We are far too focused on self-love these days. People have come to believe that self-love is the starting point, and goal, of human life. It isn't. Self-love hardly even makes sense as a concept, and in practice it almost always translates into narcissism. Let's talk about why we should stop worrying about loving ourselves and focus instead on loving others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So I wanted to build on something that we talked about Yesterday. | |
| And that is, if you remember, we talked about social media and how social media fuels our narcissism and causes us to think about ourselves, focus on ourselves an inordinate amount. | |
| And this is where a lot of the self-esteem issues come from. | |
| It's not that we think badly about ourselves in this culture. | |
| It's just that we think about ourselves way too often. | |
| We spend way too much time thinking about ourselves. | |
| And when we do that, of course we're going to notice our flaws, and of course we're going to be obsessed with those flaws because we're obsessed with ourselves. | |
| And then we chalk that up to a self-esteem problem when really it's a narcissism problem. | |
| It's almost the opposite of a self-esteem problem. | |
| Now, that isn't to say that we should never notice our flaws. | |
| We need to be self-aware. | |
| We need to know that we have flaws. | |
| But we shouldn't spend all day noticing them. | |
| And the best thing to do with a character flaw or a moral flaw is to, once you notice it, to then just set out to correct it. | |
| To live your life and try to correct it in the way that you live your life. | |
| And the best thing to do with an unfixable physical flaw is to just forget it. | |
| And again, live your life. | |
| Either way, the process is harder, and we are interfering with it when we are too focused on ourselves. | |
| Now, I mentioned that I think these love yourself, embrace your flaws types of campaigns are misguided. | |
| And they're very common these days, of course, where we're constantly being told to love yourself, love yourself. | |
| I think it's misguided because we should be encouraging each other to forget about ourselves. | |
| Forget yourself and focus on other things. | |
| Look outward instead of always inward. | |
| So I don't agree with running around and telling everyone to love themselves. | |
| And in fact, I think that if we just drop that phrase from our vocabulary completely and never again discussed loving yourself, self-love, you got to love it. | |
| If we never talked about those things ever again, we would be better for it. | |
| Now, I got a lot of feedback to that idea about self-love. | |
| So some of it positive, a lot of it negative or critical, I should say anyway. | |
| And honestly, the critical feedback, it hurt my own self-love. | |
| So I want you to know that. | |
| It hurt my feelings. So now I wanted to expand upon it a little bit more because I think it's an important point. | |
| My basic theory is this. | |
| Loving yourself, if understood correctly, can be good, but not as an end in itself and not as the beginning either. | |
| Now, I think there are two huge mistakes we make when we talk about self-love, the idea of loving ourselves. | |
| There are two huge mistakes. The first mistake is in thinking that loving yourself is the highest good and the ultimate point of life. | |
| That's obviously a big mistake. | |
| The second mistake is in thinking that self-love is the starting point and you really can't love anyone else until you love yourself. | |
| Now, I'm not going to spend much time debunking the first idea, which is Satanism. | |
| The idea that self-love is the highest good, the ultimate point. | |
| That's Satanism. | |
| And it is a philosophy that's been adopted in the mainstream by leftism. | |
| But I've talked about that plenty of times in the past. | |
| I will again in the future. For now, I'm going to address the second idea, which is prevalent even among people who know that self-love is not the highest good. | |
| It's still very prevalent. And you hear this all the time, don't you? | |
| I mean, you've heard this. | |
| Maybe you've said it yourself, that you can't love someone else until you learn to love yourself. | |
| You'll even hear that you really can't do anything with your life until you love yourself. | |
| This is what's implied when you ask someone You know, you meet someone that you haven't seen in a while and you say, oh, what are you doing with yourself? | |
| What are you doing for a living? And they say, well, I'm just working on myself right now. | |
| I'm just working on myself. | |
| Now, Christians will tend to think that, and what he means is, He's completely—this is a person who has just caved in on themselves, just completely—you're looking at a void of a person where they have completely caved in, and they've blocked everything else out, and they're just thinking about themselves all day and working on themselves. | |
| Now, Christians will tend to think that there's scriptural support for this approach. | |
| They'll point to Jesus saying, love your neighbor as yourself. | |
| And they take that to mean that you cannot begin the project of loving your neighbor until you have developed a sufficient affection for yourself. | |
| But that is not at all what is meant. | |
| You see, we have to remember that love your neighbor as yourself is the second greatest commandment. | |
| The first commandment that we're given is love the Lord God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. | |
| I would say that If we concentrate on the first commandment, which is loving God, and then if we concentrate next on the first part of the second commandment, which is loving our neighbor, and if we really give that our attention, then love for ourselves will just be tossed into the bargain. | |
