Hi Kevin, I enjoyed your article. My interest always perks up at the mention of Nathaniel. I had the pleasure of spending quite a bit of time with him over the years. I do want to point out a minor error - a bit technical - and not one that takes away for the theme of conclusions of your article. You wrote: Self esteem is the confidence and reliance upon one self to make decisions about the world and reality. Self esteem is poorly understood in our society but I define it as the ability to look inward and make value judgements for yourself. You don't compare yourself to others nor do you seek to be better than someone else (or some other standard).
Nathaniel made a distinction between self-esteem and confidence. Here is his definition: "Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and as worthy of happiness." And quite often he substituted the concept of "experience oneself as lovable" or, "deserving of love" for "worthy of happiness." For him, confidence was always relative to something specific, like the confidence we might have when working on something we have trained for and have acquired skills at. On the other hand, self-esteem was an experience of ourself in a much more general framework. Self-esteem and confidence come from different sources. Confidence can be increased, in the average person, by working at the skill that are related and observing the increasing competence in the results we have. A person could feel quite confident in their ability to read a general ledger, for example, yet hold low self-esteem. Our self-esteem automatically increases or decreases with the ways that we use our consciousness (self-accepting, self-assertive, practicing integrity, etc.) - it is constant and automatic. Our "ability to look inward and make value judgements" would be a result of self-esteem rather than self-esteem itself. You are right that a person whose self-esteem is high is far less likely to compare themselves to others or be competitive with others in any sense of establishing or proving some kind of worth. Being able to comfortably rely on oneself to make decisions is a product of self-esteem, and to the degree that we exercise this practice of making our own decisions, the higher our self-esteem will grow (all else remaining equal). So, it is both an effect and a cause of self-esteem, but not self-esteem itself. As I said at the beginning, these differences don't alter your theme or conclusions. Best Wishes,
Steve Wolfer
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