Becker, Ernest. The Birth and Death of Meaning. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.

The child-training configurations are the primary institutions of a society, which shape the basic personality structure of its members by providing more or less similar Oedipal transition experiences. The basic personality structure is thus composed of certain basic attitudes toward the self and toward objects, which remain part of the mental set of the individual. (p. 77)

It seems clearer to speak of self-esteem as growing up with self-consciousness, as the self-reflexive animal become aware of itself in a world of discrete objects. When the pronominal "I" becomes a rallying point for the executive power of the ego, a differentiation between the "me" and the "not-me" becomes possible. Self-esteem then takes the shape as the continued disposal of power to act without anxiety. The self-system learns to conciliate the environment, and has the satisfaction of sensing its own executive powers. As the ego becomes adept at using its defense mechanisms, the problem of losing the parental protection and omnipotence is solved. The child has shaped himself into the very person who can count on continued parental approval, because he has largely tailored his action to suit their wishes. (p. 79)

When this problem has been met, the problem of maintaining self-esteem is also solved. Self-esteem becomes the child's feeling of self-warmth that all's right in his action world. Thus, the seemingly trite words "self-esteem" are at the very core of human adaptation. Self-esteem is the warm inner feeling of self-righteousness that arms the individual against anxiety. The ego has finally come into its own as an effective control when the organism is no longer at the mercy of a stimulus-response relationship to anxiety. The self-esteem is a natural systematic continuation of the early ego efforts to handle anxiety.

It is the durational extension in time of an effective anxiety-buffer. (p. 78)This cannot be overemphasized. It permits us to understand a crucial aspect of the Oedipal transition: namely, that this transition is fundamentally a training in which the child learns to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem. (pp. 79-80)

Self-esteem is then an integral part of the self-system. If we had to give one definition of "human nature," it would derive from this crucial need: Man is the only animal who needs a symbolic constitution of his worth. The self-system, as we saw, is an evolutionary development that permits action for a special kind of animal. It is a linguistic contrivance, with which the individual relates his consciousness to himself, the objects around him, and to a world of space-time that gives him dependable points of reference. (pp. 80-81)

Self-esteem, then, is an aspect of self-consciousness that permits the self to handle not only present anxieties but past and future ones as well. It had to come into being as a component of action, because the go binds time and fixes the pronominal animal in a world that can be remembered and anticipated. (p. 81)

As soon as the individual can project himself into a past and a future, a new

problem is posed. The ego is tasked to avoid anxiety at that imaginary point in

space-time, and not only in the present. The ego handles this by feeling warm

about its experiences wherever and whenever they are symbolically projected.

(p. 81)

Now, the connection between the ego and culture is clarified at this point.

Culture, remember, provides the action goals for the individual by introducing the possibility of choice between alternatives, weighting them according to degrees of rightness and wrongness. The task for the individual is simple: He has only to choose that action which makes him feel right. A self-objectifying animal must be able to act without anxiety in order to have a conviction of positive self-value. Therefore, if the function of self-esteem is to give the ego a steady buffer against anxiety, wherever and whenever it might be imagined, the function of culture is to make continued self-esteem possible. The main task of culture, in other words, is to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action. (p. 81)

When culture falls down in its job of constructing the self as an object of primary value in a world of meaning, life grinds to a halt. (p. 82)

Socialization, then, serves the vital function of making the behavioral environment automatically dependable. The linguistic ego, as we know so well by now, permits man to live in a world of past, present, and future, and releases him from the tyranny of the moment in which lower animals live. With proper command of culturally codified performance, he frees himself from that other tyranny: the possibility of continually negative valuations by others. In this sense, socialization is a kind of “instinctivization” of the human animal – a paradoxically symbolic instinctivization. The individual is shaped to follow, automatically, certain rules of conduct, and to expect that others will automatically follow them too. (p. 90)

The self-system is a delicately fashioned and, for many, a precariously fragile creation. One doesn’t have to be schizophrenic to wonder how most people stand up so well to the outright threats and insidious underminings that take place in social relations. The self-system of many is charged with the explosive potential of a massively undermining anxiety. Fortunately, the interferences that man lives by can be counted on for the most part. But he can never be sure of person-objects – his most dependable inferences about someone can suddenly be violently or humiliatingly baffled. A person-object is a locus of causality, capable of introducing undreamed-of events into one’s life. The person-object with whom one has lived for years with mathematical dependability may one day calmly slaughter a brood of children. (pp. 93-94)

A society, basically, is a practical system of interaction set up to exploit the environment so that its members can survive. Usually, we conceive of this social organization as a rather routine arrangement. The institutions of society are conventions which the members follow so that the work can be done; that is, bricklayers know how to lay bricks and how to act on the job and at the union hall. But this picture is much too deceptively coarse; it obscures the crucial underlying dynamic. In more subtle focus, the fundamental task that every society on earth must face is truly monumental. Society must protect its person-objects at their sorest point: the fragile self-esteem of each and every member. In the social encounter each member exposes for public scrutiny, and possible in intolerable undermining, the one thing he needs most: the positive self-valuation he has so laboriously fashioned. With stakes of this magnitude there can be nothing routine about social life. Each social encounter is a hallowed event. (p. 94)

