50 Arguments Against Self-Esteem's Claim You're Experience

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Face Your Self-Esteem Lies & End Them

50 arguments against self-esteem are provided. These same 50 arguments are also used on other pages to prove self-esteem wrong about you being feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

Ego will help you to recognize, remove, and replace your ego: a.k.a. self-esteem.

“Once you label me, you negate me.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Read for the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

Self-Esteem Can Be Based on Identifying with the Experiences of the Body

The First 25 of the 50 Arguments Proving Self-Esteem Is a Delusional System

Prove right now that you are the experience that you are judging your self to be! Where is the evidence that you are the experience that you are judging your self to be?
Where is it written that people are or can become their experiences? Where is it written that your being becomes your experiences of your errors or mistakes?
Whose law is it that you must regard your self as your experiences, and especially so if they are negative? Where is the evidence that you must become your negative experiences?
Prove that because you experienced some ignorant or foolish thing in the past that that damns you to forever repeat as it. Where is the evidence that just because you experienced bad that that makes you, your being, bad?
Prove that the experience is the judgment of it! Where is the evidence that the experience and the judgment about it are one and the same?
Is a car its experiences? How can you be your experiences? You are much more than a car! Is the air its experiences? You are more than air!
Where is the proof that you are definitions or labels of experiences? Aren’t you your nonverbal being?
Prove that your being can become some label or thing? What happens to your self when you imagine it becomes things, thoughts, or memories?
Why can’t you ever find and demonstrate your self as definitions, concepts, experiences, images, labels, words, thoughts, etc., in the here-and-now? Why can they only occur about the past? Isn’t all thought only of the past? Isn’t your self in the present?
What are the fair, just, and consistent procedures that you use to judge your self to be one experience and not another? Is there any way to validate why some of your experiences should get the “I” label, and some shouldn’t?
Prove that your unique being is general just because you need it to be to assume it is thoughts, labels, descriptions, labels, memories, thoughts, and things because their nature is general.
Prove that you were ever able to surround or experience your entire self at once so that you could know it to rate or judge it as anything or something.
Prove that you were able to stop time and your own flowing, your own process so that you could judge your self to be some static thought? When did you capture your self to mark it as something?
Show how you can now be your past experiences when they are obviously not here but are only represented by distorted and incomplete labels of partial memories.
Prove that thought is your experience of your self. What happened to your sensations of your self without thought? What are the thoughts about if they are you and you have thoughts about your self?
Where is the evidence that thought knows reality, knows all of it, knows enough truth to make any judgments? When does thought perceive or sense under its own power?
Prove that your thoughts are the experiences that they claim you were and are. Can thoughts be experiences or only limited, partial, and fragmented representations of them? If thoughts are not the real experiences, then what are you if you are thoughts?
Prove that definitions, descriptions, experiences, perceptions, sensations, thoughts, or whatever–can know your being and your infinitely complex situation. Don’t they always have to isolate you from your situation to classify you? Can or have you ever existed independently of your circumstances, conditions, environment, milieu, or situation?
If your self is definitions, descriptions, experiences, images, terms, etc., then how does it continue, how does it remain alive, how is it more than a rock or a robot?
Prove that thought is or can be responsible for your selfhood or your experience.
Where is the evidence that static thoughts can ever know or understand the dynamic self?
Where is the evidence that static thoughts have ever or can ever be your dynamic self?
Where is the evidence that static thoughts are ever or can ever do your dynamic self?
Aren’t all your thoughts of self at best only maps of the territory of the self? Is the map the territory? Can it be? Should it be mistaken for or treated as such?
Prove that the necessarily limited bits of reality that descriptions, definitions, and categorizations are–can be about or can be your whole self. Realize that even a true sum of the parts can’t be the whole, let alone the sum of your limited definitions and categories.

