Lightyearsaway

My contention was that 1) all these "pillars" exist within a socially constructed system of self-esteem 2) This socially constructed system of self-esteem lacks the capacity to (in his words) “honor” the self-esteem that humans truly “want and need”, and so Branden needs to emphasize these pillars to make the best out of a bad situation.

You can perceive the reality of, say, coffee burning your skin, without any theories. However, many more complicated social and physical phenomena require theories.

We have no option but to use some theory of reality.

tell me what you think about the value of my grass counting game in my original post and we can go from there. I'll repeat: If I invent a game of speed counting blades of grass in various geometric patterns, I should, according to Branden, only “realistically” value my achievements in the game once the game has gained some popularity. If no one wants to play the game, then I can’t gain any self-esteem from it. It is only if others decide to value the game, and if I can then prove my proficiency in the game, that I can “realistically” gain self-esteem. Btw, I'd be curious to know what you think about the following statement by Ernest Becker, where he (very broadly) describes the main forms of heroism/self-esteem that have taken place throughout history: "We can ask about any epoch, what are the main social forms of heroism available? We can take a sweep over history and see how these forms vary and how they animate each epoch. For primitive man, who practiced the ritual renewal of nature, each person could be a cosmic hero of a quite definite kind: he could contribute with his powers and observances to the replenishment of cosmic life. Gradually, as societies became more complex and differentiated into classes, cosmic heroism became the property of special classes like divine kings and the military. With the rise of money coinage one could be a money hero and privately protect himself and his offspring by the accumulation of visible gold-power. With Christianity something new came into the world: the heroism of renunciation of this world and the satisfactions of this life, which is why the pagans thought Christianity was crazy. It was a sort of antiheroism by an animal who denied life in order to deny evil. Buddhism did the same thing even more extremely, denying all possible worlds. In modern times, with the Enlightenment, began again a new paganism of the exploitation and enjoyment of earthly life, partly as a reaction against the Christian renunciation of the world. Now a new type of productive and scientific hero came into prominence, and we are still living this today. More cars produced by Detroit, higher stock­ market prices, more profits, more goods moving-all this equals more heroism. And with the French Revolution anther type of modern hero was codified: the revolutionary hero who will bring an end to injustice and evil once and for all, by bringing into being a new utopian society perfect in its purity."

To asses reality, we have to look at both, the quantity and the quality of studies i.e. we have to delve into the specifics, into concrete criticisms and methods. The existence of studies in other subjects that you regard as illegitimate tells us nothing about the subject at hand. I may add that just as everyone tends to perceive themselves as good and moral, most people also see themselves as being rational. So the mere repetition of the word "rational" in relation to oneself, or one's belief system carries no information.

Some highly trained meditators can exert more control over their minds, but we have instincts, and various deterministic elements in our biological system. Plenty of evidence for that. I was referring to righteous political leaders, who tend to kill way more people than lone psychopaths. In general, the notion that we tend to see ourselves as good stands. I also mentioned a gung-ho American nationalist, and yet, by omitting him in your response, you imply that the possibility of his “goodness” is a less “delusional” concept than for the Isis member. That itself proves cultural relativity. Let’s look at what we know from cold, hard facts. forget media opinion, forget cultural biases. From wikipedia The Lancet, one of the oldest scientific medical journals in the world, published two peer-reviewed studies on the effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation on the Iraqi mortality rate. The second survey[2][3][4] published on 11 October 2006, estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006 (in those 3 years alone). 601,027 deaths (range of 426,369 to 793,663 using a 95% confidence interval) were due to violence. 31% (186,318) of those were attributed to the US-led Coalition, 24% (144,246) to others, and 46% (276,472) unknown. The causes of violent deaths were gunshot (56% or 336,575), car bomb (13% or 78,133), other explosion/ordnance (14%), air strike (13% or 78,133), accident (2% or 12,020), and unknown (2%). So you really have no similar evidence of ISIS killing as many people. And yet, you would feel far more reluctant to say “If a member of the US military thinks he is good, then he is delusional.” False. i will quote Branden directly “If it is not grounded in reality… it is not self-esteem." http://www.nathanielbranden.com/on-self-esteem Isn’t the “success” and “achievement” that Branden alludes to, culturally relative?. i’ll repeat what I said in the review: The self-esteem gotten from putting a spear through a fish’s head would be, according to Branden, more “grounded in reality” in a Tribal African culture than in say, American culture, where putting a rubber ball through a hoop would provide a self-esteem more “grounded in reality”. If I invent a game of speed counting blades of grass in various geometric patterns, I should, according to Branden, only “realistically” value my achievements in the game once the game has gained some popularity. If no one wants to play the game, then I can’t gain any self-esteem from it. It is only if others decide to value the game, and if I can then prove my proficiency in the game, that I can “realistically” gain self-esteem. Using this example, “false” self-esteem, according to Branden, would mean thinking that I was better (or worse) at the game than I really was.

