So, when did they start telling us that we have to love ourselves? Remember that song from the eighties? Witney Houston. It's the Greatest Love Of All. Self Love. Hmmm.... I think she died an untimely death from drug addiction. And that is a really complex web because part of the cliché rhetoric around addictions is that they come out of self hatred, or from a lack of self esteem, or that addictions are all about finding some way of validating an empty soul that simply cannot or never will validate itself. Or whatever. Not that I want to judge the poor woman because she clearly was herself a victim no matter what she happened to be singing and recording during her illustrious career. And she was such a brilliant singer!
On the weekend I heard one woman on a program that celebrates feminism proclaim that she had to learn to love herself before she could love another person. She sounded so smug and obnoxious, I just had to shut it off. Her tone was such that there was no one in the universe more important than her exalted self, and there is no way I am going to start my day hearing that kind of claptrap. (besides, I don't like competition!) And, those of us who are Christians by profession or by actuality, how many times have we been told from the pulpit and elsewhere that we have to love ourselves, because we are commanded to love our neighbours as we love ourselves, and if we don't love ourselves, then how can we possibly love anything else? Except maybe chocolate.
I am going to start on that last statement. Love your neighbour as you love yourself. Is that really a command that we love ourselves? I don't know. I have always read this as meaning that we are to love our neighbour, purely and simply. But we also have to love ourselves? Oh...Do we? I have always understood this as really meaning that it is already given that we are going to love ourselves. It's a no-brainer. The real challenge is that we actually love the person next to us the way we already love ourselves. Hello? Still there?
So, allow me to launch into another attack against psychobabble. Sometime in the seventies everyone began talking about loving themselves, how much they loved themselves, how they needed to love themselves, how they couldn't really love anyone unless they first loved themselves. I never drank that particular flavour of Kool Aid. And we were all under a lot of pressure to drink it. And I simply refused. But why? Because I hate myself? Uh...no. I neither love nor do I hate myself. I am myself. Love is something you do for someone else. Otherwise, it ain't love. I certainly take care of myself, and value my life and try to keep my life functioning as smoothly and enjoyably as possible, but here I digress. But I don't adore myself. I don't think of myself as anyone or anything special. Because I'm not. And, honey, neither are you. If we choose to reach anything higher than that then that makes us narcissists, and we have only to look at the president Dump, the Narcissist in Chief in the White House in Washington DC for a little salutary warning. But do I think we're okay, we will always be okay, and for that reason what's there not to love!
I do find it interesting the way the trend towards self love coincided so neatly with the rise of our culture of narcissism and the kind of global uber capitalism that is strangling our humanity and by extension our planet. It would be arguable that there is an indelible link between self-love, or rather, self-adoration (they are two different things) and the kind of individualism and rampant self-promotion that of course are the very lyrics and music of capitalism. For fans of opera, just close your eyes and think of Wagner (no, don't!) and try to visualise the corpulent Brunhilde, resplendent in horned helmet and brass bra, as the flames mount higher and higher around her. And that, ducks, is self-adoration.
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