Becker—Birth (iv)

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Chapter Eight

CULTURE AND PERSONALITY

The Standardization of the Self-Esteem

"We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and
guiding action has power over us from the first."
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

". . . mankind's common instinct for reality . . . has always held the
world to be essentially a theatre for heroism."
WILLIAM JAMES

If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down. And this is exactly what we learn from clinical data, from the theory of the psychoses, as well as from anthropology. ...

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... Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish:...

... It is wrong to say that man is a peacock, if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self-glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self-display. ...when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them, the eternal grinding-out of the inner-newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on—...

This is the uniquely human need,... each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—... This seems to be the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive

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and effusive emotions. ... Self-preservation, physio-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity—all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. ... Freud saw the universality of narcissism, and revealed the invertedness and the clinical liabilities of it. Adler too studied the neurotic overemphasis on the "Will to Power," and made the idea a central part of his formulations. But it was Nietzsche, earlier, who saw the healthy expression of the "Will to Power" and glory, the inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.

... If you are a psychiatrist or social worker, and want to understand directly what is driving your patient, ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings—... If you are a student of society, and want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism. If you are a child psychologist you already understand the

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deeper meaning of what we casually and often scornfully term "sibling rivalry." ... The child needs to be an object of primary value, and by definition only one person can be primary;... Children are not vicious animals struggling to dominate rivals, but culture-heroes in the making, desperately trying to stand out.