Why Do I Care What Others Think? A Philosophical View of Self-Esteem

We waste much of our lives burying ourselves to conform to what others expect us to be. Certainly, some situations demand conformity to a certain code of conduct, such as professional engagements, crisis management situations, etc. But often self-inhibition becomes our habitual state in most, if not all, of our social interactions. In extreme cases, the fear of how others may perceive us becomes so internalized that we don’t allow ourselves to be even when we are alone. Why can the mere thoughts of another person have such a powerful hold on our lives?

In Meditations, Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius pondered “how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value of his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others”. Certainly, from an evolutionary perspective, we are social animals and our need for approval springs from our desire to belong to our communities. Group interdependency was essential to our survival, without which we could not access necessary resources, mates, and protection. While social integration is still crucial for our well-being as a species, it is no longer a matter of life or death. Yet, many among us still react to social disapproval as a life-threatening experience, driving us to travel to great, often self-destructive, lengths to fit in.

While fitting in satisfies our inherited evolutionary impulses, it is not the equivalent of healthy social integration. Professor Bréne Brown argued that fitting in is the opposite of belonging: “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted” whereas “belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who are” (Brown, 2010). Fitting in involves inauthenticity and conformity, whereas belonging requires authenticity and acceptance. Let’s take a closer look at how conformity works. 

What Is the Omnipresent Eye of Society?

Many thinkers have analyzed the intricate mechanisms of social conformity. Some view it in a positive light, while others in a negative one, but what most of their theories have in common is that the borders of conformity don’t end in the sphere of socialization but extend as an internalized voice of social norms and expectations. While philosophers such as Adam Smith contended that this results in greater social harmony and moral integrity, others tended to disagree. 

Although Smith is best known for his contributions to economics in The Wealth of Nations, he considered his magnum opus to be The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759. In this seminal work, he attempted to demystify moral conscience.  He argued that the accumulation of our knowledge of other people’s opinions of praise-worthy and blame-worthy traits acts as a mirror by which we come to evaluate and regulate ourselves. The impartial spectator is an imagined third party through which we evaluate and regulate our behavior objectively, through the eyes of an imaginary ‘other’.  While Smith argued that this inner judge is empathetic, allowing individuals to develop balanced and neutral assessments of their behaviors, most of us experience a corollary inner spectator best known in pop psychology as ‘the inner critic’.

How trustful can we be of the judgments, expectations, attitudes, and beliefs we absorb and internalize since our youth from others that constitute our inner judge? Philosophers such as Michel Foucault argued that social norms and even what society holds as true knowledge statements are constructed within the context of existing power relations. A society with power discrepancy between men and women will produce sexist norms, expectations, and beliefs that diffuse and reproduce existing power relations between both sexes. Aside from the prevalent skepticism regarding the so-called impartiality of our socially-constructed ‘inner judge’, why do we choose to see ourselves from the eyes of the ‘other’ rather than our own?  

The simple answer is that we do not truly accept ourselves, rather, we outsource that acceptance from external sources. Here is a situation where one’s self-definition and self-worth are entirely dependent on the perceptions of others. Our eyes are replaced, as it were, by the eyes of the ‘other’ through which we see, judge, and censor ourselves. When we place barriers to the stream of our self-expression, we lose ourselves in inauthenticity, constantly striving towards an unattainable ideal self, shaped by societal expectations. 

Living in a state of inauthenticity is to be in limbo, neither allowing oneself to be nor being able to be someone else. The difference between the real self and the ideal self is between the ‘I am’ and the ‘I should’, the latter being the product of our social conditioning. Paradoxically, as prominent psychologist Carl Roger noted, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change” (Roger, 1961).

According to Rogers, authenticity is lost once there is incongruence between who one is and who one is expected to be. In early childhood, we experience a confrontation between our spontaneous expressions of self and society through the responses of our primary caregivers. We learn that some expressions are rewarded and others punished, what Rogers called conditioned positive regard. In a time when we are completely dependent on our caregivers, catering to the conditions of their acceptance becomes a matter of survival, and eventually, a matter of self-worth.  A child raised in this manner will grow unable to recognize their inherent worth, unable to accept themselves unless they meet the ‘conditions of worth’.

According to Roger, the path of redeeming our authenticity lies in the practice of unconditioned positive regard. Once we accept ourselves without the condition that we must be someone other than ourselves to be loved, we can start to reclaim our need for external validation, which is in essence a misdirected need for internal validation. When this happens, “the individual increasingly comes to feel that the locus of self-evaluation lies within himself – less and less does he look to others for approval or disapproval; for standards to live by; for decisions and choices” (Roger, 1961). As many philosophers have noted, freedom lies in reclaiming authenticity, as your ability to be who you truly are is the ability to make your own choice.