There's a story about the Dalai Lama that I heard from my mother recently. It runs something like this:
In an interview, the Dalai Lama was asked about the self-hatred and self-loathing in Western culture. He was surprised by it, the very concept had never even crossed his mind. It's just not a problem in Eastern culture.
It sounds too clean and too pat for it to be true, or at least for it to be true the way it's phrased here. But it lead me down a certain line of thinking, and then I and a friend (thank you Lee!) happened, entirely by coincidence, to discourse a little bit on self-confidence. The following is derived from both.
