Sublime

Our personalities are directly linked to our emotional reactions, decision-making, and behaviors. But what if the ego code is flawed? Maybe planning a successful event would be just the thing to boost Nadia’s confidence.

It was a prophetic work. In it he argued that the breakdown of family, community, and faith had left us fundamentally insecure, deprived of the traditional supports of identity and worth. He did not live to see the age of the selfie, the Facebook profile, designer labels worn on the outside, and the many other forms of “advertisements for myself,”

Jim is what I call a rugged individualist. His brand of individualism comes straight out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the same philosophical roots as the American Revolution and soon after that the French Revolution. Gone forever was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It got repla

Feeling good about yourself doesn’t make you conceited; as your sense of worth grows, there’s actually less need to impress others.

Nathaniel Branden’s lengthy work Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Working with clients in psychotherapy, I often see that the most radical transformation occurs after the client’s realization that no one is coming to the rescue. “When I finally allowed myself to face fully my own responsibility for my life,” more than one client has said to me, “I began to grow. I began to change. And my self-esteem began to rise

It’s quite simple. It is when one is able to feel “I am beneficial to the community” that one can have a true sense of one’s worth. This is the answer that would be offered in Adlerian psychology.

I’ve met Ayn Rand fanatics all over—among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, at the office of the Tampa Bay Tea Party, even on a road paving crew. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (who read Atlas Shrugged in high school) brought her pitiless philosophy of egoism to policymaking on Capitol Hill. Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-