From a purely rational perspective, Epicurus was right when he said "That which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist." However, humans don't just have rationality. We have emotions; some of which we simply cannot avoid.

Michael, it's not that the illusion of self-importance is impossible without others, it's just much harder to attain, and not applicable to most people Korben, my take on morality is that at least part of it is wired, as shown by scholars like Marc Hauser and John Mikhail, but that our fear of death highjacked our "moral instinct" (as well as various other more primitive mental functions) via culture i.e. via the various beliefs and activities that could provide us with the illusion of being persons of value in a world of meaning. Everyone tends to feel righteous and moral in their actions, even the worst mass murderers e.g. a member of Isis and a a Gung-ho American nationalist both apply the same moral instinct, but from different cultural lenses. They both see themselves as good, and the other as evil. All of us tend to see ourselves as good.

This Terror Management Theory (Wikipedia) stuff sounds like a new-age version of Existentialism. I'm not interested. How far does "social" extend here? Is it only family, family and friends, them plus people known through work, them plus acquaintances, all of one's countrymen, the indefinite powers-that-be, the whole world? The word social is a convenient tool of hucksters. “It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” - Atlas Shrugged. Your interest in TMT, or lack thereof, has no bearing on the veracity of the hundreds of TMT studies that have been conducted. "Social" refers to groups of people. The words "culture we live in or that we subscribe to" were meant to give an indication. People can subscribe to the meaning and value of sub-cultures within larger cultures, or to a mixture of many such social constructs.

Overwhelmingly, self-esteem comes from social validation by the culture we live in or that we subscribe too. What else? Yes, we have freak examples of people who were raised by wolves or some of the other things you mention, but those are statistically insignificant. I may add that many of your examples do involve people maintaining or developing a self-esteem based on their previous socially constructed culture. They may pray to God; they may abide by or build upon previous rules and behaviors learned. Traditional hermits, for example, come from a religious background. And religion is a social construct. The term was in fact originally applied to a Christian who lives the eremitic life out of a religious conviction. Pioneers certainly carried with them much of their previous culture, and pioneering itself was in many instances encouraged by their previous cultural social environment. Sole shipwreck survivors tend to be too busy trying to survive to do much of anything else, but they often do maintain or build upon many of their previous self-esteem constructs. As for solitary confinement in prison, many people go insane, but those who don't devise interesting strategies, often having to do with imagining interactions with people or concepts from their previous culture. But we're talking desperate survival mode here. A few examples I could find: . While he was in “the box,” Perez talked to himself out loud. He kept journals. For a while, he regularly wrote out and responded to famous historical quotes. He also used his imagination to time travel, imagining “alternate endings to past interactions with people—what if I said this? Or what if I would’ve invited her for coffee or something like that?” He wrote about painful relationships and episodes, reframing them and extracting a lesson.“I used to lie in bed with my eyes closed,” says Perez, “thinking about my past, thinking about my future, planning for the future. Some of it was based on reality, and the other—borderline fantasy.” He tapped into a tunnel-like experience, creating a personal space for himself inside the tiny physical space of his cell. Over time, he got more intentional about how he was using his time in his “mental workspace,” as Schlegel refers to the overlapping networks that allow intentional imagination to take place. Perez believes what he ended up doing “bordered on meditation.” . Michael Jewell, a Texan inmate, had a similar experience. After Jewell’s 1970 death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he served 40 years, seven of which were spent in near-total isolation. He says he used to kill time for hours working out detailed visualizations of himself in a vivid alternate reality, where he could inhabit open spaces and converse with people. “I might imagine myself at a park and come upon a person sitting on a bench,” he says. “I would ask if she or he minded if I sat down. I’d say something like, ‘Great weather today.’ The other person would respond something like, ‘It is indeed. I hope it continues until the [football game].’ ‘I know what you mean. In another couple of weeks it’s going to be cold as a witch’s tit in Wisconsin.’ As we conversed, I would watch joggers, bicyclists, and skateboarders pass by. The conversation might go on for half an hour or so. When I opened my eyes and stood, I would feel refreshed and even invigorated.” . Hussain Al-Shahristani, Saddam Hussein’s former chief scientific adviser, spent a decade in solitary confinement at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. He survived, according to the BBC, by “taking refuge in a world of abstractions, making up mathematical problems, which he then tried to solve.” . While imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II, the Russian Jewish mathematics professor Jakow Trachtenberg watched as his fellow prisoners “gave up hope and died even before being sent to their death.” To survive, he developed an innovative method of performing rapid mental calculation, known today as the Trachtenberg system.

