I was looking at my older links and found this wonderful post about self esteem, and holding frame on playersjourney.net, everything that is written is to his credit. The post is long and I will continue in the comments. Have you seen your lower self esteem get a boost? How did you deal with it? You can share your ways too.

====================================================================================

First of all, let me say this: I’m not a scientist, nor do I pretend to be. These are just observations I’ve had mixed with some shit I’ve read. So if you want to win self-righteous points by pointing out scientific flaws, go fuck yourself.

I’ve always been a pretty confident, upbeat person so I never understood why some people had problems with self-esteem. I would always offer banal, unhelpful advice like “fake it till you make it man!” or “just think you’re awesome.” However, I’ve recently learned that low self-esteem is a mental disease that begins with strong emotions elicited by natural biological reactions, stemming from evolution. Let me explain.

Ranking Human beings, like a lot of other apes, are naturally hierarchical creatures – so much so, that we rank each other. In a human “tribe,” each person has a rank – there is a #1, a #2, a #3, etc… This ranking system is biologically wired into our emotions by evolution, whether we like it or not. Scientists studying bonobos (one of our closest ape cousins) came up with a device that could mimic a bonobo voice. They realized that if they emitted a sound equivalent to the #7 ranked bonobo sounding disrespectful to the #6 ranked bonobo, not only would the #6 bonobo get angry and upset, EVERYBODY IN THE TRIBE would get angry and upset. In other words, bonobos (and probably humans) are wired to organize ourselves into a very specific hierarchy and then have everybody respect that hierarchy. This makes sense – if you look at most human societies, companies, and social groups, they are clearly organized into hierarchies, with an alpha male at the top, a #2 beneath him, etc… And the reason these hierarchies work is that everybody generally accepts the order.

But what does it mean to be “ranked” higher? It works like this: the #1 ape gets to do whatever the fuck he wants. He fucks whoever he wants, eats whatever he wants, and goes wherever he wants. Scientists have observed chimps moving out of the way when the #1 ape walks by. Chimps even bow to the alpha male. Naturally, the #1 ape (the alpha male) gets to be #1 because he is the strongest and most powerful ape in the group. Then, the #2 ape also gets to do whatever HE wants, subject to deferring to #1. And so on. As you go down the ranks, the apes get less freedom to do what they want because they have more people they have to take orders from. From an evolutionary perspective, this arrangement makes sense: the tribe is more likely to survive and be healthy if there was a “leader” who gave orders to his underlings, rather than if every ape just did whatever they wanted to. This is why many companies are organized hierarchically. This arrangement has the added advantage of ensuring that the strongest and healthiest apes eat the most and reproduce.

The #1 ape doesn’t really care about the other apes because he is stronger than them and can do whatever he wants. But the cohesion of the tribe depends on the lower ranked apes obeying the higher ranked apes so the lower-ranked apes evolved to form a deep emotional attachment to higher ranked apes and constantly obsess over how to please them. What does the alpha male want? What is he thinking? Am I upsetting him? This makes sense too – if the lower ranked apes didn’t give a fuck about the alpha male, they would try to eat the same banana the alpha male was trying to eat and the alpha male would knock them the fuck out. Lower-ranked apes are also wired to bow and act submissive around higher-ranked apes. For this reason, the lower-ranked apes are full of stress and anxiety because they don’t want to fuck up and piss off the higher-ranked ape. In fact, scientists have theorized that social anxiety comes about because lower-ranked individuals don’t want to talk to or even be around higher-ranked individuals out of fear they will make them upset and get their ass beat.

The fact that the lower apes obsess about the higher apes and the higher apes don’t give a fuck about the lower ranked apes has caused a lot of stress and misery in human affairs. It is the reason slavery, poverty, inequality and abuse exist. Religion had to force higher-ranked people to care about lower-ranked people because we don’t naturally have those emotions. Sure, we feel a mild bit of compassion, like when you see a homeless guy, but those emotions are not strong enough to make you actually treat poor people well. This is why rich white people lose their minds if a rich white girl goes missing, but don’t care if the same thing happens to a poor black girl.

