Self-Pity: The First and Last Delusion

I struggle to avoid self-pity. I would rather be self-reproachful, which has lent its own challenges. But I would rather believe that I’m nothing special and be right than the opposite and be wrong.

This wrong belief is the basis of self-pity: the idea that, among all people, my unique inner qualities mean that I should be spared from the hardships of human life.

It is a natural human inclination, but self-pity leads to some of the worst that humanity has to offer.

Definitions

First allow me to define “pity,” and distinguish it from its seemingly related but distinct cousins, sympathy, empathy, and compassion.

If sympathy means to understand someone else’s feelings and in so doing comfort them, and empathy means actually feeling those feelings, and compassion means “to walk in someone else’s shoes,” then pity means “feeling sorry” for someone.

This attitude towards someone has two components: a feeling of superiority, and an active desire to cushion or protect oneself against their feelings, to NOT feel as they feel or share their perspective intellectually.

When someone says, “I feel sorry for you,” it usually is meant in a negative way. And no one wants it said to them; those who do, who are “fishing for pity,” are often as low in character as they are in spirit.

And one—being prone to self-pity—leads to and informs the other: being a person of low character, who often spreads unhappiness to those around them.

Of course, we might all fish for pity, or feel sorry for ourselves, once in a while. As an example, I wake up feeling sick and call in to work to ask for the day off. If my boss takes pity on me, they will probably give me the day off. Sometimes it is normal to do it, especially among children.

Or at the end of a hard work day, I’m not paying attention and stub my toe, leading to disproportionate pain. A whisper of self-pity might color my attitude, lightly salving my feelings of iniquity. Indeed, this is its purpose.

“Why me?” is a handy and age-old deflection of the less-palatable question, “why not me?” And everyone asks it sometimes.

But I’m referring to people who do seek pity habitually, specifically adults, for whom it becomes a default mode of expression.

So what, then, is self-pity?

It is the tendency to want to protect oneself from actually feeling one’s own feelings, i.e. to prevent having sympathy, empathy, or compassion towards oneself, which would require at least an understanding (i.e. sympathy as defined above) of one’s own feelings.

Being out of touch with one’s feelings is a type of mild delusion.

You feel one way—pain, sadness, anger, loss, fear, self-disgust—but you are not conscious of it. You are conscious of another feeling—persecution, denial, entitlement, non-culpability, contempt—that obscures, distorts, or alters your true one, and turns it towards an alternate purpose besides being felt.

Hence, one’s conscious thought, of which one is aware, is not a reflection of one’s true feelings. It is a reflection of feelings that one does not actually have, or at least a distorted or altered version of them.

I.e., it is not “real.”

In this way, it is a falsehood taken as reality. This is why, if I’m out of touch with my feelings, I can be convinced of almost anything despite all proof to the contrary.

Aberrant, illogical, fallible feelings, and thoughts derived from them, can dictate a mentality of complete malleability, even at the expense of one’s own interests.

This is why adults can sometimes—perhaps more these days—behave like children. Children are out of touch with their feelings because they are experiencing many of them for the first time and lack perspective of the gravity of one feeling over another, its duration, or its tendency to be incorrect, incomplete, or fleeting, no matter how unbearably strong it is in the moment.

They lack the words to describe or grade them, and hence experience them as either unadulteratedly pleasurable happiness or as unfamiliar and terrifying dangers.

For example, a child gets soap in her eye during a bath and cries in pain, not knowing that this pain is neither mortal nor permanent. The parent who comforts her reassures her that it will pass, and then implicitly or explicitly emphasizes the lessons to be learned when it does: namely, that she is strong, she’s a “big girl,” and that feelings are not always right.

Because of this formative quality, children can also be most easily molded by what is told to them. They can imagine and believe in things that don’t exist. Their entire outlook and identity is shaped by what they are told and shown is “real” and “right” at an early age.

Adults behave like children, however, not because it is all they know, but because it feels good. Which, sadly to me but blissfully to them, ostensibly, is all they know in many cases, and they want to keep it that way.

They want to live in a world of pure subjectivity, where truth is defined by one’s feelings while the external world is, in fact, the illusion.

If their feelings, however, were not a lie….if they were capable of experiencing them and the world and perhaps even life itself as they actually are and not as what feels good, they might actually be able to succeed in this endeavor.

