Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58).
 
The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious minds well-ordered to guide our lives in moral and successful ways. Focus may be like throwing a switch—a dimmer switch more likely—but the decision to think or not, especially the quality of thinking we generate, can face obstacles.
 
Defensive habits in particular are a significant obstacle to clear thinking. Defensive symptoms of the neurotic type are a form of delusion—though not nearly as serious as the delusions of a person experiencing a psychotic episode.
 
A young man, for example, who is fired from his job and jilted by his lover on the same day may become depressed and conclude, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” * This is not true and can be called a delusion, a false belief about reality. This person, in addition, may, without help, have considerable difficulty doing much of anything for several days or weeks. His thought processes are turned off, partially or completely.
 
Much of what we think, feel, and do as adults has been influenced and shaped by the conclusions we make as children and teenagers. An influential part of our psychologies is what Edith Packer (chap. 2) calls core evaluations about our selves, other people, and the world in general. How well these premises have been formed, meaning how correct and healthy they are, determines how we will act later.
 
This gives rise to a question: how well can we focus our minds to develop a well-ordered subconscious when we experience a host of psychological problems? Not easily is the answer.
 
The formation of these premises depends greatly on our parental upbringing and teaching in school. What we believe and feel as adults is often not as simple as flipping a switch, though generally, absent drug influence or physiological damage to our brains, behavior is controllable. Which means we can refrain from pulling out a gun and shooting someone, or cheating someone through a dishonest act, but certain areas of our lives may not exhibit what an outside observer would call clear thinking.
 
The influence of defensive habits, I believe, is underemphasized in Ayn Rand’s writings, though she does call these types of failures to focus and think errors in knowledge, as opposed to willful evasions.**
 
Technically, this is true. The person with psychological problems does have free will and did in his or her younger years when initially creating the false premises, though the formation of many of these premises occur by emotional generalization and chance.
 
Many false premises become repressed and shaped into habits manifested as symptoms that cloud our perception of reality. Such a person often does not know how to correct the errors. And with the present influential view of determinism by genes and environment, many conclude, “That’s me and I can’t do anything about it.” However, free will as a controllable behavior means we can seek help, professional or personal, or continue to live our lives despite the obstacles. Dealing with our psychological problems is more difficult, especially in today’s culture, than many realize.
 
Alcoholics who want to stay sober, for example, must every day confront strong obsessive urges for a drink. Clouded thinking is often the result. The same is true of people with other psychological problems and their neurotic symptoms.
 
Let me conclude with this quotation from contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler (432) who understands the relationship between psychological problems and free will:

Psychoanalytic therapists believe expanding our understanding of the meanings and causes of our behavior creates freedom, choice, and a freer will [my italics]. People can change, people do change, and psychoanalytic therapy helps people change, sometimes in profound ways. Every legitimate psychotherapist, deep down, believes in the human capacity to grow, change, and experience a greater sense of freedom and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable hardships. If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.

 
* I first used this example in Independent Judgment and Introspection (94).
 
** Rand seems to view our subconscious minds as equivalent to Sigmund Freud’s preconscious, the store of unrepressed knowledge that we are not now aware of but can recall at a moment’s notice. She does not make allowance for motivation by repressed premises and therefore is quick to condemn people as dishonest and immoral. Using her terms, though, non-self-defensive shooting of someone, or cheating, is clear evasion of what is right or moral for decent life. The criminal personality, as Stanton Samenow has well demonstrated, lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden.

The Components of Our Psychology

This month’s post is an excerpt from my 2019 book Independent Judgment and Introspection, pp. 88–99. Light edits and the omission of some paragraphs and all footnotes have been made.
 
 
Core Evaluations. Core evaluations are fundamental subconscious conclusions (evaluations) formed in childhood about ourselves, other people, and the world in general (reality). They are held as self-evident truths and operate as automatized habits to influence our future development and present actions. Self-esteem is formed as a cluster of core evaluations, based on our mental choices and physical actions over time, plus other less fundamental, mid-level evaluations. Specifically, self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and efficacy. Sense of life is the emotional sum and expression of our core evaluations and self-esteem.
 