The worst part of the not caring thing is that in relationships one party is “inferior” and obsesses over the other party, while the “superior” party feels nothing. That’s why some people are shocked when they get dumped – they had intense feelings for their partner, and they don’t understand how their partner could feel NOTHING for them and walk away with the relationship like nothing happened.

Not only do human beings respect the hierarchy, we feel good when we are in what we perceive to be our rank. If you put a person at a rank they don’t feel they belong in, they feel anxiety (remember the bonobos freaking out). If you took a janitor and made him a CEO he would feel a ton of anxiety and would want to go back to being a janitor, even though he logically knows being a CEO is a better job. If you’ve ever had a depressed friend, you might have noticed that they insist they suck (i.e, they are ranked at the bottom of the tribe) even if they aren’t – they are purposely trying to put themselves at the bottom because that is where they emotionally feel like they fit. If it weren’t for people accepting (and liking!) their position, the hierarchy wouldn’t work.

But if we are born equal how are rankings established? I’m not exactly sure how, but I think it goes like this: we meet somebody that is in our peer group (aka the tribe). We size them up and try to determine how “powerful” they are. Powerful means different things in different contexts and communities, but it could mean rich, attractive, strong, etc… Then, depending on how they act (and how we act) and if we feel like they are more powerful than us, a powerful biological reaction occurs in our brain where we see ourselves as being “beneath” them and them as being ranked higher than us (or vice-versa). Sometimes, the word “powerful” doesn’t even make any sense – nobody is “powerful” in middle school, but there is always a “cool kid” that had a sidekick and then a bunch of losers that followed him around everywhere and did everything he told them to. Of course, this interaction and reaction only occurs with people we emotionally care about – we don’t rake ourselves against the guy at the bank or people in the highway, but we do rank ourselves against our friends, people at our graduation party, people we date, etc… The problem is that once we’ve spent enough time “beneath” somebody that emotion solidifies and we see ourselves as beneath them forever – no matter if they become homeless and we become a CEO.

Rejection anxiety If a person gets rejected from the tribe completely, they feel rejection anxiety. Because our biological processes think we are in the woods alone, we lose our appetite (to conserve food), can’t sleep (you shouldn’t sleep when you are in the woods alone and the tribe won’t protect you from predators), we feel terribly alone, and we constantly ruminate on what he did to get rejected, so we can fix it and so the tribe takes us back. Rejection anxiety is one of the worst feelings a human being can experience, and it make sense – evolution has designed us to not do anything that would get us rejected from the tribe, and for us to feel terrible if we do.

Now we can understand low self-esteem. A person gets low self-esteem when they enter into an emotional relationship with a person they see as “above” them and that person treats them like shit. The parties subconsciously “agree” that one person is beneath the other. Their body and mind undergo a biological process where they now believe themselves to be a low-ranking individual dependent on the higher-ranking person, even if logically they are not. In my life I am seen some incredibly attractive, smart, successful people with low self-esteem. It’s not a conscious “decision,” but a biological process that produces overwhelming feelings of inferiority that are hard to eradicate.

The low self-esteem person forms an emotional attachment to the higher-ranked person and subconsciously feels it is their duty to please them. Human beings do a thing called confabulation, which is where their brain justifies their emotions, so their thoughts rationalize their behavior. People stay in abusive relationships because they subconsciously feel low-ranking and confabulate reasons why they deserve the abuse. Their emotions and thoughts team up to create a toxic reality for them. They are afraid to leave because then they will lose their rank, or, worse, be rejected from the tribe altogether. And of course, the relationship offers them a lot of good feelings as well so they learn to ignore the abuse.

Continued in comments.

Edit - This took off. Thank you all for the responses. Wow! Thank you so much for the gold.