Can you provide any examples of people whose self-esteem had nothing to do with social meaning/culture/validation?

Self-esteem comes from social validation. By definition. It entails seeing oneself as a person of value in a world of meaning. A person comes to this world and finds various pre-created meaning structures (cultures) that s/he inevitably adapts to, chooses from, relies on and even helps build upon Becker used the term "heroism" more than self-esteem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBbrswEpFTQ No need to speculate here. We have many examples of how people behave when faced with "social death" Let me ask you, for example, what would scare you more, losing everything you have and becoming a homeless person that everyone (including former family and friends) thinks stinks, acts in sexually inappropriate ways and has lost his mind, or being a highly accomplished, socially admired, respected family-loved person who receives a nobel prize and then dies in a car accident? Ernest Becker made a famous statement that “What we fear is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance" Yes, this has been extensively tested. Im sure you agree that that involves a certain amount of self-delusion. We find it much easier to scoff at death when we come armed with a "symbolic shield" like romanticized notions of love, country, God, Allah etc You're putting words in my mouth. I said that with civilization, there was a gradual shift from cosmic to earthly notions of self-importance. My contention was that they are both delusional - both used to deny our animal insignificance and death. I also mentioned that "the march of progress" since 1800 has caused overpopulation and massively increased ecological footprint, leading to ecocide and compromising the long term survival prospects of humanity due to environmental degradation. This obvious regress must be taken into account, as well as some TMT studies like these that show how our belief in progress has many of the same irrational properties as religion http://www.academia.edu/534931/Things_will_get_better_The_anxiety-buffering_qualities_of_progressive_hope_2009_ There were also some advantages to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that we no longer have. By our standards, yes they are, but not by hunter-gatherer standards. The 70 virgins await in a different delusional realm, whereas hunter-gatherers already exist in that realm. All the major religions of civilization, from Sun worship, to Christianity and Islam, came to co-exist with the forms of earthly self-esteem/heroism brought about by the materialism of agriculture and surplus (tyrannical monarchies, nations, money, jobs, progress etc). The former (primitive) cosmic dimensions of self-importance were diminished.

I wasn't aware that that's what you meant by love.

Incorrect The videos I posted (from a 2003 documentary called "Flight From Death") already show a few easy to digest studies. If people are not motivated to even go that far to delve into studies and investigate empirical reality, thats their problem. There's extensive literature on hunter-gatherer religions. It shows that they were were deeply religious people, and had a very cosmic sense of self-importance. Today, our sense of self-importance/esteem is proportionally more "earthly" than "cosmic".

I haven't bothered to write books on the subject or start a website, which shows that Nathaniel Branden had far more "zeal suited to religion" but with far less evidence on his side. That is not what these "double blind experiments prove"

Terror Management theory also has a view on love that addresses your point

I think you are unaware of the aforementioned hundreds of studies and double blind experiments confirming TMT. They certainly don't qualify as "fudging" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=terror+management+theory&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjlsZeIp7PNAhUJ8mMKHcYIAAQQgQMIGjAA A few of them are presented here, in this film from about 10 years ago

