Low self-esteem is good for you! We’ve been too successful at making people feel good

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell

Is low self-esteem all that bad? Self-loathing is. But between self-loathing and narcissism is a vast spectrum comprising infinitely various degrees of self-regard. Neither extreme is good. If only we could just reach medium.

In 1986, California state assembly member John Vasconcellos proposed the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. This ignited a new movement: Based on the notion that low self-esteem caused every kind of social woe from teenage pregnancy to low test scores and high dropout rates, school curricula and parenting techniques were radically transformed, their main objective now being to cultivate high self-esteem among the young, which activists proclaimed would cure those social woes and make America a safer, happier, and better place. A multibillion-dollar industry surged around self-esteem. Kids were taught to make “me” flags of their putative “me” nations, to view history and fiction through the filter of their feelings, and to start schooldays with affirmations such as I always make good choices and Everyone is happy to see me.

The aftermath has not worked out as planned. Since 1986, self-esteem among young people has increased. Studies show that students hold themselves in higher regard than students in decades past. But to the shock and horror of the self-esteem movement’s boosters, soaring self-esteem has done nothing to stem crime, addiction and those other ills the boosters claimed high self-esteem would stem. In fact, ambient sky-high self-esteem might present new problems of its own: One long-term study found that college students are now twice as narcissistic as college students were in 1982; other studies link high self-esteem with high rates of aggression, territorialism, elitism, racism, and other negative qualities.

And other studies show that the so-called Millennial Generation – young adults born after the self-esteem movement began — are demonstrably less likely than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers to care about social problems, current events or energy conservation. Millennials are also less likely to have jobs whose main purpose is to help other people. In one study, three times as many Millennials as Boomers said they made no personal effort to help the environment.

“Certain forms of high self-esteem seem to increase one’s proneness to violence,” reads one report published in the journal of the American Psychological Association. “An uncritical endorsement of the cultural value of high self-esteem may therefore be counterproductive and even dangerous. The societal pursuit of high self-esteem for everyone may literally end up doing considerable harm.”

Noting that there are “almost no findings showing that [high] self-esteem causes anything [beneficial] at all,” University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman laments:

“Something striking has happened to the self-esteem of American children during the era of raising our children to feel good. They have never been more depressed.”

This is no doubt partly because, raised to believe that they are special and perfect and entitled to all good things, they face terrible comedowns in the real world.

If (as often happens nowadays) every student in a class gets an A grade or every player in a tournament gets a trophy not because they all deserved these things, but rather in order to boost their self-esteem, then A becomes commonplace and meaningless, an average grade of no particular pride-inducing significance, just as C was a few decades ago. And the notion of “victory” is blurred. If everyone is special, then no one is special. Q.E.D.

Such revelations might shock the self-esteem boosters, who envisioned high self-esteem as an all-powerful magic potion, but will probably not shock us. Researchers have found that high self-esteem does not guarantee happiness and is often linked with depression because those whose self-esteem is elevated on false or flimsy pretexts – e.g., being told that everyone adores you or being told you’re perfect just for existing – are highly susceptible to all perceived slights. So-called beneficiaries of the self-esteem boom have been brainwashed to believe they deserve the best grades, the best treatment, the best of everything. Thus they are very easily offended, angered, disappointed, and crushed by even the faintest criticism. Psychologists call that kind of sky-high but baseless self-esteem “fragile self-esteem.” Its healthy opposite is achievement-based “secure self-esteem” – otherwise known as earned self-respect – which is not necessarily sky-high, but less likely to leave its possessors sulking and raging when the real world delivers its usual harsh doses of reality.

People with high self-esteem often seem like aliens to us, and icky aliens at that. We blame ourselves for everything. They take no blame. We’re always sorry. They never are. We fear punishment. They don’t. Often, they do the punishing. Our flaws obsess us. They think they have none.

“One has only to go into a prison,” writes former jail doctor Theodore Dalrymple, “to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people (the young thugs) who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate.”

A comprehensive review of self-esteem research published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science in 2003 is titled “Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?”

According to its authors, a team of professors from major universities, the answer is no, no, no, and no.

“Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes,” the authors warn. In fact, “indiscriminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences.”

They recommend instead that high self-esteem be promoted not as a basic birthright but rather as a goal attained through achievements and ethical behavior. (Hey, why did no one ever think of this before? Oh wait, they did. It was how every culture on Earth functioned until a few years ago.) In other words, feeling good should stem from doing good.

Self-loathing and narcissism are both unhealthy because both are forms of self-absorption, albeit at opposite extremes. Whether we are always sorry or never sorry, it is all about us.

Most spiritual paths advocate a conscientious middle ground. According to these doctrines, good people just do good, which generally entails neither playing dead nor playing God.

According to the Tao Te Ching, a sage “does not consider himself right, and thus is illustrious. He does not brag, and thus has merit. … The sage knows himself but does not display himself.”

“Nothing in the world is as soft and gentle as water. Yet it has great strength. It flows downhill and can easily wear away the hardest stone. The soft and gentle can conquer the hard and firm.”

