I notice that all of the mass murderers of the past two decades are quite young, teens or early-mid twenties.
I have known about the debunking of the self-esteem movement for some time, and known that violent criminals often have very high self-esteem, as well as other fantasies and delusions.
I have two theories about how this silly idea got started.
The first is the great difficulty some people have coming to terms with evil. They see someone do something very bad, very antisocial and try to explain it because they cannot imagine themselves doing it. So they conclude that it must be caused by lack of self-esteem or “sickness” because that’s the only way they could picture themselves doing things like this.
Second, there are problems that young people have—drug and alcohol use, eating disorders, suicide attempts, sexual acting out—that do stem from low self-esteem. But serious criminal behavior is something else again. But I think that the two are lumped together.
Obviously self-esteem building exercises that are divorced from accomplishments are ridiculous.
I remember reading in the paper once several years ago about some Indian tribe that was having trouble with youth gang activity and things like that. One if the tribal leaders seemed to think that teaching their old language would be a panacea. I wonder how that worked for them. It seemed evident to me that us was a crisis of morality and values and language didnt have much to do with it.