The Virtue of Loving Virtue
Lesson 6: Honor the Self (3 of 3)
The purpose of morality is to help you achieve happiness. But people don’t automatically value their own happiness. To desire the best for your life takes work: the work of achieving and maintaining the last of the three cardinal values Effective Egoism demands: self-esteem.
Emotions carry with them an implicit evaluation of “for me” or “against me.” Inherent in those evaluations is an evaluation of the “me” involved. Self-esteem, in other words, shapes your every emotion. If your pleasure/pain mechanism is your body speaking to you about the physical state of your being, then the voice of your soul is your self-esteem.
“Self-esteem (or the lack of it),” Nathaniel Braden writes, “is the reputation a man acquires with himself.” It’s your core belief about your ability and worth, and it impacts every emotion you feel, and every choice you make.
Think of when you procrastinate. Sometimes it’s because the task is unpleasant, like going to the DMV. But often it’s because you feel you can’t do what you’re supposed to do—not that you lack some concrete skill, but that you as a person are incompetent to deal with life’s challenges—and so your mind rebels at doing something that feels fruitless. That is your soul lacking confidence. Or think of when a friend or partner mistreats you and you don’t speak up or walk out because you don’t think you deserve better or can do better. That is your soul lacking worth.
To set ambitious goals, to stick to them in the face of obstacles, and to take joy in their achievement requires self-esteem. It requires self-confidence and self-respect. Without such self-esteem, you’ll lower your sights, give up on your values, and, if you do achieve them, self-sabotage to restore a sense of proportion between what you have and what you feel worthy of having.
Where does self-esteem come from? It doesn’t come from people telling you that you’re perfect. It doesn’t come from deluding yourself about your own abilities or blinding yourself to your own flaws. Self-esteem has to be earned: you develop your core beliefs about your ability and worth through the choices you make.
Your self-judgment is both a metaphysical judgment and a moral judgment you pass on your choices. Metaphysically, the more you choose to think, the more confident you grow in your ability to deal with the challenges of life. The more you shun the responsibility of thinking and act blindly on your emotions, the more out of control and incompetent you’ll feel. Morally, to the extent you live up to your ideals, you’ll feel worthy of respect, love, and happiness. To the extent you betray your ideals, you’ll feel guilt, self-loathing, even self-hatred.
But as with any emotion, self-esteem isn’t automatically in touch with reality. You have no choice about reaching some evaluation of your ability and worth—but you do have a choice about the standards you use to measure your ability and worth.
For example, some people judge their ability, not by the degree to which they choose to think, but by their competence at some specific skill: “I’m good because I’m a great programmer,” “I’m good because I know how to fight.” But self-esteem isn’t about any specific ability you’ve cultivated; it’s about your general ability to navigate reality.
Other people judge their ability by impossible standards of perfection: “I’m good if I don’t make mistakes.” But measuring your self-esteem by unattainable standards constitutes a profound contradiction: your need for self-esteem comes from the fact that you are the author of your choices, and so assessing yourself by a standard that is not open to your choice means saying, “I couldn’t have done better but I should have done better.”
Or take worth. Some people judge their worth, not by whether they live honestly and with integrity, but by some external or comparative standard: “I’m good because I’m smarter than other people,” “I’m good because I’m more beautiful than other people,” “I’m good because people like me.” But self-esteem is internal: it’s about your own estimate of your relationship to reality and morality. To base it on other people in any way is to make it vulnerable and self-defeating: you can’t seek self-esteem if you’re crawling on your knees or sneering down at inferiors.
Other people judge their worth by self-sacrificial moral standards: “I’m good because I put others before myself,” “I’m good because I’m not selfish.” But this, too, represents a contradiction: “I’m worthy of happiness because I recognize that other people’s happiness is more important than mine.” Healthy self-esteem requires that you dedicate yourself to moral principles aimed at human flourishing, not self-effacement.
Judging yourself by wrong metaphysical and moral standards is damaging. Sometimes such mistakes are mistakes. It’s understandable that a person could confuse his need for competence with a need for unachievable flawlessness. It’s understandable that a person who has been taught that morality consists in selflessness would judge herself by the degree to which she’s set aside her values for the sake of others.
But for people who are characteristically irrational, wrong standards of self-esteem are more insidious. Precisely because self-esteem is a need, they are driven to pursue a substitute—pseudo-self-esteem. Pseudo-self-esteem isn’t merely self-esteem gauged by a mistaken standard. It is an attempt to fake self-esteem rather than acknowledge that you lack it. It’s a pretense of self-esteem. Branden observes:
A man’s pseudo-self-esteem is maintained by two means, essentially: by evading, repressing, rationalizing, and otherwise denying ideas and feelings that could affect his self-appraisal adversely; and by seeking to derive his sense of efficacy and worth from something other than rationality, some alternative value or virtue which he experiences as less demanding or more easily attainable, such as “doing one’s duty,” or being stoical or altruistic or financially successful or sexually attractive.
