Self-esteem is one of the strangest, most misleading, and even most dangerous ideas to have emerged in the 20th century.
thetimes.co.uk, 17 March

The couple of decades I have spent reading ancient and modern Chinese and Indian texts, joined by the occasional Tibetan or Japanese author, have only strengthened my conviction that we are all united by embodiment and sentience. I would like to call this 'human nature' in the old-fashioned way, boldly affirming the ancient insight that it is universal, while immediately adding that it is not uniform. If a baobab or moss can grow from the loose topsoil or earth in different climatic regions, then from sentient embodiment there emerges into the light of day a body of languages, cultural norms, and customs, often labelled with the frivolous term 'national mentality'. It is frivolous because it tends to establish some kind of immutable essence characteristic only of a Latvian or an Inuit, ignoring the differences among the Latvians or Inuits themselves.

From flour, one can make Italian ciabatta, French baguette, Indian naan, or Chinese baozi. One can wrap meat in dough and get Chinese jiaozi, South African dombolo, or Kazakh tushpar – that is to say, dumplings. It is similar with the doughy lumps of sentient embodiment – certain ideas, various enduring ways in which humans have described the world and themselves within it. The diversity found in these attempts is historically conditioned. Therefore, we will find no equivalents for the late 20th-century popular psychology concept of 'self-esteem' among the ancient Greeks, Chinese, or Indians. It is hard to imagine Krishna saying to Arjuna: 'You know, mate, your unhappiness comes from low self-esteem!' It is unlikely that Master Kong would have said to Zigong: 'Without knowing about self-esteem, how can one know anything about death?' No Buddhist sutra begins with the sentence: 'Thus I have heard. Once the Bhagavan was in the Jetavana Garden speaking about low self-esteem.' One could say that Hegel's postulated Absolute Spirit had not yet gathered steam, only fully manifesting in the tenets of American positive psychology.

What exactly is self-esteem? What is its relationship to self-respect, self-pride? Is it possible to apply all these concepts to oneself as a subject without all these 'selves'? Does low and high self-esteem make us more or less happy? These all seem like important questions if I accept Epicurus' claim that the words of a philosopher are empty if they do not alleviate human suffering and heal the soul just as medicine heals the body.

On one hand, popular culture, with its tentacles in mass media and social networks, is constantly feeding us quickly dissolving clichés and ideas of easy behaviour. They tend, in a Freudian way, to normalise the 'deviations' characteristic of human nature, aligning them with the hierarchy of values of the Zeitgeist: self-expression, self-growth, self-care, self-assertion, self-display, self-compassion. The 'self' and ipsation. It should be noted that none of the aforementioned 'strategies' is objectionable in itself, provided it is used in moderation. But, as it happens, many of us struggle with balance. Both in our affects and in the defects of our mental life, we suffer from a lack of healthy mental factors. Many people, when thinking about any object, and especially themselves, tend to use 'cognitive shortcuts' – ready-made explanations that offer the least amount of mental friction. Clichés, pre-existing assumptions, and prejudices are the cognitive tools that divert us from the need to keep our attention on a thought that tends to vanish like morning dew or bubbles on the surface of water.

On the other hand, we have access to a collection of ideas and techniques from past philosophical and religious traditions that seek to curb the overly bloated 'ego' like a crazed bull. 'The mind is like a galloping horse, thoughts are like a mischievous monkey' – states one Chinese Buddhist text. The Chinese thinker Zhuang Zhou reminds us that instead of constantly feeding our sensory organs with new impressions, it is better to 'sit in oblivion' and practise 'fasting of the heart' from time to time. In my opinion, this resonates with Pascal's observation that a portion of the world's troubles stems from our inability to sit quietly at home. Nowadays, of course, this could be attributed to a lack of willpower to stop basking in social networks, sharing the latest selfie, or engaging in morally virtual battles for justice. Whether it be the western tip of the Eurasian continent or the eastern highlands and plains, the voices of antiquity hum a similar tune: certain aspects of the 'self' are harmful and do not promote happiness.

There is also a third aspect. A certain romanticised fascination with 'the light from Asia', sometimes joined by 'neuromania' (a philosophically unclear tendency to invoke the results of neuroscience research), creates fertile ground for nihilism of the self – that is, the idea that there is no 'self' at all. Or that the 'self' is nothing more than an illusion created by the brain. It turns out that modern Buddhists, the best representatives of the anatta or no-self idea, are people in white coats who look into brain scanners and hasten to report that the 'self' cannot be found in the jungle of neurons. If there is no 'self', there is no need for self-esteem, as there is neither the one who evaluates nor the one to be evaluated. Admittedly, Buddhists have been discussing the problem of reductionism of the self for 2000 years, often acknowledging that this illusion is quite robust and does not leave us so easily.

But what is one to do with low self-esteem? I, for instance, have often returned to the thought over the last 15 years that I am a useless idiot. That is to say, the climatic processes of the soul, with a regularity characteristic of the changing seasons and the various winds of psychic life – gusts of joy, cold fronts of understanding, puffs of doubt, hurricanes of anger, and typhoons of uncertainty – force me to end up in Dante's 'dark forest', temporarily losing the 'straight path'. Often, the feeling of idiocy is amplified by the awareness that you are not like them – the confident and noble ones – who, without losing their way, have already escaped the jungle and are basking in the sun of understanding and conviction. In such moments – unless the low atmospheric pressure of the soul is treated too excessively with folk remedies such as intoxication, polyphagia, procrastination, and losing oneself in the depths of YouTube – it is sometimes useful to recall Zhuang Zhou's story about some birds. The wingspan of the mythical Peng bird is several thousand kilometres, and to fly to the Southern Ocean, also called the Celestial Pond, its gigantic wings churn the waters and winds, covering the sky like clouds. The cicada and the dove, watching the great effort of the Peng, laugh in bewilderment. The little insects do not understand why one needs to fly so far; they are content to flutter from branch to branch. But if you lack the strength to reach the opposite tree, there is nothing left but to fall to the ground. Whether you are a large bird or a small insect, whether your flight is to the Celestial Pond or to the next branch, everyone depends on the air and wind that sustains them. It is important to understand what kind of bird you are, so as not to embark in vain on journeys that your wingspan will not allow you to complete. And no amount of high self-esteem will help if you are a cicada. However, unlike the solitary Peng, the cicada is in merry company, chirping like crazy after sunset.

It seems to me that the idea of self-esteem is one of the many modern answers to the age-old problem pointed out by Siddhartha Gautama. Dissatisfaction, suffering, and torment stem from birth, ageing, death, contact with the unpleasant, separation from the pleasant, and not obtaining what one craves. In short: one has to pay for self-awareness not only with the fear of death, but also with a fair dose of low self-esteem.

Article first published in the May 2021 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine