Against Self-Worth
Self-worth, or its many synonyms (self-esteem etc.), can safely be said to be one of the keywords disseminated by the discourse of the therapy-media complex. Just today I was confronted with an article published with the German moderate conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which stressed the role of parenting in developing self-worth in children. To what end is a question rarely asked these days, as unquestioned this value has become, but the answer is still given in the text: in order to foster resilience, another, if possibly ideologically and systematically subordinate value.
To any critical observer, this constant messaging should raise the question which lack self-worth is the answer and remedy to. Apparently, the objective worth - quite literally in terms of income, and dependent on that, the respect individuals can command in a society of competition - must be so far from satisfactory for so many aspiring bourgeois subjects that even a conservative news outlet can change its tone to a more sensitive and empathetic tone every now and then.
An even merely cursory glance on correlations that anybody with access to the internet can do for themselves within five minutes (and the para-academic documentation of which here is not the place for) shows that self-worth and its functional analogues became increasingly highly valued discursive currency roughly at the same time the productivity-pay gap started widening, the Gini-coefficient started rising etc. - let’s just say sometime in the late 70s, when something now commonly referred to as neoliberalism started to remind everybody, despite claims to the contrary, that we live in a society, and that this society is capitalist.
To return to the above: the imperative of feeling good about themselves for the majority of the subjects of this mode of production appears to be indirectly proportionate to the material reasons they really have to feel good about themselves.
This begs the question why there seems to be such a huge demand for precisely this kind of messaging, unless you subscribe to some vulgar manipulation theories.
The answer is quite simple, and everybody has encountered it: the mostly miserable state of so many people of a certain age, professional and academic achievement, or indeed simply work find themselves in does not lead them to reject the rules of the game, but rather leads them down a path of an interiority of oh-so-many untapped potentials: self-worth. Potentials for what? Surplus-value production. Alas, the capitalists apparently know better.
But it’s nothing personal, you can still feel good about yourself - and be quiet and resilient.