stay in the victim mentality basically forever, they're held to low standards, and other people rush to tell them how everything is going to be okay. This can be addicting, and taking responsibility for yourself requires throws away this advantage.
I think it's alright to evaluate people based on their character, but evaluating "worth" as how much productivity you can provide society seem like a consequence of the rat race. I don't think it's a healthy way to think since the priority is so disconnected from social life. And I can see the point with the idea that a king is only a king if other people believe that he is. So even if you're a great person, people around you might not have the judgement to realize it.
But the question you've asked is essentially about the nature of social hierarchies and coherence between living beings. A proper answer requires everything from psychology and neuroscience to game theory and complex systems. It too large to even put a dent in it, so I just shared a few interesting things which came to mind.
Edit: It's worth a mention that Jordan Peterson uploaded a video about Self-esteem not existing. It may be a poor concept better explained by other things. If you're interested the video ID is watch?v=9f3qyNNtpQk
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The way I see it, having a strong self-worth is a matter of remembering the variety of audiences that provide worth to you, rather than allowing your self-assessment to be constantly buffeted by the last person you talk to or the room you are in.
My major objection to the way a lot of TRPers talk about the concept of someone being "Alpha" or "Beta" is that they fail to talk about context, Alpha and Beta are inherently ordinal rather than absolute concept. Within a closed space, like a wolfpack or a high school, the alpha male is the biggest and toughest male present. He isn't in any absolute sense Big or Tough, he is the biggest and the toughest. The beta is defined by being smaller, and less tough, not absolutely Small or absolute Cowardly. If the Alpha dies, a Beta moves up.
Using the classic fictional stereotype of an American high school as our pet model, the Alpha male is the star quarterback on the high school football team, right? He's the best athlete, the leader, the chosen one. But if the QB dies in a DUI accident, or transfers schools, or breaks his leg, somebody else becomes the QB. A guy who didn't used to be the best athlete on the team, who used to be second best, becomes the best. That's the nature of an ordinal system of worth.
The problem with the modern world is that very few of us live in a closed system, and so it become scrambled, hard to understand. We live in systems way beyond our Dunbar Number, we live in anonymized urban societies where we feel judged by strangers, or in fake online worlds where we never even see our interlocutors.
People with weak self worth are constantly buffeted by the opinions of strangers, by the ordinal rankings in each room they find themselves in, by a vague sense that an indistinct group of people are better than them. They walk into a room with people better than them, they become servile; while if they are around people worse than them they become tyrannical. They rate themselves around the last interaction they had, forgetting all the good things they've done or all the bad things they've done.
A person with a firm sense of self worth remembers, regardless of what room they find themselves in, the people who love and respect them. Yes there are people better than you, but there are also people worse than you, the fact that you are now in a room with someone better than you doesn't mean you are the worst person in the world. The fact that the last thing you did was wrong doesn't erase all the things you've done right. They rate themselves not on the opinion of the audience in front of them, but on the broader audience, all the world, all the universe, and how they should respond.
Realistic self worth is about steadiness, humility, and honor. As Tony Montana told us, "All I've got in this world is my word and my balls, I don't break them for nobody."
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A lot of complexity here. IMO: there are contexts where high confidence is beneficial even if it is not externally-administered, for instance in making friends and finding partners where people gravitate to confidence. Similarly, you can have high external valuation and yet have a low assessment of yourself, causing a shyness that is unwarranted and unbecoming, which leads to problems in social life.
There’s also the question of proportionality: you can be confident and have reasonably high self-worth and yet still feel pain at social defeat and feel pleasure at social victory. The default self-worth can buffer against unwarranted catastrophizing. If you’re a chess player and go into hysterics at every loss you will probably not play chess for long. Self-confidence is also (counter-intuitively?) judged as good by others, for instance when a defeated opponent keeps a stiff upper lip and praises the winner.
The ideal is a reasonable amount of sensitivity regarding your external persona, which is guided by a reasonable amount of self-respect and self-judgment that filters and optimizes longterm social sensitivity. You don’t want to commit sepukku every time you fail at an obligation. Neither is it necessarily advantageous to primarily judge yourself by some narrow and fleeting social obligation.
Religious language can offer some insight here. God judges every deed, while both loving and disciplining as a father. This is an archetypally correct mode of social feedback because nothing is more optimized for behavioral shaping (the psychological term of art) than how a loving Father/mentor teaches his Son/student. This is how evolution has guided the best possible identity-formation / behavioral-shaping, through love and loving chastisement (which is very cool actually). So we see for instance that a child who feels socially secure is most adaptive to learning in school. That’s the correct balance of self-worth [forever loved by the Eternal Father] and reasonable social sensitivity [humility, growth mindset, interest in others].
Frankly I do not find the term self-[worth / judgment / assessment] ideal. How can I be the one negatively evaluate what I myself am doing? Why would the problematic me negatively evaluate the exact same problematic me, and why would problematic me listen to problematic me when evaluated? In what sense can I be disappointed in myself when I am the same person through and through? I am disappointed in myself being disappointed? What’s really happening in any self-judgment is that we imagine a hypothetically reasonable and perfect Judge and how that Judge would feel about us. We then internalize this judgment and measure our action against it. It is at least quasi-religious. It is more healthy to admit that I myself suck, and that there is instead an independent, omnipresent judge who I answer to. In ages of old, when a person felt the watchful eye of their deity over them, what they are really doing is what we would call “self-judgment” today. This is very optimal, because we have a built-in instinct of external administration that can be sublimated in the imagination, whereas there is no “self-judgment” instinct so it gets confusing and paradoxical and unhelpful.
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