Just as a fraud who counterfeits money has to twist himself in knots to conceal the truth, thereby making the truth his enemy, so the person trying to counterfeit self-esteem faces constant threats to his pretense. A pretense is hollow. There is an underlying tension that never leaves, amounting to the constant fear: “The clock is ticking. Someday, the truth about me will come out.” When you see someone become triggered by something seemingly innocuous—the tiniest slight, the mildest criticism, the faint scent of rejection—you are seeing someone whose pretense at self-esteem has been threatened.
Genuine self-esteem, on the other hand, is solid: it is based on the clearest perception possible of the truth about yourself, including your flaws and failings. You want to become aware of your flaws so that you can seek to improve them.
If self-esteem is something you earn by making moral choices, the virtue that encourages you to make good choices and form the best possible moral character is pride. Pride, in this context, is not the feeling of achievement, but the quest for achievement—the achievement of a healthy soul. Ayn Rand describes the virtue of pride this way:
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself.
Pride makes possible self-esteem. But to practice pride requires doing something few people take the time to do: defining a moral ideal to aspire to. To achieve self-esteem requires thinking deeply about what morality actually demands of you—and then striving to live up to those demands. To live up to them, not partially or part time but fully.
To practice morality full time and so cultivate the virtue of pride means to exhibit unbreached rationality. This doesn’t require omniscience. It requires consistently acting with your eyes open. It means never evading your knowledge and constantly striving to expand your knowledge—above all, your moral knowledge. To practice pride is to love morality, to be interested in moral issues, to want to know what’s right—not so you can preach it but so that you can practice it. Pride is the desire to cultivate a virtuous character and so achieve, in Peikoff’s words, “the best possible spiritual state.”
In conventional ethical systems, the basic moral challenge is temptation: you know what’s right, but you don’t want what’s right. Living up to morality’s demands, on this view, is impossible, but your job is to struggle to achieve the impossible.
But if morality is a guide to happiness, then temptation becomes a real but trivial issue. The challenge is not to desire the good but to see it. Imagine that before you made any choice, you were able to watch a movie that showed you the full consequences of each alternative. You could see how overcoming your fear of strangers and walking up to the girl in the library would lead to a passionate romance. You could see how phoning in sick to work so you could go out golfing would lead to you running in to the company CEO and ruining your career. You could see how standing up for your ideals in the face of an online mob would set you on a path of lifelong courage, while cowering and apologizing would cripple your self-esteem and nurture an ever-growing sense of resentment and self-loathing. If you could grasp, with total certainty, the full consequences of your actions, there would be no issue of temptation—what’s right and what’s desirable would be one and the same.
You cannot see all of the specific consequences of any of your choices. Temptation occurs when you see a situation out of context. You see with vivid clarity some short-term reward—sex with an attractive person, a brownie smothered with ice cream—but only dimly glimpse the long-term cost—divorce, diabetes. Or you see with vivid clarity some short-term cost—the blistering pain of the dentist’s drill, the brutal difficulty of a workout—but only dimly glimpse the long-term benefit—dental health, strength and energy.
But while you cannot see all of the specific consequences of your choices, you can project the consequences in principle. You know that evading what you know will harm you, even if the fact in question is painful to confront. You know that telling the truth in a difficult situation will benefit you, even if the short-term consequence will be a fight with your spouse or a poor grade in a class. Morality—a pro-happiness morality—gives you the only crystal ball there is. But it is up to your free will whether you use that crystal ball. “The challenge in life,” writes Peikoff, “is not to struggle against immoral passions, but to see the facts of reality clearly, in full focus. Once a man has done this in a given situation, there is no further difficulty in regard to him acting on what he sees.”
The fact that a pro-happiness morality is practical, that there’s no incentive to violate pro-life moral principles, means that you can live up to morality’s demands. Fully, consistently, without exception.
Morality, remember, is a guide for your choices. As a result, morality can’t require of you anything that’s outside your ability to choose. It can’t require you to make a certain amount of money or experience certain emotions or know what’s unknowable. It can only tell you to do what is under your direct volitional control. Rand puts it this way:
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul.
When morality is about what’s good for you, and when it doesn’t demand the impossible of you, then there is nothing barring you from doing what’s right without exception. There is no reason to settle for less than your best because there is nothing to gain from less than your best. There is no reason to engage in willful self-destruction.
Rand calls this attitude “moral ambitiousness.” Since morality is good for you, you should strive to understand and practice what’s moral. Not because you’re supposed to. Not because some authority will send you to Hell if you don’t. But because the more moral you are, the more successful and the more happy you’ll be.
To say that living a fully moral life is possible is not to say it’s easy. It requires effort. It requires accepting short-term discomfort for long-term benefits. Most difficult of all, it often requires overcoming past mistakes and traumas. By the time you are able to self-consciously think about moral issues, you may have developed all sorts of baggage that makes doing what’s good for you extremely difficult. You can become invested in psychological defenses—approval seeking, projecting a phony self-image, numbing negative feelings with drugs or sex or frantic busyness—and the anxiety of defying them can seem more terrifying than living a life without happiness. Dedication to happiness takes courage.
