Replies

The stupidity of concern with self-esteem rather than self-respect has been one of my pet hobby horses for years now, along with the inordinate concern in every psychology class, popular psychology book, management guru, organizational consultant and thus most schools, churches and businesses with process rather than actual results. But that's a whole other story....

Well stated. I've been in the belly of the self-esteem beast. Edited a book by Nathaniel Branden, the "father of the self-esteem movement." Branden actually wrote that self=esteem resulted from accomplishment, but the idiots who followed him distilled that part out. Then I spent some time with a group of followers of Virginia Satir, a self-styled family therapist and self-esteem guruette. They called themselves "The Hundred Beautiful People," a real case of hubris, since most of them were ugly. Branden was NOT a member.

Anyway, the 100 were psychologists from all over the country who pushed the self-esteem sans self-respect movement into the schools. They made a CA state congressman a member and he, in turn, sponsored successful legislation to get self-esteem legislation into the schools. I can't even begin to describe what unprincipled, self-serving, idiots these people are -- or were, since they were rather elderly. One of the fun things they did at their meetings was to swap wives, at least some of them. So you see how upstanding and moral they are...I ran for the door!

I've read some Nathaniel Branden and I do recall his making the point about accomplishment; however, I thought he was wrong in failing to distinguish between self-esteem and self-respect and I would fault him (and he a former acolyte of Ayn Rand and her cold logic) for sloppy thinking in so doing. His self-talk stuff, too, degenerates easily from talking yourself into doing things that create self-respect into vainglory and delusional self-congratulation.

Oh, yes, I, too, have seen the belly of the pop psych beast, beginning in the '60s with people who dangerously popularized their misunderstanding of Fritz Perls' gestalt therapy: tearing people down and then failing to put them back together again, through Est and so-onward into self-esteem. I agree with you about the lack of character and moral fiber of these popular gurus and gurettes, when I was at the University of California the sociology and psychology departments were the most notorious for professors hitting on students and passing them around the departments from professor to professor and then to the TAs as their freshness and novelty wore off. I knew a few girls who'd been passed around that way, and they were pretty bitter when they figured out how they'd been used.