Thursday, April 12, 2018

Race and Self-Esteem


The following quotation from Francis Fukuyama sheds some light on the disputes going on about racial equality and Confederate statues. 

“But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride”
 
Excerpt From
End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama
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