Core evaluations are “few in number—probably less than ten,” says [psychologist Edith] Packer (pp. 4–5), formed early in life usually by emotional generalization, not conscious choice. Core evaluations are then held subconsciously to influence our future. And all of us are capable of holding, and often do hold, contradictory core evaluations, correct and rational ones along with those that are mistaken. “Mistaken core evaluations,” continues Packer, “are at the root of all defense mechanisms and most out-of-context emotions. They are at the base of all neurosis.” Core evaluations are the “autopilots” of our lives, habits and standing orders for good or ill, that guide the way we process new experiences, make choices, and act.
 
Emotional generalization, to further elaborate the process, begins with reactions to specific events, say, a father yelling at and calling his son a klutz (or worse) for spilling a glass of milk. The child may feel fear and anxiety for having done something wrong and probably hurt at the way his father reacted to the objectively harmless event. Similar events repeated over time, may lead the child (the child’s subconscious integrating actions) to generalize the fear and hurt to other people, such as teachers, and in adulthood, to all other people he comes in contact with. The integrating actions, unexamined by the young child, see similarities between father, teachers, and others who yell. A core evaluation becomes established in the subconscious and automatized as, perhaps, “I can’t do anything right. I must be careful around other people.”
 
It is important to emphasize and to clarify that this is not environmental determinism. The child could have reacted differently to the spilled milk and name-calling father. And some children do react differently in such situations, by saying to themselves, for example, “What’s the big deal? I didn’t do it on purpose. Father is being ridiculous!” Better teaching—of the parents, teachers, and other adults who yell at children and call them names when they make mistakes—would go a long way in countering the development of this and other similarly negative core evaluations. The adult needs to help the child process the event, not make the situation and the child’s psychology worse. Haim Ginott’s advice (chap. 2*), paraphrased, is appropriate here: “Oh, the milk spilled. Here’s a sponge. Let’s clean it up and get you another glass.” 
 
The ease with which children can draw mistaken conclusions indicates how important it is for their parents and other adults to be there for them, to support them, by finding out what is going on in their minds. In particular, they need to help children put words to their emotions by identifying the thoughts and evaluations that stand behind the feelings. This requires trust and intimacy. Unfortunately, says Packer (pp. 10, 12), “most children do not share many of their important thoughts and emotions with their parents,” or other adults. Core evaluations, both good and bad, build up brick by brick as “hundreds and hundreds” of concrete experiences.
 
The significance of core evaluations is that our subconscious applies them in the present to every new concrete experience remotely similar to the ones that gave rise to the core evaluation in the first place, “without our permission in the present,” to quote Packer’s choice words (p. 7).
 
Self-Esteem. Self-esteem is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.
 
The worthiness component of self-esteem is our certainty that we are valuable to ourselves, that we are our own highest value. Self-worth and self-respect are synonyms. This makes worthiness fundamentally egoistic; demands for self-sacrifice undercut it. If we value ourselves highly, we can easily value ourselves in addition as capable of being valued, that is, loved, by others. The source of this self-worth initially comes from the infant’s mother, then also from the father and other significant adults in the child’s surroundings. Holding and touching, plus verbal expressions of love, interact with the infant’s self-esteem to provide the warmth and security that young, as well as older, children need.
 
This means that around age two—the “terrible twos”—when children begin to assert themselves (sometimes opposing adults, sometimes just asserting their developing self-confidence), verbal abuse, such as yelling, name-calling, and irrational commands like “don’t be selfish,” plus physical abuse, including spanking by hand, are often experienced by the child as humiliating, or even threatening. These traditional techniques of child-rearing are the primary early influences that lead children to develop negative core evaluations, especially self-doubt about themselves, but also fear of others, and confusion or even negative conclusions about the world in which they live. Today’s permissive directionless parenting is just as bad, if not worse, because of the psychological chaos it creates.
 
The efficacy component of self-esteem is cognitive competence, the certainty that we can and do perform the actions necessary to use our minds properly, to identify rational values and act to acquire them. “Actions necessary to use our minds properly” means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts. This commitment requires us to monitor the contents and functioning of our conscious and subconscious minds. It means introspection to identify the nature, meaning, and cause of our emotions, which ultimately means to identify and correct any mistaken core and mid-level evaluations. Introspection must continue throughout our lives.
 
