I Competition in the Service of Self-esteem

Abstract

What makes us a lifelong addict to our fellow humans’ attention is the fact that self-esteem is deeply ingrained in our emotional self-regulation. The most natural starting point of a non-reductive account of the economy of attention is therefore the psychic household, in the purview of which the revenues of attention are converted into the asset of self-worth. This conversion is what gives opportunity to the tricks of false accounting to which the pejorative tone of vanity gives expression. Opportunism and strategic manipulation in this accounting are what separates fair play in the pursuit of attention from the foul play of vanity and resentment. The questions thus addressed are: How are vice and virtue interrelated in the pursuit of self-esteem? What are the costs and risks of utilizing attention income as an incentive to socially desirable behaviour? The discussion will entangle us in considerations of how the intra-psychic household of self-esteem connects to the social economy of attention, how the social dependency of the ego relates to the assuredness of its self, and how self-esteem tackles the antagonism of the self’s autonomy and its social dependency.