Read for the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

Self-Esteem Can Be Based on Self Being Experiences of the Body

The Second 25 of the 50 Arguments Proving Self-Esteem Is a Delusional System

Where is the proof that your judgments of your self are more accurate or more real than anyone else’s of your self? How do or can you determine whose judgments are accurate? Yours are too subjective, and theirs are too lacking in your experience. So which judgments are supposed to be you–yours or theirs?
Can thought observe the self? If thought cannot observe the self, then how can thought know the self? If thought cannot know the self, then how can thought claim to represent the self? If thought cannot even represent the self, then how can thought claim to be the self?
Can the observer observe itself? Can your self observe itself? Who is it that observes the self and names the self as something other than that which is observing it? If the self is observing itself, then how can the self also be what it is observing?
Does the self see the self? Does the self name the self? If the self is naming itself, then how can the self be the name of itself?
Prove that you can be words when words have variable meanings and are not limited to any one interpretation. Won’t everyone interpret your words differently? So which of the different interpretations are you supposed to be? Prove yours are more accurate, complete, knowing, or real than everyone else’s.
Prove that you are in the present what you thought you were in the past just because you thought you were before. How does that follow logically? Isn’t that a non sequitur?
Since nothing, including you, can ever repeat, then how is it that you believe that you are something that has already occurred in the past? Are you what has happened that cannot happen again? Isn’t this just what you claim when you claim you are what you experienced?
How can you repeat being the thought that you thought you were when you thought you were that thought in the past?
Where is the evidence that the nonverbal self, the true self, can ever be known or captured by any verbal means?
Prove that your ego is permanent. Isn’t it your assumption that your ego is permanent when you define and create it using concrete and static thoughts and memories of experiences? Are not all human experiences fleeting? Isn’t it true that anything observable is impermanent? How can you make your self into what is no more?
Prove that you are one with your ego, with your self-concepts and images, and with your self as thoughts. Aren’t you separate? Don’t you choose, enjoy, judge, persecute, praise, repress, suffer, and experience all manner of sensations in regard to thought? Aren’t you in the present and your thoughts in the past sometimes; aren’t you in the present observing thoughts in the present sometimes; aren’t you in the present imagining thoughts in the future sometimes? When do the two meet and form you?
Where is the evidence that your relationship with the world is a knowledge-thing or a thought-thing? Is this not what you claim when you think of yourself in relation to your experiences as something, as some judgment, as some reified thought?
Where is the evidence that your thought-thing of self is part of your thought-thing of your relationship with the world? That is, how does your self-image become reborn as your social-image?
Does your self exist in two separate worlds? Does your self exist in the world of self-images and also in the world of social-images? Can your self exist in both of these worlds at the same time? What happens to your self when these worlds collide?
Where is the evidence that your thought-thing of the other person is a part of your thought-thing of your relationship with them? That is, how does your self-image for another fit into and become a part of your social-image for them? Does this transform their self?
Where is the proof that your self is the separation, the individuation of your thought-thing of yourself from your thought-thing of your relationship with the world? In other words, by what logic do you claim that you are more your self-images than you are your social-images or vice versa?
Prove the reality of any thought-things–enmeshed or differentiated? That is, are thought-things (e.g., self-images or other concretized thinking) anything more than imagination, than imagined realities that have no substance, form, or direct relation to a self existing in the real world (outside of the mind’s imagination)?
Prove the reality of the imagined relationships of thought-things? That is, is the relating of thought-things (e.g., social-images) any more than imagination? Your social-images are an imagined reality that has no substance, form, or direct correlation in the real world (outside of the human mind): Maya.
Where is the evidence that you are a god who can create themselves out of definitions, descriptions, categories, or types? Isn’t self-esteem just fanciful thinking?
Prove that you are omniscient and omnipresent. Prove that your senses are omnidirectional. Obviously, you can’t. Hence, all your judgments, observations, knowings, and claims are limited and at best, only arbitrary. If they are limited, then your self is limited by them. If your self is limited by them, then what happens to the parts of self that are left out of your definitions or categories? If they are limited, then how can they honestly be the full you?
Please show us your logical system for determining your ego. What? You have none! You mean to say that if you are honest, then you must admit that you determine what your self is without rhyme or reason? Then how can the self you fabricate be fair, honest, or real?
When did you study and learn a system of self-esteem thinking that would at least more often than not provide an accurate picture of you? You mean to say that you decide who and what you are without anything more than emotion and whim to guide you? Then surely you cannot take the resulting nonsense seriously!
Do you magically become whatever it is that you think you are? Do others also magically become the thoughts that you think they are? How powerful you must feel.
I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if someone does not like you that you have become some bad thing. I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if you are having a bad day that it is because you are a bad thing. I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if you have something bad that, that makes you a bad thing.
When do all the definitions of a university become that university? That is, if we collect all of the definitions of anything and put them into one place, will we then have that thing? No. Yet, you do not bother to collect all of the definitions of your self into one place. No. You can take any one definition and claim that it is you whenever you feel like it. Great job. Yes, humans are quite rational.

The above was excerpted and modified from the first edition of Planet Earth Insane Asylum for the Universe: The First Report to the 2000 High Council. It was further modified for Planet Earth: Insane Asylum for the Universe, 2nd Ed..

Three more pages containing 50 arguments against self-esteem can be found in the “Related Pages” section.

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Some Related Quotations

“Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it’s conditional.” —Albert Ellis, Ph.D., the most famous and influential living psychologist in the world, Psychology Today, February 2001, p. 72, in the interview, “The Prince of Reason,” with the famous psychologist Robert Epstein, Ph.D.

“Self-esteem steals souls.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

“Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.” —John Madden

“Teach your children not to strive for high self-esteem. This is nothing less than teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority feelings.” —Paul A. Hauck, Overcoming The Rating Game: Beyond Self-Love—Beyond Self-Esteem, p. 46

“That which is real is not the continuation of identifying memory.” —J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume IV, p. 53

“The assumption being that if high-risk children could be made to ‘feel good about themselves,’ these epidemics could be mitigated. … This prescription, unfortunately, has proven to be yet another in a long list of nouveau homilies that haven’t lived up to their promises.” —John Rosemond, Plan To Build Self-Esteem Backfires, August 1996 syndicated newspaper column regarding research done at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Virginia

“The cause of all sins in every case lies in the person’s excessive love of self.” —Plato, Laws

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Related Pages of Free Information

Read and master the life skill of acceptance using the best combination of CBT, REBT, & Stoicism.

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6 Groups of Topics Menu

Read and master the life skill of acceptance using the best combination of CBT, REBT, & Stoicism.

Read for the best understanding of why thinking makes the world insane.

Read for the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

9 Skills & Topics Menu

Read and master the life skill of acceptance using the best combination of CBT, REBT, & Stoicism.

Read for the best understanding of why thinking makes the world insane.

Read for the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

50 Arguments Against Self-Esteem: I Am Not Experiences