People often confuse egoism, egotism, narcissism, self-love. There are so many variants in the English language and not only in the English language.
I recommend that you walk over, tip-toll, to the Life's Wisdom playlist, in which I've included quite a few videos about the differences between self-love and narcissism.
But today I'd like to discuss yet another cousin in this extended clan and kin and Keith and family, and that is egotism.
Is there such a thing as healthy egotism?
Now, on the face of it, no. Egotism is self-centeredness, selfishness, to the exclusion of others, and usually at the expense of others.
So there's no such thing as healthy egotism, at least not socially speaking.
And indeed, we come to the first juncture of our discussion.
There's a difference between social considerations and mental health considerations.
Sometimes society imposes on us behavioral scripts, sexual scripts. Sometimes society demands from us to conform in ways which are detrimental to our mental health.
Society is not interested in the well-being of individuals. It is interested in the functioning of teams and collectives.
So there is a tension and sometimes a conflict, not to say a discrepancy, between social expectations and what we in psychology know to be the right kind of behavior or the right kind of choices and decisions, actions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, society doesn't always agree with us.
And so egotism is defined from the social or from society's point of view if you are harming other people if you're exploiting other people then you're an egotist but this is of course relational it's other people's point of view, not yours.
Let's break it down, let's deconstruct it, so that I don't give the wrong impression. I'm not calling to harm other people.
Let's start with the fact that your survival and your well-being should always come first.
You heard me right and I'm not being facetious or ironic or sarcastic. Your survival and your well-being should always come in first place.
You are the guardian and custodian of a single individual. You, yourself, you're in charge of making sure that you conduct your life in a manner which would yield optimal outcomes and would keep you alive and reasonably contented if not happy.
How do we call this attitude? Self-love. This is self-love.
When you accept yourself as you are, you are your own best friend, you have your back, and you have your priority straight. And your priority number one is to survive because you cannot be a force for good. You cannot be an agent of change and you cannot be a moral agent if you are dead. You need to be alive.
Even if you were to fully conform to society's mores and expectations and requirements, communicated to you via socialization agents, like parents and so on, even if you were to be a good guy or a good girl, you need to be alive to do this.
Survival is number one. Anything that challenges or contradicts survival in your book is evil and you should make sure that it doesn't have any long-standing impact on you and doesn't deprive you of your life.
Same goes when it comes as far as your well-being is concerned in order to function appropriately in order not to harm people actually you need to be mentally healthy you need to have a feeling of fulfillment and self-actualization. You need to fit in not only externally, but also internally.
In other words, you need to avoid dissonance. You need to not be anxious and not be depressed.
Your well-being is the key to your functioning, including inter alia, your social functioning.
Someone who is not well, mentally speaking, and physically speaking, is unlikely to be a pillar of society, or unlikely to contribute to society, or unlikely to be a pillar of society or unlikely to contribute to society or unlikely to participate and collaborate with other people in a way which would be conducive to the greater good.
Number one priority, survival. Stay alive.
Number two priority. make sure to safeguard your well-being, to vouch safely, to make sure that you're feeling well physically and mentally. These come first.
These are your first and second priorities. Everyone else and everything else come on third place.
So if you're a mother, your children come third. If you're a wife, your husband comes third. If you're a teacher, your students come third. If you're a patriot, your nation comes third.
None of these, no institution, no collective, no individual, no group of individuals, no idea, no concept, no religion, nothing can supersede your survival and well-being.
Nothing can be priority number one except your survival and nothing should ever be priority number two except the maintenance, furtherance, sustenance and buttressing of your well-being.
End of story. This is the number one and number two of self-love. This is the ABC of self-love. This is self-love 1-0-1.
Don't confuse survival and well-being with pleasure. Survival and well-being are not hedonistic. Survival and well-being have nothing to do or little to do with self-gratification, especially self-gratification of base instincts. The Id, what Freud called the Id.