In encouraging you to strive for a fully moral life, I’m not saying you should continually ask yourself if you’re perfect and flagellate yourself for any shortcomings. That is a recipe for guilt and depression. What I’m really talking about is cultivating a commitment to continual improvement. If you have moral flaws, the question is whether you’re committed to eliminating them over time or whether you surrender to them.
If you do violate your moral principles, what should you do? What does moral redemption look like? It requires more than a resolve to do better in the future. Many a person has woken up with a hangover vowing to never drink again, only to crack open a bottle a few weeks (or a few hours) later. A resolution, by itself, isn’t enough.
Moral redemption starts with self-honesty. You say to yourself: I told that lie. I took that action. I’ve engrained this negative character trait. Self-honesty isn’t about settling for where you are today or liking where you are today, but about fully acknowledging the reality of where you are today. It means not pretending that “the real me” is different from the “me” who lashed out at my friend, or cheated on the test, or lied about believing in God, or peeked at my partner’s private journal. Self-honesty means seeing myself as I am, right now, at this moment.
Next, moral redemption requires fully accepting the consequences of my actions. Irrationality, we’ve said, means seeking to cheat cause and effect. Moral redemption, in essence, is reasserting respect for cause and effect.
If I was seeking effects without causes, then redemption requires taking responsibility for where I am and getting what I want. Even if I have been the victim of injustice or bad fortune, it means that I distinguish between fault and responsibility. It may not be my fault that I’m poor, but it’s my responsibility to rise out of poverty. It may not be my fault that I’m depressed or anxious, but it’s my responsibility to improve my psychological well-being. I must accept where I am today, including the role my choices played in bringing me to this point. Then I must stop blaming others and stop making excuses, knowing that getting what I want is in my own hands.
If I was enacting causes while trying to escape the effects, then moral redemption requires taking responsibility for what I did. If I took credit for a project at work I was hardly involved in, it means saying to my boss, “By the way, Paige really did most of the work on that one.” If I stole Ramen from my dormmate, it means fessing up and replacing what I took. If I cheated on a lover, it means not staying in the relationship under false pretenses of fidelity.
If I was seeking to reverse cause and effect, then moral redemption requires taking responsibility for my own desires and motives. To face the truth: I’m sleeping with people to prove I’m worthy of love, I’m pursuing wealth to prove I have ability, I’m a bully who tries to exert power over others to convince myself I’m not powerless. It means accepting that I lack self-esteem and have to rebuild it by pursuing only rational values and practicing virtue.
Then, moral redemption requires striving to understand my poor choices and undesirable character traits. Why did I lie to my boss about how far along I was on the project? Was I afraid she’d get angry—and if so, do I have an irrational fear of people’s negative emotions? Or is there something deeper at work? Perhaps I feel the need to project an image of myself as a superstar at work, because deep down I feel incompetent. Self-improvement requires getting to the deepest “why” I’m capable of, so that I can make the biggest correction I’m capable of.
Next, moral redemption requires a plan of action. This is the only kind of resolution to do better that matters. A plan can mean anticipating future scenarios where I’ll experience the temptation to repeat my past mistakes and coming up with a strategy to avoid repeating them. Or it can be a positive series of steps I’m going to take to instill a new habit or character trait. For example, a lot of people find themselves getting into angry arguments on social media. They come away feeling like they were the worst versions of themselves. To improve, they need a plan such as: I’m not allowed to post anything when I’m in an emotionally charged state.
Finally, moral redemption requires action across time. I cannot think my way to a better character without action. It’s action that allows me to assimilate and automatize a new set of behaviors. If you’ve ever quite smoking, you know that the hardest part is dis-integrating the link between smoking and different settings and activities. You go to have your cup of coffee and it feels unsatisfying, like something’s missing. It takes time to break the link between coffee and nicotine. Then, after several weeks, you’re starting to enjoy being a non-smoker, only to go out to a party. You’re overwhelmed by the sense you won’t be able to enjoy late night conversations without lighting up. You have to break that connection as well.
For any habit, including moral habits, you cannot short-circuit that process. You will encounter situations where the old desire will re-emerge, and you will have to consciously remind yourself of your new resolve and will yourself to follow your plan of action. But over time, it will become easier. Over time, the new way of acting will become second nature.
This isn’t easy. Although it can feel safer in the moment to suffer internally than to confront your fears, your guilt, your shame, it’s not true. Negative emotions tell lies. Alcoholism tells you that you can never enjoy life without your crutch. Depression tells you that you will never find enjoyment in life. Anxiety tells you that you will not be able to cope with whatever fear terrifies you. You need to be able to set those feelings and fears to the side and act on your knowledge: that happiness is possible, that life can be amazing, that confronting your worst fears will make you feel better not worse. That is courageous. That is what it means to lead a moral life.