In Christian tradition, pride is not just one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but is considered the worst sin of all, a mortal sin, and the cause of all others. The original term for this sin was not “pride” but the Greek word hubris, which some scholars say should be more accurately translated as “unmerited high self-esteem.” For two thousand years in the Western world, high self-esteem or pride was considered a moral failing – yet now children are brought up believing that it’s the highest virtue.

Spiritual texts laud the modest and the humble. “The palace pillar is wide, but the human heart should be modest,” reads a Shinto poem. “The inhabitants of Paradise will be all the humble and the weak,” reads Islam’s Hadith of Bukhari. “Be humble; be harmless; have no pretension,” urges the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita.

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father,” warns the New Testament’s Book of Matthew. “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility is wisdom,” notes the Book of Proverbs. Saint Augustine observed: “There can only be two basic loves: The love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.”

Through a practice known as bodhicitta, devout Buddhists pledge to spread compassion through the world, aiming to end the suffering of “all sentient beings.” The funny thing that happens in the midst of all this liberating, shimmering compassion is that somewhere down the road, you realize that all sentient beings include you.

Low self-esteem does not enlighten us. Self-loathing is not holy. But, all else aside, low self-esteem makes us contemplative and introspective. Our perfectionism makes us diligent. We celebrate small pleasures – albeit because we believe ourselves unworthy of big ones. We try hard. We aim to please. Low self-esteem makes some of us creative – as we seek meaning in pain. Low self-esteem makes some of us respectful – because we assume everyone is better than us. Low self-esteem makes some of us gentle – because we are not strong. Low self-esteem makes some of us hilarious – because self-deprecating humor is humor indeed. Low self-esteem makes some of us good listeners – because we do not want to listen to ourselves. Low self-esteem makes some of us empathic – because we have suffered, so we know.

We who hate ourselves are not saints. And yet self-loathing – in spite of itself – has given us gifts that we get to keep.

2002: The perils of designer tribalism "......................... the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others—smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.

Henry’s quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive’s compassion, “respect,” and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:

Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?

Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: “The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job.”

This is a truth that was broadly recognized at least through the 1950s. With the failure of colonialism, however, came a gigantic failure of nerve. (It might be said, in fact, that the failure of colonialism was a gigantic failure of nerve.) More and more, confusion replaced confidence, and with confusion came the pathologies of guilt.

Since the folly of locking up native peoples in their old-time cultures is obvious, but it is tactless to say so, governments have everywhere resorted to the rhetoric of “reconciliation.” This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we are all on the same plain of social development divided only by misunderstanding.

But this assumption, Sandall emphasizes, “is false.” And it was recognized as false by governments everywhere until quite recently. Around 1970, the big change set in. Then, instead of attempting to help primitives enter the modern world, we were enjoined to admire them and their (suitably idealized) way of life. As Sandall observes, “the effect on indigenes of romanticizing their past has been devastating.”

If your traditonal way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is “rich,” “complex,” and “sophisticated,” how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? Why not hang up a “Gone Fishing” sign and head for the beach? I might do that myself. In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.

The statistics are grim. Between 1965 and 1975, Sandall reports, Aborigines arrived at one college with sixth-grade reading levels; in 1990, after primary education had been handed over to local Aboriginal communities, that had fallen to third grade. Today most Aborigines arrive at the college in question almost completely illiterate.

This social disaster was the result of specific political policies. But the policies themselves were the result of a moral attitude, one that many anthropologists have actively nurtured. In part, the attitude is a reflection of the Lévi-Straussian “non-hierarchical” view of culture: the view which denies that there are important distinctions to be made between la pensée sauvage and the mind, for example, of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In part, what we might call the “anthropological attitude” is a coefficient of the idea—also fostered by Lévi-Strauss, among many others—that culture is at bottom a “narrative,” a product of “social construction.” And the results of that development—corrosive skepticism, blasé nihilism, irresponsible relativism—have helped to place anthropology in the intellectual slum wherein it now molders. “For more than twenty years,” Sandall writes, “anthropologists have written about constructing reality as if the world and everything in it were mere artifact, about building identity as if any old self-glamourizing fiction will do, about creating the past as an enterprise more exciting than history, about inventing tradition as if traditions were as changeable as store windows.” “As if,” indeed. Sandall is very good on all this, and I only wish that he had devoted more space to discussing the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is mentioned only in passing. He is one of the most influential and oleaginous proponents of the all-is-narrative, all-cultures-are-equal position now writing. He is a real postmodern culture-cultist who would have benefited—well, we would have benefited—from a closer look.

It is part of the ethos of designer tribalism to foist all of one’s own attitudes and longings onto the apparently blank canvas of whatever primitive populace happens to be in vogue at the moment. To some extent, this is simply a matter of ignorance, as illustrated, for example, by Christopher Columbus’s report that the people he discovered “are very gentle, and know nothing of evil.” But the culture cultist supplements ignorance with heavy helpings of ideology and idealization. He looks at an exotic culture and, lo and behold, he finds himself looking into a flattering mirror. This is one reason that natives always seem to be non-smoking, vegetarian, sex-worshipping, drug-taking, eco-conscious, progressive-thinking pacifists—according, anyway, to the press releases distributed by the culture cultists."............................

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