I think Terror Management Theory has provided some of the best evidence on self-esteem and on the source of our anxiety. Hundreds of tests, double blind experiments etc have been conducted. Many studies and papers published https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=terror+management+theory&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjlsZeIp7PNAhUJ8mMKHcYIAAQQgQMIGjAA I'd be interested in knowing how you all think it relates to objectivism. Sheldon Solomon provides a brief explanation here As for seeing the aforementioned shift from primitive society to materialist civilization as some gradual advance toward reason, the evidence in TMT indicates otherwise: It was about the acquisition of earthly heroism, as opposed to cosmic heroism i.e. the pursuit of a different (less satisfying and evenly distributed) form of self-esteem. In the words of Ernest Becker: “The real world is simply too terrible to admit. it tells man that he is a small trembling animal who will someday decay and die. Culture changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some ways. 'Civilized' society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money, art and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease. It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, or cosmic specialness, or ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning." Also, a reasonable case can be made that the ecocide resulting from materialist civilization is morally abhorrent, and that the long term prospects of human survival have diminished due to ecological degradation. TMT has provided evidence that the ideology of progress is based on delusion. http://www.academia.edu/534931/Things_will_get_better_The_anxiety-buffering_qualities_of_progressive_hope_2009_

Branden defines self-esteem as:“a disposition [grounded in reality], to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life, and naturally worthy of happiness, fulfillment, success and achievement [as opposed to] fantasies of superiority and exaggerated notions of one’s accomplishments.”The “success and achievement” that Branden associates with self-esteem is not “grounded” in some objective “reality”, as he implies, but simply grounded in the social consensus one happens to live in or subscribe to i.e. in culturally relative and invented social reality. The self-esteem gotten from putting a spear through a fish’s head would be, according to Branden, more “grounded in reality” in a Tribal African culture than in say, American culture, where putting a rubber ball through a hoop would provide a self-esteem more “grounded in reality”. If I invent a game of speed counting blades of grass in various geometric patterns, I should, according to Branden, only “realistically” value my achievements in the game once the game has gained some popularity. If no one wants to play the game, then I can’t gain any self-esteem from it. It is only if others decide to value the game, and if I can then prove my proficiency in the game, that I can “realistically” gain self-esteem. Using this example, “false” self-esteem, according to Branden, would mean thinking that I was better (or worse) at the game than I really was.We have over 30 years of evidence coming from Terror Management Theory to show that when Homo sapiens gained self-awareness, s/he also gained an end-of self awareness: an awareness of his/her animal insignificance and finitude. This led to a crippling anxiety that in turn led to the creation of culture as we know it: to beliefs and activities that would provide individuals with the illusion of being persons of value in a world of meaning - usually by inflating the significance and meaning of tiny slivers of invented reality, so that we wouldn’t have to face the insignificance and meaninglessness of our place in the big scheme of things.The cultures that provided the best belief systems to counter our fear of animal insignificance and death were prehistoric, because they embraced an animistic spirituality that granted cosmic significance to each and every individual in the tribe.With the shift to civilization, we entered an era of materialism that increasingly relied on an (unequally distributed) earthly (as opposed to cosmic) self-esteem. Since the illusion of earthly significance is smaller than the illusion of cosmic significance, most individuals in civilization came to exist in a chronically deprived state of self-esteem. To quote Ernest Becker in 1973:“Our own everyday rituals today seem shallow pre­cisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only using one's fellow man as a mirror to make one's face shine, the primitive used the whole cosmos. We can really only get inside primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to play in the generative rituals. We don't know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature-unless we belong to an ac­tive religious community. Nor can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritual­ist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; he has contributed to sustaining and renewing the universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritual­ist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. The primitive feels the effect of his ability to generate life, he is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. Primitive man set up his society as a stage, surrounded himself with actors to play different roles, invented gods to address the performance to, and then ran off one ritual drama after the other, raising himself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of men. He staged the dance of life, with himself at the center.”From this light, we can see that Branden’s emphasis on mindfulness, self-acceptance, assertiveness, responsibility, purpose, discipline, integrity etc are all basically attempts to make the best out of a bad situation; attempts to squeeze the maximum juice out of various impoverished social consensus schemes that lack the capacity to (in his words) “honor” the self-esteem that humans truly “want and need”.(As a small side note, I may add that Branden had a preference for libertarian capitalism that influenced his ideas of how to best achieve this goal.)So when Branden insists that we see ourselves as being deserving of love, or for example, recommends as an exercise that we state “I have a right to exist”, we have to realize how, in comparison to primitives who felt they had a right to “raise themselves to the stars”; this sounds more like a shy “I have a right to keep my neck above the water”.In fact the very existence of the book bespeaks a social lack - the impoverished self-esteem granting capacity of our culture.