Your Value — Face and Self
General Disclaimer: This is a hot-take article. The short nature of my blog posts is geared to be read on the subway or the toilet, and intends to spark your thoughts.
As an extroverted person I love engaging people. Before the pandemic more than nowadays, I often find myself at events where I can get to know many people but only have a short amount of time to do so. I need criteria to decide which people to talk to, and - of those - which to keep engaging with. The most important indicator for value of interaction with other people I look for is self-value and conceptual self-value.
Definitions:
Self-value I want to define as someones self-perception of personal value/worth/worthiness. Conceptual self-value I want to define as someones self-value under external stress tests. As another term I want to introduce "face value” as the self-value (presumed to be) perceived by peers. Where peers are any and all actors that populate our social encounters. [I only just defined the terms writing this essay so I don’t recon they are the tightest, but it’ll do]
Base Idea:
The anthropological shorthand for an explenation, as to why conceptual self-value is important for deciding whom to engage with, sees human intuition still largely unchanged over from 10.000 BC. In spite of todays abundance of social interaction and social annonymity (especially in cities like Berlin), we social animals are fine tuned to (perceived) self-value when interacting with peers. For the longest time humans existed, the perception of our peers dictated our survival odds and hence selected the fitness to relevant social awareness. Feeling as if ones worth was low was equipollent to being aware to be at risk of not being able to survive. As such, humans hate the feeling of low self-value and badly want to get rid of this feeling.
Developed Idea:
People that have a low self-value, wanting to get rid of the associated negative feeling, are likely to ensure themselves of a higher face value than their peers. This leads to manipulative and demeaning behaviour towards peers - especially those, that actors with low self-value attest a low conceptual self-value. But even if successful with establishing higher face value than these peers, through interactions that often involve discounting and/or belittling them, the underlying low self-value problem is not really solved. Subsequently the manipulative context gets maintained to constantly reassure oneself of (higher) face value.
Following Axioms:
Interactions with low self-value persons are more likely to be dominated by their attempts to ensure themselves face value, than interactions with high self-value persons. Interacting with higher conceptual self-value persons is less likely to change their self-value perception. Low self-value persons are less likely to support you with your goals or be empathetic towards you.
Detecting Low Self-Value:
Interactionally low self-value can be shown in readiness to mock weaknesses of peers. Often of those not present or perceived to be set low on a social hierarchy (new members of the group, service personnell, kids, ill persons, disabled, migrants, the poor). One interactional way to test the waters is to open up about yourself and see how the others react. Or ask about the others opinion on actors that are perceived to be lower on a social hierarchy among the present peers.
Detecting Strong Conceptual Self-Value:
In general I am advocating for a strong concpetual self-value. You ought to base your identity perception on some solid self-reflection and not let the result be toppled from in the moment challenges. Although I advise to disjoint core identity aspects from resulting action more often than most people do. [1]
Strong conceptual self-value is often shown in how people react to critizism toward their identity. The more relaxed they are about it, the less they show to be “threatened” by it and the less they engage on the premisses of the critic, the stronger the conceptual self-value.
Resulting Heuristic:
When faced with many potential social interactions. I rigorously select for actors that have high self-value and high conceptual self-value.
In my opinion there is an ordinal hierarchy of Self-Value X Conceptual Self-Value mixtures.
I assume by now, your thoughts are sparked. Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out and stay beautiful <3
[1] Example: I see myself as a feminist = identity. I acted in a way that some else perceived as hurtful = action. If I have high conceptual self-perception for me being feminist and disjoint myself from the action, I can have a stable identity and change my behavior. (But this is for another time and hence only a vague foot note here.)