But they are governed by self-pity, by delusion, by lies. As such, they are gripped in fear like the child with soapy eyes.

Their tendency towards believing misinformation is based on the pretense that they are not strong but vulnerable, and under attack, and that feelings are not just feelings but intuitive truths.

The Five Sub-Delusions

As the First and Last Delusion, self-pity generally leads to five sub-delusions:

Grandiosity, as I’ve already touched on: the feeling that you are superior to other people

Entitlement: the feeling that your superiority entitles you to things, opportunities, or recognition that is unearned

Persecution: the feeling that people are against you, don’t like you, or want you to fail, because they are jealous of you (and your superiority)

Also mentioned earlier, what I call Sólopónos, “alone pain”: the feeling that people aren’t “against” anyone else, and no one else has truly suffered; only you.

Contempt: a professed inability to treat other people respectfully, patiently, or considerately because you are both better than them and in too much pain, and far too busy WITH the pain, to exert total responsibility over yourself or your emotions

Often the first and most obvious is a sense of persecution.

The self-pitying person believes that everyone is out to get him. Nothing in his life which hinders him is his own creation or fault. Instead, the world works against him, and generally not against OTHER people; it works for everyone but himself.

This leads to the next delusion, sónopónos, which is tied to the first, which is the belief that only the self-pitying person truly experiences pain, suffering, hardship, or adversity.

This mindset acts, in a way, to justify his sense of superiority to others upon which his sense of persecution is based. No one else suffers as he does; therefore, he is special.

The next delusion is a sense of entitlement, which of course follows from a sense of superiority as well as soloponos, because no one suffers as much as he does, hence no one deserves as much compensation or pity/compassion/second chances as him.

The self-pitying person believes that he is entitled to things that he has not worked for or, in any meaningful, concrete, or sufficient way, earned.

How does self-pity relate to this tendency?

The self-pitier pities himself according to the belief that, despite his innate and certain superiority, his entitlements have been denied him by the persecuting world, which despises uniqueness and intelligence such as his and persecutes only him and no one else, and no one else knows or can appreciate what he is going through since the discomfort other people feel is nothing compared to this patent injustice of not getting what he wants and is entitled to. And the reason they don’t feel it is that they are not as intelligent, creative, or truth-seeking as he is, and so he is contemptuous of and actively scornful towards their apparent happiness or lack of self-pity.

I.e., their lack of misery. So self-pitiers spread misery and contempt in various ways and to various degrees, or at least do nothing to combat it in themselves or in society.

How These Sub-Delusions Are Indeed False

All of these attitudes are delusions, i.e. objectively false, as shown:

Grandiosity: he is NOT superior to other people. Although his abilities and proficiencies might differ, he does not deserve special treatment or privileges because of some innate or superhuman quality.

Entitlement: he does NOT deserve these privileges because, believing them to be innate, he has done nothing TO deserve them. He merely FEELS he deserves them, which is an incorrect feeling.

(The idea of “deserving” itself is totally subjective, fabricated, pseudo-religious, and not found in nature.)

Persecution: no one who does nothing of importance is persecuted for it. In fact, ineffectualness and unremarkability are often rewarded in society by having a gentle, pleasant, safe life, which he is completely unable to perceive as such.

Soloponos: pain is part of the human condition, and he is certainly not the only recipient of it, nor, generally, is his pain the most egregious throughout the world.

Contempt: he treats other people prejudicially, in a way that he himself would never tolerate, and is therefore offended and only affirmed in his other delusions when someone stands up to him, points out his faults, or finds him intolerable to be around.

Why Be Self-Piteous?

This is a description of a person who is incapable of analyzing the causes of either his own, other people’s, or society’s conditions.

So why would anyone choose to live like this?

The first answer is that no one consciously chooses to do so. They act this way because they lact the insight, patience, or humility necessary to recognize that it is the limiting factor in their life.

But what if “behavior is a solution,” as cognitive therapists sometimes say? What is self-pity a “solution” for?

It is a solution in that level-headed and practical analysis would undermine his sense of VICTIMHOOD. Hence it is what the self-pitier fears most, while self-pity—which instead justifies this victim sense—becomes what he values most.

