Intellectual Fascism
Why had you better not rate your self or your essence? Albert Ellis provides a few more reasons:
1. Rating your self or your you-ness is an overgeneralization and is virtually impossible to do accurately. You are (consist of) literally millions of acts, deeds, and traits during your lifetime. Even if you were fully aware of all these performances and characteristics (which you never will be) and were able to give each of them a rating (say, from zero to one hundred) how would you rate each one?; for what purpose?; and under what conditions? Even if you could accurately rate all your millions of acts, how could you get a mean or global rating of the ‘you’ who performs them? Not very easily!
2. Just as your deeds and characteristics constantly change (today you play tennis or chess or the stock market very well and tomorrow quite badly), so does your self-change. Even if you could, at any one second, somehow give your totality a legitimate rating, this rating would keep changing constantly as you did new things and had more experiences. Only after your death could you give your self a final and stable rating
3. What is the purpose of rating your self or achieving ego aggrandizement or self-esteem? Obviously, to make you feel better than other people: to grandiosely deify yourself, to be holier than thou, and to rise to heaven in a golden chariot. Nice work, if you can do it! But since self- esteem seems to be highly correlated with what Bandura (1977) calls self-efficacy, you can only have stable ego-strength when (a) you do well, (b) know you will continue to do well, and (c) have a guarantee that you will always equal or best others in important performances in the present and future. Well, unless you are truly perfect, lots of luck on those aspirations!
4. Although rating your performances and comparing them to those of others has real value because it will help you improve your efficacy and presumably increase your happiness rating your self and insisting that you must be a good and adequate person will (unless you, again, are perfect!) almost inevitably result in your being anxious when you may do any important thing badly, depressed when you do behave poorly, hostile when others out-perform you, and self- pitying when conditions interfere with your doing as well as you think you should. In addition to these neurotic and debilitating feelings, you will almost certainly suffer from serious behavioral problems, such as procrastination, withdrawal, shyness, phobias, obsessions, inertia, and inefficiency (Bard, 1980; Ellis, 1962, 1971, 1973; Ellis and Becker, 1982; Ellis and Harper, 1975; Ellis and Knaus, 1977; Grieger and Grieger, 1982; Miller, 1983; Walen, diGiuseppe and Wessler, 1980; Wessler and Wessler, 1980).
For these reasons, as well as others that I have outlined elsewhere (Ellis, 1962, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1988), rating or measuring your self or your ego will tend to make you anxious, miserable, and ineffective. By all means rate your acts and try (undesperately!) to do well. For you may be happier, healthier, richer, or more achievement- confident (confident that you can achieve) if you perform adequately. But you will not be, nor had you better define yourself as, a better person
If you insist on rating your self or your personhood at all which REBT advises you not to do, you had better conceive of yourself as being valuable or worthwhile just because you are human, because you are alive, because you exist. Preferably, don’t rate your self or your being at all and then you won’t get into any philosophic or scientific difficulties. But if you do use inaccurate, over-generalized self-ratings, such as ‘I am a good person,’ ‘I am worthwhile,’ or ‘I like myself,’ say ‘I am good because I exist and not because I do something special.’ Then you will not be rating yourself in a rigid, bigoted, authoritarian, that is, fascistic manner.