The two components of self-esteem influence and reinforce each other, so a high self-worth encourages and supports strong competency, and vice versa. Alternatively, low self-worth undercuts our competencies, and vice versa. High self-esteem is an accomplishment that has to be earned over many years and sustained with persistent monitoring. It is not experienced as a brag or boast, for example, as Packer puts it (p. 230), “Boy, I’m a great, worthy [and competent] person.” That is not self-esteem. “Rather, self-esteem is experienced as a total emotional state” that gives us “a certain calm and a sense of control—as if the most important issues about [ourselves are] settled.” Self-esteem is a quiet confidence. Its emotional expression is pride.
 
If put into words, a healthy self-esteem would say something to the effect, “I am confident that I am valuable to myself and others, deserving to be loved—by myself and others—as the honest and independent person I am. I am also competent to use my mind in a correct, rational way to make me happy in life.”  In Packer’s words (p. 230), self-esteem says, “I am basically fit for life. I do not have to doubt that fact.” Doubting oneself, or self-doubt, is expressed as the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety then is what generates our need for defensive maneuvers to defend against the unpleasant feeling.
 
Sense of Life. Core evaluations and self-esteem determine who we are as individuals. Sense of life expresses our identity as an emotional sum, a composite set of emotions that outwardly expresses our outlook on life. As Ayn Rand says (pp. 25-26), it is a “pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics.” Metaphysics studies the fundamental nature of reality and our place in it, so the “pre-conceptual” part of our sense of life is our core evaluations from childhood formed through emotional generalizations that express who we are and what we think about other people and the world in which we live. Sense of life, according to Rand, “becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all [our] other emotions and underlies all [our] experiences” (italics Rand's).
 
Sense of life is what an artist projects in a work of art and what patrons of the arts respond to. If it could be put into words, a sense of life would say, from the artist’s perspective, “this is life as I see it,” and from the patron’s viewpoint, “this is how I do or do not see life.” Sense of life attracts and repels, so sense of life is what one falls in love with, or does not fall in love with. Sometimes, in experiencing an instant like or dislike of someone we meet, it is our sense of life meshing or clashing with the other person’s sense of life.
 
Sense of life, however, it must be emphasized, is a composite emotion and emotions are not infallible. Getting to know another person, whether as a friend or romantic partner, requires time and patience to explore and learn all of the other person’s values, ranging from the philosophical and abstract to the everyday and concrete. Judging another person is even more difficult. Judging whether another person is honest and independent requires close interaction before a reliable conclusion can be drawn. Sense of life only gives clues, both to one’s own subconscious and to that of others.
 
 
* I seem to have inadvertently changed Ginott’s example from “juice” to “milk.”

The Difference between Emotion and Attitude

For many decades social psychologists (1; 2, chap. 1) have viewed attitudes as the central concept that explains motivation. Where do emotions fit in?
 
The two are similar, yet different.
 
Emotions are automatic, psychosomatic responses to evaluations about objects, persons, or events that we judge, based on past knowledge and values, to be beneficial or harmful (Independent Judgment, p. 63).
 
“The firing of a gun can hurt me,” I might be thinking, “and the bang outside sounded like a gun. That makes me afraid and my heart race and my breath shorten.”
 
Four components to this experience are the fact judgment, “the bang was a gun”; the evaluative judgment, “the gun can hurt me”; the emotion, “I am afraid and need to hide”; and the physiological reactions of a racing heart and shortened breathing. Note that the emotion of fear generated a tendency, need, or urge to act and that the fact and value judgments each can be either true or false; the bang may in fact have been the backfire of an automobile.
 
Although the judgments about guns were learned earlier in our lives, they are not something we even think about on this occasion. The emotional reaction happens in a split second. The source and cause of this experience is subconscious.
 
Attitudes are settled, enduring composites of beliefs, evaluations, and action tendencies about some object, person, or event. Beliefs are fact judgments about what we believe to be true. Evaluations are positive or negative judgments about what we think is beneficial or harmful. And the action tendency is what it sounds like: a tendency, need, or urge to act.
 
Note that both emotions and attitudes are responses to something or someone and that we can feel emotions and hold attitudes about all kinds of things and people, including ourselves.*
 
Note also that emotions are integral parts of our attitudes—the beginning moment, actually, of what may become a new or developing attitude—that express our positive and negative reactions to what we have the attitude about.
 
In years past, to continue the above example, we may have formed an attitude toward guns through experiences of shooting them or from reading what many have said about them.
 
Both emotions and attitudes are in our minds and are not behavior, but they do explain and motivate behavior. We must choose to act on the felt tendency, need, or urge before action can take place.
 
