Self-esteem is looking at yourself as a person and liking what you see.
Self-esteem is also loving yourself the proper way which demands that you shed yourself of any altruistic delusions – altruism is the attempt to put other people first. To have self-esteem you need to see yourself as just as good as anybody else. You have to like your faults and not take yourself too seriously and you have to keep trying to improve yourself. To do this you must believe that you should love yourself.
Self-esteem is the supreme need in you. It is the ruling one. It is the basic one and any other feeling or need you have is just a manifestation of it. The view that we need shelter, warmth and food more is totally wrong because you can turn your back on these things as some do if you hate yourself so you have to love yourself to treat yourself to them.
You can love yourself even when you do not like yourself and you must learn to like yourself for loving yourself so that the more you love yourself the more you will like about yourself. You love yourself when you get yourself started on the road to liking yourself better. That is loving yourself because you feel you want to help yourself love yourself more. All self-help starts with this unconditional love. When this love is developed enough it will prevent guilt or at least a lot of guilt simply because it makes you work and do good to yourself and others to shut your conscience up. You can feel guilty about feeling guilty so don’t let yourself do that to yourself.
Seeing yourself as better than other people is not self-esteem for if you genuinely esteemed yourself that much you would behave in a haughty way towards others and your esteem would do you little good and would prove that you are a failure which will hasten its dying breath. Being stuck-up is not even necessary which is a sufficient reason for condemning it. It leads to disappointment. If you truly believe that you are really better than other people you think you should do nothing for them. It is a dangerous belief. Everybody has faults and things they excel at but nobody is better than anybody else as a person.
Self-esteem is being happy with how happy you are and simply letting new happiness come to you. It is because you see yourself as good that you do good. You do not do good to feel good or to earn your own approval of yourself or that of other people but to remind yourself that you are good. That is how good works are necessary for self-esteem. To help others for the sake of making yourself feel good any other way is pathological for it enslaves you. You don’t need to do that. Good works done to prove you are good or to earn a good self-image are unnecessary and therefore dangerous. What you have to do is to do good works to get rid of your false image, your bad perception, of yourself. Never do good to be happy but because you feel happy – even if it is just a bit - because if you do good to be happy you will make yourself unhappy if you fail to do good. There is always some happiness in you so use that.
If you really esteem yourself you will present yourself to others as decent and if they do not see that it is their loss. But they always see it even if they will not admit it. If they are jealous or envious that shows they see it on some level.
Could strong self-esteem lead me to do terrible things and still feel good about myself? Doing evil is disrespecting and perverting your own powers and it is beneath your dignity as a human being so the self-esteem behind it is not true self-esteem. Anything can be counterfeited and mistaken for the real thing.
What about secret evildoing that you will certainly get away with? Is it encouraged by self-esteem? You cannot do secret evil because that is willing evil to exist and that evil could afflict you so you are willing what may harm and what certainly has harmed you, into existence. You could do good instead of it so it is always wrong. We have reason so that we might do only what is reasonable. You have no reason to do secret evil but only an excuse. Excuses are incompatible with self-love. It is taking advantage of the fact that not all evil can be exposed and that is evil.