| We don't even have to think about it. | |
| If you're really focused on loving God and loving your neighbor, then self-love just comes with it. | |
| It's just part of it. Self-love is not the starting point. | |
| It's not the beginning. And it's not the end goal either. | |
| It's a byproduct. | |
| It's something that happens in the middle. | |
| And not because you're trying to make it happen. | |
| It simply does happen. | |
| There's another important thing we should remember about love your neighbor as yourself. | |
| Love your neighbor as yourself. | |
| What that really means in context is keep your neighbor's interests at heart like you keep your own interests at heart. | |
| Jesus is not recommending self-esteem. | |
| Jesus is simply building off of the fact that we all naturally, as individuals, value our own interests and work towards fulfilling them. | |
| Everybody on earth naturally does that. | |
| Now, we may have very wrong ideas about what's in our best interest, but we still are. | |
| We're very concerned about that. | |
| All the time, we're concerned about our own interests. | |
| So Jesus is just taking that for granted. | |
| He's not saying to work on that or to build that up. | |
| He's saying, you're already like that, so you don't have to think about it. | |
| That's how you are. But instead, take that mentality and apply it to your neighbor. | |
| Don't worry about fortifying that mentality about yourself. | |
| Apply it to your neighbor. | |
| But we've taken this command and we've done the opposite. | |
| We've taken it the opposite direction. | |
| That's the opposite of what we were supposed to do. | |
| When we use it as an excuse for selfishness. | |
| No, no, no. That's the opposite of what he meant. | |
| I think there are two things about love that we have to remember in order to really work through this idea of self-love. | |
| The first thing is... | |
| You know, Aquinas says that to love, he defines love as willing the good of the other, right? | |
| That is, wanting what is good for someone. | |
| Not necessarily wanting them to always get what they want, but wanting what is actually good for them, what is actually good. | |
| And then working so far as we can to actively bring about that good. | |
| I've never heard a better definition of love. | |
| I think that is. That's the definition. | |
| Whatever the dictionary says, right there, Aquinas, he has the definition. | |
| To will the good of the other. | |
| At least that's the definition for person-to-person love. | |
| Love for God is a little bit different because you can't really will the good of God. | |
| He already has everything he needs. | |
| There is no good that you can provide for him or wish for him because he's the author of all good. | |
| So he already has all that. | |
| He contains it. He is it. | |
| Love for God, I think, could be defined more like Maybe something like wanting to give God what He is due, which would be our faith, our loyalty, our trust, our obedience. | |
| That's what loving God means. | |
| But how does this definition apply to self-love? | |
| What does it even mean to love yourself? | |
| What is the definition? It's kind of confusing because you'll notice that both of these definitions, although the second one I just came up with, but the first one from Thomas Aquinas, that it's outwardly focused by definition. | |
| How do you bring it back on yourself? | |
| Well, I guess to love yourself, if loving others is to will the good of the other, to love yourself must mean to will what is good for you. | |
| Not to will what is pleasurable, necessarily, or even what is always desirable, but to will what is actually edifying, healthy, wholesome things that are going to elevate you, bring you closer to truth and to beauty and to God. | |
| To love someone else, to put it more simply, is to want them to go to heaven. | |
| And to work to kind of help them get there. | |
| And so to love yourself is to want yourself to go to heaven and to help yourself get there. | |
| But that desire in its fullest and holiest state is not rooted in a love for yourself. | |
| It's rooted in a love for God. | |
| So you want to be good and do good because that's what you ought to do because that's what God deserves for you to do. | |
| So I think we see that self-love cannot be the starting point. | |
| It can't be the point at all. | |
| It's not the point. It's a thing that happens when you worry about loving things beyond yourself. | |
| It is the product of those things. | |
| Second point, we see from Aquinas' definition that love is active. | |
| It's not just a feeling. | |
| This, of course, is a Love is a huge misconception we have in our culture, and it's been disastrous for our culture. | |
| It's been disastrous, especially for families and for marriages, where we look at love as a feeling of affection. | |
| But it's not. Love is an act to will, to will the good of the other. | |
| The problem is that when people talk about loving themselves, They mean it almost always as a purely emotional exercise. | |
| They mean to say that they want to feel good about themselves. | |
| That's what they mean. | |
| It's like I'm working on loving myself. | |
| What they mean is I'm working on feeling good about myself. | |
| They are essentially sitting around trying to conjure up emotions about themselves. | |
| Or maybe they're even taking drugs to help that or whatever. | |
| But they are trying to develop emotions in their head about themselves. | |
| And this is a ridiculous exercise because you're never going to reach a state where you feel always good about yourself. | |
| That's never going to happen. | |
| It shouldn't happen anyway. | |