Both concepts are what Ayn Rand would call (chap. 4) concepts of consciousness, not concepts of the external, material world, as the concept “gun” is.
 
Concepts of consciousness, such as thought, reminiscence, imagination—as well as emotion and attitude—are identified by the actions of consciousness, the contrasting psychological processes, that distinguish one from the other.
 
Thought, using Rand’s words (pp. 32), is a “purposefully directed process of cognition” and emotion is “an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent.” Reminiscence (my words) is the power to preserve and recall a thought, emotion, or experience and imagination is the ability to create and project in our minds how something or someone might be different.
 
The mental process of forming an attitude is the accumulation over time of emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts about something or someone such that the experiences and beliefs become established and lasting, often in conscious awareness.
 
We have attitudes but experience emotions is a familiar way of differentiating the two mental processes.
 
My attitude toward guns is that I love them, especially since I had positive experiences of shooting them as a kid. I have that favorable attitude toward guns and have held it for a long time. I am quite aware of the attitude.
 
The bang outside my house, however, might confuse or scare me, depending on how I evaluate it in the present. I know that cars can backfire, that firecrackers can make bangs like guns, and that I do not like criminals staging shootouts in my neighborhood. All of this might go through my mind in the split second that the bang has occurred.
 
The difference between emotion and attitude is that the emotion has a trigger, time-bound, that we perceive and react to immediately. The attitude is a lingeringly favorable or unfavorable expression, built up over time, and is something that we can even have a leisurely discussion about, such as should we be pro-gun or anti-gun?
 
The emotion calls for and sometimes produces action without our stopping to think about it. The attitude does not necessarily call for action, though it may.
 
Ayn Rand’s point about concepts of consciousness is that they are formed the same way concepts of the existential world are formed, except that we focus on the mental or psychological actions that distinguish one process from another.
 
After observing (i.e., introspecting) many instances of similar mental processes, we isolate the one we are interested in and omit its content and intensity to arrive at its essential distinguishing characteristic.
 
Emotions are instant reactions, attitudes are lasting, though neither is changeless. Both contain a wide variety of content and can be either extremely intense or not so intense.
 
Both can and do explain and motivate behavior.
 
Social psychologists are right that attitudes are central motivators but they could spend more time examining emotions as a crucial component and source of our attitudes.
 
 
* “Feeling” often refers to our experiences of physical pleasure and pain (or even of warm or smooth), whereas “emotion” refers to our experiences of psychological joy or suffering. Many times, however, the words are used as synonyms, as I often use them, or as in this case as a verb, “to feel an emotion.”

Two Types of Knowledge: General and Personal

General knowledge, that is, book reading, school learning, and the ability to cite or quote sources at will, does not by itself make us interesting or even a really knowledgeable person.
 
Personal knowledge does, though it often is not even considered knowledge.
 
Our emotions evoked by general knowledge and more particularly our personal reactions to, and experiences with, all aspects of our lives give us personal knowledge that no else possesses.
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection, I make passing reference to these two types of knowledge. I also discuss Edith Packer’s distinction (pp. 226-38) between universal and personal evaluations when identifying emotions. Personal evaluations constitute a significant part of our personal knowledge.
 
Consider two quotations from my book that summarize general and personal knowledge:

To survive and flourish, humans require general knowledge, or education, in the form of concepts and principles to guide their choices and actions. Each individual, in addition, requires specific knowledge, or a set of concepts and principles unique to his or her experience, to direct action to the achievement of health and happiness (p. 54).
 
Systematic bodies of concepts and principles constitute our sciences; specific bodies of concepts and principles, unique to our own experiences, constitute our personal knowledge (p. 73).

General knowledge comes largely from others; it is essentially our education broadly construed, not just what we learn in school. Personal knowledge, which includes the general, is what we have experienced over the years and makes us who we are as individuals.
 
Personal knowledge comes first. It is what we begin acquiring early in life, and continue to acquire throughout. It starts developing before we can speak, perhaps even in the womb, in reaction to pleasureful and painful experiences. The pleasure-pain aspects of these experiences provide the foundation of our emotions, and the emotions we associate with concrete experiences in childhood and youth influence how healthy and happy we will be as adults.
 
Personal knowledge, as a result, might also be called experiential knowledge, the acquisition of knowledge based on the objects, persons, events, and even ideas we come in contact with, or rather, experience firsthand.
 
