Don’t fight to preserve your false self-worth

Those who appraise their worth beyond what reality justifies are emotionally-oriented and will act irrationally to preserve their unmerited self-esteem. Those with overestimated self-worth do not find value in themselves, but in a fake, imagined person. This avatar must be viciously defended, as life provides no supporting evidence for its worth:

3 For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.
4 But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. (Galatians 6)

Don’t allow fear of the loss of your present self-image to keep you from being yourself. Any self-esteem based on hiding or ignoring who you really are will always fail when the challenges of reality reveal your true self.

Conceited people avoid anything that suggests that they are less than they purport to be. Don’t do this. When you value your self-image more than the truth, you’ll interpret any correction as loss. If you define yourself based on falsehood, you place how you feel at a higher priority than how you actually are; you will act out of a desire to avoid negative feelings, you will do so without thinking, and you will do so contrary to reason. You will flee from, ignore, and attack anyone and anything that reveals you for who you really are. You will even do so when it results in harm to yourself and others.

The deep distortions in which dishonest people engage is the reason that they so deeply despise those who live the truth. Truthful people are living contradictions of their continuous lies, and the only way that the dishonest can avoid the cognitive dissonance caused by their very being is to silence, discredit, or destroy them.

While the haughty interpret correction as an attack on who they are, the humble recognize it as the path to becoming who they could be. The humble view correction as an empowering gift.¹ Those who love truth above all have an intrinsically fluid self-worth; they freely adopt new truth, because they assess their value in terms of how truthful their present beliefs, feelings, and actions are, not in appraisals detached from reality or based on some past estimate of it.

An honest person has no reason to hide from greater selfawareness. They have the means to test new information against their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, and they have the means to improve by integrating any potential improvements they can perceive. They have the ability to question their identity and change it in response to sufficient evidence.

A dishonest person, on the other hand, has every reason to hide from self-awareness. First, dishonest people prefer to smooth over the undesirable portions of their lives through willful delusion rather than reconcile themselves through deep and painful change.² Dishonest people can warp their perception of reality by actually editing their memory—often in real-time—in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. For themselves and those who make them feel good, they will impute positive qualities and deny negative ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. For those who make them feel bad, they will impute negative qualities and deny positive ones, no matter how much evidence contradicts the former and how much substantiates the latter. They will even twist the properties of the world around them that deviate from what they wish they were. Those who stand for the truth are hated by the dishonest because the things they say and do contradict the dishonest distortions of reality in ways that are harder to ignore.³