| You should, there are times when you should feel bad about yourself. | |
| When you do something bad, when you do a horrible or selfish or cowardly thing, you should feel bad about yourself. | |
| You shouldn't feel great in those moments. | |
| Doesn't mean you should hate yourself, you shouldn't go into despondency and despair over it, but you shouldn't feel good about yourself either. | |
| So there's never going to be a point where you always feel good about yourself. | |
| Just like you're never going to reach a point where you feel always affectionate towards your spouse or your kids. | |
| But you love your spouse and your kids, hopefully. | |
| Anyway. In fact, love really comes into play in the moments where you don't feel particularly good. | |
| Talking about in a family setting with your spouse or your children, it's when you don't feel that really strong affection because you're tired or you're annoyed or you're angry or you're hurt or whatever it is, right? It's when you don't feel that, when you don't have that affection necessarily, that's when love really comes in. | |
| That's when the love is really needed. | |
| Because then to love the other person is an act of will. | |
| It's really a choice. It's not just something that you're doing because you happen to be feeling pretty good in the moment. | |
| Anybody can act loving when they feel loving. | |
| Anyone can do that. It doesn't mean anything. | |
| Even the most abusive and horrible spouse can still act loving in the moments where he feels loving. | |
| But it doesn't mean anything if the moment when those feelings leave, you start acting like a tyrant. | |
| So to act loving when you don't feel it, that's the real thing right there. | |
| I mean, that's it. | |
| That's love. That's really love in its strongest state. | |
| Or maybe I should say in its rawest state. | |
| So when we always focus on our emotions about ourselves, we're embarking on this really foolish and narcissistic quest to reach a state of emotional constancy in relation to ourselves, which is never going to happen. | |
| Instead, we should just be always doing what is good for ourselves, actually good. | |
| Not what is always pleasurable or anything like that, but just what is actually good, what is actually bringing us higher and closer to truth. | |
| And we should just be doing that all the time and let the emotions come and go as they will. | |
| So that there really shouldn't be a reason to talk about self-love. | |
| It's not the point of everything. | |
| It's not the starting point. | |
| It's not the end. | |
| It's not something you feel. | |
| It's something that comes with the package of loving others in a real and active way. | |
| The last thing I'll say is this. | |
| Think about the implications of this idea that you have to love yourself before you can love other people. | |
| Think about what that looks like in practice. | |
| Think about how this must work in a marriage. | |
| For the brief period where somebody with this mentality can actually stay in a marriage, think about how that must work. | |
| You'd be going up to your spouse and saying, sorry, honey, I can't love you today. | |
| I'm just not feeling great about myself. | |
| You see? I need to love myself again, and then I'll get around to you, okay? | |
| But I can't love you right now because I'm just not feeling great. | |
| No, I think that obviously is not the right approach. | |
| The opposite is the better approach. | |
| Forget about yourself. Love your spouse. | |
| Serve your spouse. And then, magically, you'll find that your opinion of yourself improves. | |
| That's what happens. | |
| It's really magical like that. | |
| Go out and do good things for others And do your duty, fulfill your responsibilities, live as though you feel great about yourself, and then you'll find that, oh, wow, I feel pretty good right now. | |
| But then you can't, but here's what I'm talking about. | |
| We've become so focused on our emotions about ourselves. | |
| Your emotions about yourself, that's just an underlying thing. | |
| It's a current that's kind of there, but you can't stop and think about it. | |
| Because even when you're going out and you're living your life and you're doing what you're supposed to do and you're being self-sacrificial and you're being loving towards others, that is going to lift you up emotionally as well. | |
| But the moment that you stop and dwell on it, you stop and think, wow, I really feel great about myself. | |
| Let me think more about how I feel about myself. | |
| Let me analyze. The moment you do that, it all falls apart. | |
| You start losing all of it. | |
| It's like now it's just water through your fingertips and you're trying to grab it. | |
| It's like, no, I just had it. | |
| It's gone now. That's because you're not supposed to stop and think about it. | |
| Continue living, continue going. | |
| I guess it's a little bit like when you, if you've ever really dwelled on breathing, or if you've been walking and you began to think, this is kind of a, how am I walking right now? | |
| I don't feel myself telling myself to walk. | |
| You start dwelling on the act of walking. | |
| In the moment you do that, it starts to feel weird, like you almost forget how to do it. | |
| Because you're not supposed to dwell on it. | |
| It's kind of something that you do automatically. | |
| So, love yourself first and then you can love others. | |
| No, I think the opposite is the case. | |
| I think maybe the way that we should phrase it is something like this. | |
| You cannot love yourself until you learn how to love something other than yourself. | |
| I think maybe that's the way we should put it. | |
| And that's how we should live. | |
| All right. Thanks for watching. |