When we learn to talk, we form concepts and elementary, childlike principles, such as “all animals that walk on two legs are human beings,” which is to say at this point we are beginning to form universals that constitute the basis from which we go on to acquire general knowledge. The principles are called “childlike” because they may not agree with what a more knowledgeable adult might say.
 
General knowledge is what we learn from older people, initially our parents, siblings, and others around us. More importantly, it comes from teachers and books.
 
General knowledge is our education and does not stop, one would hope, after receiving high school or college diplomas. It is the systematic bodies of concepts and principles that constitute our sciences, both basic and applied, and we learn and remember the portions of each that are relevant to our lives.
 
General knowledge becomes part of our personal knowledge when it is individualized to our interests and goals.
 
Personal knowledge indicates who we are as unique, individual human beings and forms the basis of our personalities, our distinctive ways of thinking and acting. Much of our personal knowledge is specific to concrete objects, persons, and events, such as a ball bouncing and rolling (seen as a young child), a recent performance of a Brahms symphony, or the practical competence of changing a tire on the family car.
 
Personal knowledge is not universal in the way general knowledge is, though it can become general if, say, we continually increase our general knowledge enabling us to write a book about Brahms symphonies or the repair of certain automobiles. Most of what we do with our personal knowledge is apply the general we have learned previously (1, 2).
 
Personal knowledge is a collection of experiences—with parents and other relatives; with school subjects, teachers, and classmates; of the time we learned how to ride a bicycle; of happy and sad times at summer camp; and, as an adult, of work, family, and leisure. Throughout life.
 
The application of knowledge, whether general or personal, is not an emotion-free process.
 
All knowledge contains evaluations, universal and personal, and those evaluations are what produce our emotions.
 
Every emotion, as Edith Packer has written (1, pp. 226-38; 2, 151-53), expresses a universal evaluation that is present in all instances of that one emotion. For example, quoting Packer,  joy says “I have achieved one of my most important values” and anger says “an injustice has been done to me.”
 
Behind every emotion and its universal evaluation, we have our own personal experience of the emotion that draws a correct or incorrect conclusion about the experience. For joy: “I got into my first choice of school and feel like dancing around the room!” For anger: “The teacher said I’m no good at math—I’m never going to like or trust teachers.”
 
It is these inner conversations or voice, as Packer describes the personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge.
 
The quantity of general knowledge that we each hold obviously varies from person to person, as does its quality, that is, its degree of truth or falsity. But the variation in personal knowledge is even more diverse, as we all come from different backgrounds, family cultures—and experiences. Which is to say, we’ve all felt diverse emotions throughout our lives, which essentially is what gives us unique personalities.
 
Personal knowledge is what makes us and other people interesting—happy or sad, funny or obnoxious, caring or mean.
 
Unfortunately, personal evaluations associated with the many emotions we have had in our lives are precisely what most of us are not aware of and have not been taught to identify. Nor have we been taught how to change mistaken evaluations.
 
General knowledge by itself can be thought of as a sort of sterile academic content in our brains. Personal knowledge makes us engaging—or repugnant.
 
Personal knowledge is what gives meaning to the expression “variety is the spice of life.”

The Two Senses of Self-Esteem and Pride—Moral and Psychological

Self-esteem and pride, respectively, are a moral value and virtue. Both rest on the more fundamental attributes of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
The two kinds, moral and psychological, interact to produce the degree of self-respect or self-worth that we hold about ourselves.*
 
Self-esteem in the moral sense means holding one’s self as one’s own highest value, which means never sacrificing to others or others to oneself. The virtue of pride is the action of living up to one’s own moral values, which includes being true even to one’s non-moral, rational values, living for the sake of our own happiness.**
 
Moral values are what we seek to acquire and maintain to support our lives as a being that possesses the capacity to reason. Virtues are the acts or practice of acquiring and maintaining those values.
 
Ayn Rand describes pride as “moral ambitiousness,” always doing what one judges to be right. This means holding, and always acting on, the more fundamental moral values (and corresponding virtues) of reason, independence, honesty, integrity, courage, justice, and productiveness.
 
For this reason, Aristotle calls pride the “crown of the virtues”—the climax or point of culmination, so to speak, of morality.
 
