Self esteem is of course huge, and it is of course the great socializer, since it is what impels us all to seek ways to get others to think well of us, as a means of reassurance in feeling good about ourselves. But of course it also means sacrificing some moietey of your own personal principles in favor of the principles of the mob, so that the question becomes: just which portion of your personal principles are you willing to sacrifice? If a lot of you happened to be invested in your love of the gods, would you then be willing to be the mob's kind of heathen, for instance, by swapping the esteem of your gods for the esteem of a mob who hates your gods and has been calling them devils for the last fifteen hundred years? Not to me; at least not if there is another way. And to me, although it is admittedly a much more difficult path, the real source of self esteem should be from within just that; the self, and the clean conscience. If your gods are real and respect you and you love them, and you know inside what a pearl of great price that troth is, how can you help but to feel pretty good about that? And how can you thus help feeling good about yourself, no matter what the mob may think, since you're obviously just that much smarter than the mob, who don't even have any gods, so what do they know?

As I say, a more difficult path, and undoubtably one that calls for a good deal more "individualism" than you would probably ever have expected to hear coming out of me. And one that might or might not ever be able to transpersonalize its way into becoming a collective self-esteem of the folk... although I suspect that it might even prove to have that power too. As they say, give me ten strong men who are stout-hearted men and I'll soon give you ten thousand more. But one thing it certainly will give you is a self-esteem that is truer. Sell out to the fickle conventional opinions of the mob, and how true a coin of mob-esteem do you think you, as a heathen, will ever be really paid back in return? I can tell you this much; only about as much as it may regularly take for the mob to keep you around as their fool, for awhile, until they get bored with you and start demanding more. To me, that's a fool's bargain, not to mention a coin on which the gods you love, who know a sellout when they see one, might well be inclined to give you a rather poor rate of exchange.

Godspeed......

Garman