Love Yourself or Lose Yourself

It's been a long time since I've opened up this blog but I've had this thought in my head for the last week and I've just got to put it down into words. The thought has been on how difficult it is to defend or protect yourself if you don't love yourself. It might sound a little simplistic but hear me out if you will.

Why are some people more easily bullied than others? Why are some people so nice that they find themselves spending more time looking after other people rather than themselves? In the past I speculated that empathy had something to do with this but empathy has been strongly selected for in human evolution suggesting it has strong advantages. One of those advantages being able to read other people's intentions and from that be able to determine in what circumstances and how far one can trust fellow human beings: so long as you're right you're gaining survival benefit from the help and support of those people but as soon as you've over stepped that safe zone you're wounded or worse, out of the genetic rat race. However, another consequence of empathy appears to be a tendency to become enslaved to helping people less deserving of oneself: priests, bullies, liars, sleazebags, cult leaders, selfish women and monarchs... in other words all people who think they're more important than you and have someone convinced you to buy into it, making you their prey/slave.

This problem has made me ask the question: is part of the design/evolution of human empathy to make most human beings obedient to authorities? I mean, those mirror neurons and transference of emotion make being assertive hard work for most people. However, I think it's more than that. I think empathy is only a threat to a person's well being if that person doesn't love themselves. Say they feel ashamed because they want to have sex with lots of different people, then calling them a slut is going to hurt badly. But what if they don't care that they want to sleep with lots of different people? Then calling them a slut isn't going to affect them.

When beggars come up to me on the streets these days I don't feel uncomfortable at all saying no to them. Last night beggar came up to my girlfriend and told me that if we didn't give him money he'd die of cold and hunger and it would all be our fault. My girlfriend's reaction was one of angst... I on the other hand got angry and my first thought was, "So everyone else is responsible for you except for yourself? When are you going to look after yourself? This is Australia, poor people aren't trapped, they can make a life for themselves if they take responsibility for their actions and their own situation. If you die on the street tonight it won't be because we didn't give you money, it'll be because you gave up on yourself!"

My views on homeless people are quite complicated, but this person was clearly an institutionalised person who has developed a survival mechanism that makes giving them any kind of help counter productive to their well being. The only way to help them is tough love and the only way to give it is to be immune to their manipulations and the only way for an empathic person to have such an immunity is to now have any insecurities about themselves and their position. If a person does have an insecurity it could be either because their position is untenable... or they could just lack confidence in thenselves, which is the same as saying that they don't love themselves as much as they deserve.