Society is tasked to show the self proper deference; the individual must maintain a certain demeanor. The complementary process of social ceremony and self-governance is the theatrical drama for which the child has been laboriously trained. To repeat, the process of socialization of socialization is the fashioning of a skillful performer. The child is trained in the subtle qualities necessary to maintain a proper tension between approaching others and avoiding them. We are familiar with training in deportment, dress, and bearing. The child is taught to be perceptive, to have dignity, considerateness, and

poise: his self, in other words, is fashioned in his own awareness, his self,

in other words, is fashioned in his own awareness, he is taught to have feelings

attach to himself. In one of Zola’s novels a mother, training her daughter in

husband-seeking, shouted, “Be conscious of your body!” (p. 97)

Fundamental to social ceremonial is the proper use of the words; the actor must be able to deliver the lines correctly. The conventions which facilitate social action are largely verbal. But what is the self if not an identifiable locus of communication? What we term “personality” is largely a locus of word possibilities. When we expose our self-esteem to possible undermining by others in a social situation, we are exposing a linguistic identity to other loci of linguistic causality. We have no idea what words are going to spout forth from another’s self-system. (p. 101)

The self-system, in this sense, is an ideational, linguistic device, in a continual state of modification and creation. We sit comfortably in our armchairs pouring forth conventional symbolic abstractions. In this shadowy monotone, we exercise and modify our fragile selves, while our pet cat sits purringly by, convinced probably that we are only purring too. (p. 101)

After the child has fashioned a transactable self his work has hardly begun. He must then learn to use the ritual rules for social interaction. Children are notoriously termed “cruel” – the only way we find of expressing the idea that they have not yet learned to use the face-preserving social conventions. (p. 101)

If the self is primarily a linguistic device, and the identity of the self primarily the experience of control over one’s powers, one fundamental conclusion is inescapable. To present an infallible self is to present one which has unshakable control over words…The proper word or phrase, properly delivered, is the highest attainment of human interpersonal power. The easy handling of the verbal context of action gives the only possibility of direct exercise of control over others. (p. 103)

We are uncomfortable in strange groups and subcultures largely because we cannot frame the appropriate verbal context for sustaining the action or the ceremonial. We do not hear cues familiar to us, nor can we easily give those that make for smooth transitions in conversation. (pp. 104-105)

By using word ceremonial properly the individual can navigate without fear in a threatening social world. He can even ignore the true attitudes of others, as long as he can get by them with the proper ritual formulas of salutation, sustaining conversation, farewells, and so on. The actor has only to be sure of the face-saving ritual rules for interaction. Everyone is permitted the stolid self-assurance that comes with minute observation of unchallengeable rules – we can all become social bureaucrats. (p. 106)

We saw that the fundamental task of culture is to constitute the individual as an object of primary value in a world of meaning. Without this, he cannot act. Now, the proper exercise of ritual formulas provides just this. The actor can feel himself an object of primary value, motivated to act in a mutually meaningful situation. (p. 107)

And when we permit our interlocutor as well as ourself to act in a fabric of shared meaning, we provide him with the possibility of self-validation. As we act meaningfully in pursuit of agreed goals we exercise our self-powers as only they can be exercised. This is vitally important. It is easy to see the reverse side of this same coin: namely, that if we bungle the verbal context for action, if we deliver the wrong lines at the wrong time, we frustrate the possibility of meaningful action and unquestioned motivation. (p. 107)

Directness is self-convincing. Unflinching mastery of the lines actually serves to create meaning by providing an unequivocal context for action. (p. 107)

Thus, the word not only sustains us by outlining a context of action in which we can be meaningfully motivated. It also “creates” us, in a sense, by infusing our action with meaning. That is, as we act meaningfully we exercise our powers and create our identity. Self-validation is only possible through meaningful action in a social context. (p. 108)

Man is a social creator as well as a social creature. By the social exercise of linguistic power man creates his own identity and reinforces that of others. In this sense, identity is simply the measure of power and participation of the individual in the joint cultural staging of self-enhancing ceremony. (p. 108)

Only by proper performance in a social context does the individual fashion and renew himself by purposeful action in a world of shared meaning. Loneliness is not only a suspension in self-acquaintance. It is a suspension in the very fashioning of identity; cut off from one’s fellows, one cannot add his power to the enhancing of cultural meaning or derive his just share of it. Social ceremonial is a joint theatrical staging whose purpose it is to sustain and create meaning for all its members. It is the vital drama in which socialization schools the infant to act. (p. 108)

Status, remember, is a social technique for facilitating action. It divides our social environment into a behavioral map, and by living according to the positional cues, our actions take on the only meaning they can have. Our alertness to the performance of others, therefore, is an expression of our concern over sustaining the underlying meaning of the plot[.] (p. 110)

In other words, we must feel that the performer deserves his status, and if he didn’t deserve it he wouldn’t be able convincingly to play it. (p. 110)

Finally, one of the points of strain in the sustenance and creation of cultural meaning is the experience of shame. For an animal trained as a performer, failure to uphold one’s part in the plot is deeply wounding. To bungle the performance, to show oneself hopelessly inept, is to lose face, and jeopardize the face of others. To lose face is to strike at one’s fragile self-esteem, to open oneself up to the core of his anxiety-proneness. (p. 125)

The experience of shame, by going to the heart of anxiety, and upsetting our intricate defenses against it, seems to be a direct way of implanting a doubt about the whole precarious production. It seems very apt that man should question meaning when the performance designed to sustain it is bungled. Paradoxically, it seems that man in his symbolic wholeness rises above the fiction when it fails to prevent the agony of shame. (p. 125)