There's a very big difference, according to Dr. Theodore Dalrymple of in character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues. He says, "Self-respect and self-esteem are as different as depth and shallowness."
From Theodore Dalrymple on Self-Esteem vs. Self-Respect:
Self-esteemists, if I may so call those who are concerned with the levels of their own self-esteem, believe that it is something to which they have a right. If they don't have self-esteem in sufficient quantity to bring about a perfectly happy life, their fundamental rights are being violated. They feel aggrieved and let down by others rather than by themselves; they ascribe their lack of rightful self-esteem to the carping, and unjustified, criticism of parents, teachers, spouses, and colleagues.
The twin qualities leading to self-esteem are (an allegedly) just appreciation of one's own importance and of one's own worth. Neither importance nor worth, however, are qualities to be found in nature without an appraising mind; it is the appraising mind that confers them upon their object.
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In other words, the self-esteemist wants something for nothing, and, because in his heart he knows that what he wants is impossible, he is wretched and ascribes all the many failures of
his life to it. Self-esteem is therefore first cousin to resentment.
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The problem with low self-esteem is not self-dislike, as is often claimed, but self-absorption. However, it does not follow from this that high self-esteem is not a genuine problem. One has only to go into a prison, or at least a prison of the kind in which I used to work, to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people (the young thugs) who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. It need hardly be said that this degree of self-esteem is certainly not confined to young thugs. Most of us probably suffer from it episodically, as any waiter in any restaurant would be able to tell us.
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Self-respect is another quality entirely. ...
Click to read the rest. What do you think about what Dr. Dalrymple has written?
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