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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?
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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