Sadly, while he he does indeed suffer—I don’t mean to imply that he does not—he is not the only one who suffers as a result of his self-pity. Therein lies a good portion of the immorality of self-pity, and pity in general.

How Is Self-Pity Immoral if it only hurts the self-pitier?

It doesn’t. If it did, it would still be immoral. But to the extent it hurts other people, it’s even worse. Let me explain.

Imagine the self-pitier. He seeks to be pitied by other people. He doesn’t really want sympathy, empathy, or compassion, because he does not want to connect with them or show vulnerability. He doesn’t want to expose himself to the logical, solution-oriented outlooks that often come with seeking help when it is driven by a genuine desire to improve his own situation.

Rather, he wants to spread his self-pity onto others and produce, in them, a similarly warped and incorrect image of him—a piteous image, a deluded image—of someone who lacks any responsibility for or control over his situation, and who is, in fact, a victim rather than a perpetrator or bystander.

What is being perpetrated is the spread of pity, the spread of delusion. In this way, pity harms the person who pities as much as if not more than it harms the person who is pitied.

And this is true of all pity, not just self-pity.

So How Do I Combat Self-Pity?

In order to treat a delusion, the truth must be made accessible. If humankind’s purpose is to understand the truth, and the truth starts in being true with oneself, then combatting self-pity begins with looking inward.

I mentioned earlier that such people—habitual self-pitiers—suffer. They suffer from the true injustice of what they deprive themselves of, both emotionally and in their life’s course. They deprive themselves of truth, of clarity regarding what is really important, nd of the insight required to improve one’s life. After enough time spent relying on their self-pity for their sense of who they are, they seek only to sustain it; it has become the defining feature of their identity, like an addiction.

What kind of a sad, painful life must that be?

Let’s identify the opposite of the five delusions that might allow them to effectively pursue a new path, and that have helped me avoid the trap of self-pity to the best of my ability.

First I’ll reiterate the delusion, and then state its opposite.

Grandiosity→Humility, the knowledge of one’s shared degree of significance or value in comparison to someone else

Entitlement→Gratitude, or a feeling of appreciation for what one has rather than a persistent awareness of what one lacks.
Also, →Generosity, pleasure from giving rather than receiving

Persecution→Solidarity, finding common cause with others who suffer in order to see one’s own strength in them and vice versa, and work towards a common good

Soloponos→Empathy, specifically the ability to contextualize and feel one’s own pain, and one’s joy, as part of the human condition and not unique to oneself

Contempt→Respect, the assumption that other people DO have things to teach me, that they HAVE suffered, that they CAN understand me, and the challenges they face are the result of ignorance at worst, and an unjust, ignorance-prone, ill-prioritied society at best.

What follows from these character traits is rare in our society (and these are all in the “trying” category; they are rarely mastered or universalized in the person), much rarer than someone for whom self-pity or its ways is a default emotion:

Someone who treats other people the same, no matter who they are.

Someone who views themselves as equally divine and equally valueless as the next person, all possessed of the same inexplicable electric impulse of “life” and “consciousness” that makes all feeling possible, as well as all human need.

Someone who recognizes that true feelings of self-worth come from within, from discarding all delusion and treating oneself with the same great kindness and love that one might reserve for a benign master.

Someone for whom self-worth comes from action, not from contemplation of action. It comes from achievement that breeds recognition, not from contemplation of achievement. It comes from emotional fulfillment and honesty, not from emotional denial, evasion, or escape.

Someone for whom principles without action don’t count, and essentially don’t matter. A person’s feelings are not expressions of their beliefs; their actions are. They act as they believe, and they don’t act as they don’t believe. If they don’t disrupt the status quo, it is because they believe in self-preservation. If they don’t pursue a difficult ethical path that they espouse, it is because they value their own comfort more. There is no shame in these realities per se; there is only shame in SELF-DELUSION and the DEACTIVATION OF POTENTIAL that comes with it.

It is easier to imagine ourselves as the person we wish we were than to become that person.

This is the purpose of self-pity, of all emotional escapes and evasions, of all drugs and addictions, and, in fact, of all delusion entirely. It makes us into the person we wish we were.

But that person, and the life that goes with it, is a delusion. Far better to accept who you are, failings and weaknesses and fears and all, and in so doing, either decide to accept life as the gift that it is, or figure out how to truly overcome them, than to pretend they don’t exist.