Survival and well-being are extensive qualities.
In other words, they don't depend on any specific input, any concrete event or circumstance, any individual out there.
Survival and well-being are independent parameters or independent variables, independent qualities.
The emphasis is on independent.
They are not dependent on the presence or existence of someone in your life.
That is dependency, that is not survival, that is not well-being. That's the opposite of well-being.
Well-being does not depend on being embedded or part of a specific environment or nation or place or religion or collective or church or workplace.
That is dependency, that is a negation of personal autonomy. That is to be the opposite of independent.
Pleasure is a form of dependency.
Read up, all Eastern religions would tell you this, and coming to think of it, all Western religions would tell you this.
Pleasure is dependency. Pleasure is dependency.
Pleasure conditions you to become addicted to its source and to its uninterrupted flow.
Pleasure reduces you, never enhances you, never increases you.
You can derive pleasure, of course. You can derive pleasure from a work of art, you can derive pleasure from sex, you can derive pleasure from the aesthetics or the beauty of another person, you can derive pleasure from a heart to heart conversation with your best friend.
That is not the kind of pleasure I'm talking about.
These are not hedonistic pleasures because they are byproducts.
They're not the goal. They're not the aim.
You're not talking to your best friend in order to derive pleasure. You're talking to your best friend and then you feel pleasure.
The pleasure is secondary.
As I said, a byproduct or a side effect of the interaction.
You contemplate a work of art because it induces in you internal processes, contemplation, identification, analysis, and so on.
And the aesthetic experience generates, among other things, among other after effects, generates pleasure.
You don't consume works of art just in order to experience pleasure.
Similarly if you're having sex only for pleasure you're a bad lover ask any partner of yours.
So pleasure diminishes well-being is the opposite of pleasure.
You could have pleasure while pursuing your well-being but it should never be the main goal.
It is when we pursue pleasure that we harm other peopletypically. It is when pleasure is our focus, our purpose, our direction, our guidance, guiding principle, what Freud called the pleasure principle.
It is then that we tend to become less empathic, more exploitative, a lot more envious, in short, more narcissistic.
Pleasure and narcissism are one and the same.
The pursuit of pleasure as a core effect, as a focus and the goal of life, the only accomplishment, it's a great definition of a narcissist or narcissism.
When there is a conflict between your survival and well-being and precepts, principles of social conduct, your survival and well-being come first. They should prevail.
Society comes a distant third, distant third, maybe fifth, maybe ninth. Never let society compromise your chances to survive and your ability to augment your well-being. Never give society this power. Never mind through which institution.
Your survival and well-being in a healthy society, in a functional ambience, culture, your survival and well-being should go hand in hand with the structure, the institution, the mores and the norms of the society you're in.
If you find yourself living in a society that challenges your well-being, undermines it, diminishes it, reduces it, if you find yourself living in a society that puts you a danger, danger, life danger, threatens your life, walk away, avoid this kind of society, exit, emigrate, run away.
Wait a minute, you say, what about principles like do no harm?
That's a perfect example of what I'm saying. As long as do no harm as a societal principle, societal organizing principle, as long as this principle, do no harm, does not conflict with your survival or well-being, do no harm.
But if it conflicts with your ability to survive and with your well-being, you're entitled to do harm.
An example is war. If your country is invaded, you're entitled to kill the enemy.
So do no harm except in order to prevent harm to yourself and to others. For example, to your loved ones or to your compatriots.
Do no harm is not an absolute maxim, something incontestable, immutable, denuded of context.
No, it's a general, altruistic, beneficial, benevolent principle of conduct. It's a way to comport yourself.
I agree, until your survival is at stake, and as long as your well-being is not compromised.
You have the license and the right, including the legal right, to do harm, for example, in self-defense.
So everything is relative. Everything is contextualized. Everything should be deconstructed. Don't take anything at face value. You come first.
Let's take another maxim, another edict.
