Productive Work

The drama of our life is the external reflection of our internal vision of ourselves. The higher the level of our self-esteem, the more likely it is that we will find a work and a relationship through which we can express ourselves in satisfying and enriching ways.

A person may exhibit a degree of particularized efficacy and yet profoundly lacking in the sense of fundamental efficacy essential to healthy self-esteem. For example, a man or woman may be skilled and confident on the job but terrified by any wider need for independent thinking in the moral, ethical, or intellectual sphere, fearing to step outside a familiar frame of reference established by the particular group to which he or she belongs. Thinking about the essential of life is left to others. Others determine the context in which this individual operates - the moral context, the value context, the intellectual context.

On the other hand, a person may posses a healthy self-esteem, a profound sense of fundamental efficacy, but, being highly specialized in his or her interests, may lack many of the practical skills that most people take for granted, such as how to drive an automobile, cook a meal, or perform some simple task of home repair. Rather than fearing such tasks, however, he or she normally feels confident of the ability to acquire the requisite skills should the need arise. A sense of fundamental efficacy imparts a confidence in the ability in principle to learn whatever is necessary.

It would be impossible, of course, to acquire or sustain a sense of fundamental efficacy without also acquiring some forms of particularized efficacy, in other word, without engaging in some form of productive work. We maintain our fundamental efficacy by continuing to expand our particularized efficacy; that is the meaning of growth as a way of life.

Every achievement is a value in itself, but every step upward also opens to us a wider range of action and achievement and creates the need for that actions and achievement. Survival demands continuing growth and creativeness. There is no final, permanent plateau.

If we do not discover the necessity and joy of using our productive work and creative powers, we have missed one of the highest rewards available to our species; we have deprived ourselves of one of the great, distinctively human experiences. Productive work is supremely human act; animals must adjust themselves to their physical environment; human beings adjust the physical environment to themselves.

By productive work I mean any purposeful activities involving mind and labor and serving the purposes of life, from digging a ditch, driving a tractor, designing a building, and operating a business to engaging in scientific research.

Many factors such as intelligence, energy level, and available opportunities influence the scope of a person’s productive ambition, but certainly one of the most powerful determining factors is the degree of self-esteem. On any level of intelligence or ability, one of the characteristics of high self-esteem is an eagerness for the new and the challenging, for that which will allow an individual to use his or her capacities to the fullest extent.

It takes a person who is already well centered within him- or herself and who understands that some of the forces operating are beyond personal control and that, strictly speaking, these do not have (or should not have) significant for self-esteem at all.

Whenever we are weighting whether or not a matter bears on our self-esteem (or should bear on our self-esteem), the question to ask is, Is this issue within my direct, volitional control? Or is it at least linked, by a direct line of causality, to matters within my volitional control?

If we are willing to take responsibility for that which is within our power, it frees us to see clearly that which is not, and to understand, therefore, the limits of our accountability. But if we too often fail to take such responsibility and feel vaguely guilty over our avoidance, the paradox is that in our confusion we often end up blaming ourselves for events beyond our control. Further, one of the most common forms of evading appropriate responsibility is to clutter up one’s thinking with notions of utterly inappropriate and absurd responsibility like the person who is unwilling to assume responsibility for his or her own existence but who professes to feel ‘responsible for the whole word.’

Our basic means of survival is our mind. To live, we must think, we must act, we must produce concrete values our life requires. This, fundamentally, is human mode of existence. Our life depends on achievement, not on destruction. Mindlessness, passivity, parasitism, or brutality are not and cannot be principles of survival; they are merely the policy of those who, not wishing to face the issue of survival, live off the thinking and achievements of others. The criminals who attempt to survive by violence specifically seek to escape life as his standard of value. He wants to reverse the nature of reality and to survive, not by producing, but by destroying.

To hold life as a standard value means a good deal more than survival for the next moment of time or what is sometimes called ‘mere physical survival.’ It means recognition of and respect for the life principle, the ongoing process by which life sustains itself and advances. Life, for a human being, is a constant process of thought, of motion, of purpose, of achievement; it is not the state of merely not being dead.

Many an individual, feeling he or she is not ‘enough,’ may be driven to more and more demanding levels of performance and accomplishment, in order to ‘prove’ him- or herself- and if the person has intelligence and energy, he or she may succeed in achieving a great deal. What this individual will not achieve, of course, is high self-esteem.

One of the commonest errors made by people of poor self-esteem about people of high self-esteem is the assumption that the latter always feel cheerful, confident, and secure, never feel anxious or demoralized, never know anguish or despair, always are certain about what they are doing. Not all anxiety is self-esteem anxiety, and not all despair pertains to doubt of personal worth. To posses healthy self-esteem is not to be immune to the vicissitudes of life or to the pain of struggle. One of the forms of psychological heroism is the willingness to tolerate anxiety and uncertainty in the pursuit of our values whether those values be work goals, the love of another human being, the raising of a family, or personal growth.

To stay with the arena of productive work, for example, an artist, a scientist, or an industrialist of high self-esteem may set extraordinarily difficult goals that may generate times of anxiety, doubt about choices made, uncertainty about the possibility of success, and periods of depression. This person is likely to feel, “If this, sometimes, is the price I have to pay for the attainment of my goals, I am willing to pay it” - an attitude that a person of lower self-esteem would not be likely to adopt.

The person of high self-esteem may even revel in the struggle, in spite of all the painful feelings that sometimes occur; people of high self-esteem tend to preserve a spiritual point that remains untouched, even by their own suffering.

To accept the process of struggle as part of life, to accept all of it, even the darkest moments of anguish - that is one of the most important attitudes that differentiates individuals with high self-esteem from individuals with low self-esteem. The wish to avoid fear and pain is not the motive that drives the life of highly evolved men and women. Rather it is the life-force within them thrusting toward its unique form of expression - the actualization of the self.

All of the values on which our life, well-being, and happiness depend require a process of thought and effort. A morality that holds life as the highest value also holds rationality as the highest virtue. Rationality is an attitude of responsibility toward that which exists, acceptance of the facts of reality.

Reflecting on commitment to self-responsibility, it fosters the growth of individualism but not of narcissism. It reminds us that other people do not exist to satisfy our needs and wants, they are not our servants, as we are not theirs. This view is entirely incompatible with the ethics of altruism. The essence of altruism is the concept of self-surrender and self-sacrifice. It is the self that altruism implicitly regards as evil, since selflessness is its moral ideal; it is an anti-self ethics.

When we come across human suffering, it is natural and appropriate to wish to offer help or relief. And, generally speaking, it is a virtue to do so. But helping victims (whatever kind of victims they may be) is not the most important part of morality. If it were, one would wish to see other people suffer just so that one could achieve virtue by offering help. What, then, are we to feel toward people who do not need us? They deprive us of the opportunity to be moral. Among people who are happy, we will have no way to gain self-esteem. Such is the moral corruption toward which altruism tends.