Self-esteem and pride are required to uphold and practice a rational egoism that promotes and exhibits one’s self-interest and joy in life—without harming oneself or others.
 
However, neither self-esteem nor pride in the moral sense can be achieved or maintained without a store of psychological self-esteem and pride.
 
As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 95-96), self-esteem in the psychological sense:

is the degree of confidence or certainty we have in ourselves as a valuable person and as someone competent to correctly and rationally choose values and actions to make us happy in life. The two interacting and reinforcing components of self-esteem are worthiness and efficacy. Both are mental, that is, psychological, not existential or physical as in our high or low competence in changing a tire, though existential competencies derive from and are influenced by the mental ones.

Psychological self-esteem is our conviction of worthiness and mental competence to live life to the fullest. Pride in the psychological sense is an emotion, the emotional consequence and expression of self-esteem.
 
Pretending to or hoping to be worthy and competent, along with protestations that “I am a proud person” or “boy, I’m great,” are not genuine. They are the defensive result of psychological problems and conflicts, making the moral counterparts more difficult to achieve and practice.
 
Genuine self-esteem and pride produce a “quiet confidence,” as psychologist Edith Packer (p. 230) says, and a feeling that “I am fit for life.”
 
The development of psychological self-esteem begins in childhood and requires, for the worthiness component, an unconditional love from parents and other adults around the child. For cognitive competency, the child needs to be taught what is necessary to use his or her mind properly, which in particular means an unconditional commitment to reason and facts, along with methods of identifying the nature and causes of his or her emotions.
 
A child and, later, adult who has been given strong doses of love in childhood will conclude “I am loved and am capable of being loved by others because I am confident in and reliant on myself.” The child who feels competent concludes “I can and do use my mind well to guide me throughout life.”
 
As psychologist Nathaniel Branden (p. 130) points out, self-esteem and pride in both senses of the words often begin at the same time early in life—crawling, walking, and banging a spoon on the table, for example, can produce an emotion of the efficacy of psychological self-esteem combined with the virtue of moral pride.
 
Unfortunately, most of us were not taught much of anything about our psychologies. Thus, the psychological problems we suffer in childhood arise from errors in thinking about ourselves, other people, and the world in general—Edith Packer’s mistaken core evaluations (chap. 1). These errors not only undercut developing self-esteem in the psychological sense, but they also confound our understanding and practice of the moral concepts.
 
A weak worthiness or confidence component of self-esteem—“I’m no good and the world is out to get me”—for example, may affect the adult’s practice of integrity and courage. A weak mental competence—"I’m so stupid I can’t do anything right”—may affect the adult’s independence, sense of justice, and pursuit of a productive career.
 
Mistakes in morality due to the influence of our psychologies, it must be emphasized, do not necessarily deserve condemnation, as long as our fears and failures do not cause harm to others. This is called an error in knowledge, not a breach of morality.
 
The difference in briefest essence of the two meanings of self-esteem and pride are as follows. In the moral sense: I am good (my own highest value) and I do good (always doing what I know to be right). In the psychological sense: I have confidence in myself as good and worthy and can think and do things well to make me happy, with the resulting pleasure in accomplishment.***
 
The worthiness component of psychological self-esteem gives us confidence essentially to do whatever we choose to do and is a direct connection to moral self-esteem. The pleasure of psychological pride feeds into the desire for “moral ambitiousness.”
 
 
* It is unfortunate and sometimes confusing, though not uncommon, that the English language uses the same word for essentially different referents. That the moral and psychological interact with each other only makes clarification of the present terms more challenging. A brief discussion of the moral and psychological meanings of self-esteem and pride can be found in Branden (pp. 298-99).
 
** Non-moral, rational values are optional in the sense that they do not have to be accepted and practiced by everyone in order to have a good character. They might be universal for our physical well-being, such as the generic value of food, but if we specify vanilla ice cream, then that value is clearly not one that everyone has to accept. This optional nature of non-moral values can also apply to choice of career, romantic partner, or the means of building a bridge, though in some cases universal moral values may be relevant. See my discussion here.
 
*** Criminal personalities, on the other hand, according to Stanton Samenow (chap. 3), think of themselves as both worthless (“I am a zero, a nothing”) and evil, but “If I thought of myself as evil,” said one offender, “I couldn’t live.” Criminals, thus, are masters at rationalization to prevent themselves from being aware of their inner selves.