Treat others as you want them to treat you. That's great. I'm all for it, but there are exceptions.
Actually, coming to think of it, there are numerous exceptions. For example, avoid people pleasing. Don't try to please people at your expense, at the expense of your well-being. Don't monetize your well-being. Don't use your well-being as a coin with which to pay other people in order to incur or carry favor, in order to ingratiate yourself, in order to belong, in order to be loved.
Do not trade your well-being for acceptance. Do not please people. Treat other people as you want them to treat you up to the point of people pleasing. Up to the point of self-sacrifice.
These are pathological, dysfunctional behaviors. Even if you want people to please you, you should not please them. Even if you want people to self-sacrifice for your own good, for your own goals, do not sacrifice yourself.
Your expectations that people should please you and sacrifice themselves are not healthy. They are not moral. They are not okay.
So avoid people pleasing and avoid self-sacrifice. Treat others as you want them to treat you. Really? What if you are grandiose? Andwant people to treat you as if you were some kind of God, divine figure? Does this apply to them? Treat others as you want them to treat you? You want people to treat you as if you were a divinity. Would you agree to treat them equally as godheads or godly figures?
Grandiosity distorts social relationships. Grandiosity undermines this sentence. Treat others as you want them to treat you as long as you are not grandiose, as long as you are not paranoid, as long as you are not psychopathic, as long as you are not acting out, as long as you are not mentally ill.
There's so many exceptions you're beginning to see that social mores, norms, precepts of social conduct, social scripts are not the same as tenets of morality.
When society tells you how to behave, when it communicates to you its expectations via the socialization process, the messages of society, the communications of society, the mores of society, the norms of society are context dependent. Social scripts are context dependent.
So is morality. Nazi Germany had a different morality to, for example, the United States of America. Morality and social norms they're both context dependent, period dependent, culture dependent, culture bound.
But there's a difference. Social scripts are transient. They're mutable. They change very often. Sometimes every year.
Moral edicts, moral tenets, they change very often, sometimes every year. Moral edicts, moral tenets are more constant.
And some moral tenets are even immutable.
Everything is context dependent. Of course, temporal context, spatial context, context is everything.
But morality tends to remain more or less the same. There's an immutable core that survives the changes in the environmental changes, survives different periods in history, survives differences in societies, survives cultural differences. There's something in morality that is untouchable, impermeable, invulnerable to the changing times.
That's not the case with social expectations and demands. They are in flux all the time. You need to keep yourself updated. O you need to know what's what the changes in society are so rapid and so massive and so ubiquitous and all pervasive that you need to be on a constant learning trajectory, constant learning path in order to keep up with society.
That's not the case of morality. The morality that you have been taught, the ethics that you have developed as a child, normally will stay with you until you die, throughout the lifespan. Morality is a lot more stable.
But what to do if your survival and well-being conflict with morality?
If your survival conflicts with morality, you should choose survival. That is even encoded in religious texts, for example in Judaism.
But if your well-being conflicts with morality, you should choose morality.
And the reason you should choose morality is practical. Most morality is encoded in legislation, in regulation, in laws, and in social sanctions of one kind or another.
There are adverse consequences if you were to act antisocially or let alone criminally. You could suffer reputational damage, you could be shunned and ostracized, you could be fired, and ultimately of course you could be incarcerated.
It's wise to choose morality when it conflicts with your well-being, but it's equally wise to choose survival over morality.
And under normal circumstances, the vast majority of people are not confronted with moral dilemmas that challenge head-on their survival and well-being. These are very rare situations. They happen, I don't know, in the Holocaust or at war.
In the overwhelming vast majority of cases, normal, healthy people going their way, leading their lives, are confronted with conflicts between expectations, demands on their limited resources, and so forth.
And when they are, when they're faced with this, when they need to make painful decisions, when they need to choose, the principles that I've just espoused, survival and well-being before everything and everyone, would help you as a guiding light.
Love yourselves.