The jester has a day off, but he cannot resist entertaining the party guests in an inn. He is haing a beer with his friend. Gripped by the music, he takes to dance floor while juggling cups. His friend watches, and the jester invites him join him on the dance floor, but his friend is not in the mood. The jester accepts that his friend’s needs are different and instead buys him another beer.
"Once upon a time, there was a man who loved himself and others for what they are."
The notion of the self-esteem paradigm
Scientific development unfolds through so-called revolutions, which occur when there is a build-up of anomalies – problems that cannot be solved within the existing paradigm. This eventually causes a paradigm shift as the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by a new one.
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The confidence paradigm has many inherent challenges in relation to promoting health and human sustainability, because its premise is that we are loved for what we do rather than for who we are. When we go against our natural human needs, pushing ourselves and our needs aside in order to achieve love, we may eventually reach a level of self-denial that results in stress, burnout, loss of integrity, misery and many other psychological and emotional challenges. When that happens, it is time to introduce something new, better and, perhaps, revolutionary. We have to change the paradigm, returning to the self-esteem paradigm, which may in fact have been our inherent and natural mindset but has long since been forgotten. The revolution thus consists in bringing an original paradigm back into play in a human and societal situation that, in many ways, has come off the rails.