Posted on 10/17/2002 5:18:29 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
| Robert Fulford | |
| National Post |
Connoisseurs of human foolishness will always cherish that giddy moment in 1987 when the California legislature, convinced it had found the key to understanding human failure, set up the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. The assemblyman who promoted this idea, John Vasconcellos, believed that raising the self-image of the citizens would cure drug addiction, crime and many other social ills. This project, Vasconcellos argued, was as important as unlocking the secrets of the atom.
The task force's supporters considered it the takeoff point for the self-esteem movement, but it may instead have been the beginning of the end. This much-publicized example of California eccentricity made people reconsider a belief that had taken a firm grip on the popular imagination years before: That people who hold themselves in high regard will act well and those who don't will act badly.
That sounds like a reasonable notion, and millions still believe it, but it won't stand up under serious thought and it crumples under research. It now appears that those who peddle the promise of self-esteem, including the authors of some 3,000 self-help books, are the modern equivalents of 19th-century snake-oil salesmen. It also appears that high self-esteem can often be harmful rather than beneficial.
The term self-esteem goes back at least to the 17th century. Milton in Paradise Lost suggested that sometimes nothing profits us more than well-grounded self-esteem. In 1890 William James, in Principles of Psychology, outlined a relationship between self-esteem and accomplishment.
The idea as we know it began flowering about half a century ago. The ground was prepared by The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), in which Norman Vincent Peale claimed happiness and material success result from personal optimism and self-regard. Around the same time, clinical studies in psychology showed connections between high self-esteem and success in school, business, marriage and sex.
Low self-esteem, on the other hand, showed up frequently alongside teenage pregnancy, drug-taking, wife-beating and homicide. In the 1960s two books by psychiatrists, Morris Rosenberg's Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (1965) and Stanley Coopersmith's The Antecedents of Self-Esteem (1967), claimed that the right kind of parental attention produces high self-esteem, therefore success, in children.
Armies of psychotherapists leapt on that idea, and soon intellectual garbage began piling up around it in great quantities. In 1969, Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist from Toronto who was once the lover and acolyte of Ayn Rand, moved over to this burgeoning field with The Psychology of Self Esteem, declaring self-esteem "the single most significant key to behaviour." In 1996 Steven Ward wrote in the Canadian Journal of Sociology: "What started as a fragile statement made by William James had by the early 1970s expanded into an encompassing and heterogeneous academic network."
Unfortunately for all those who committed their careers to promulgating this idea, most of what they wrote turns out to be worthless. Low self-esteem often accompanies serious social deviance, but there's no evidence to show that the first causes the second. An often repeated belief of Oprah Winfrey, that poor self-esteem is "the root of all the problems in the world" remains entirely unproven. It's just something that got drummed into her head.
In 1990 California's task force turned in its report, Toward A State Of Esteem, predictably advising school teachers to make students feel better about themselves. More books appeared. Gloria Steinem, a bit late, contributed Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem in 1992. (It turned out that she too suffered from low self-esteem, despite her power, brains and looks. Who knew?)
The task force became a joke (Doonesbury made great fun of it) but the first serious criticism didn't appear until 1996. Three researchers, reporting in Psychology Review on a survey of studies in psychology and criminology, broke the bad news: aggressive people tend to think highly of themselves. Violent and hostile people -- neo-Nazis, wife-beaters, members of the Ku Klux Klan, etc. -- "consistently express favourable views of themselves."
Last year Nicholas Emler, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, said a close study of the research shows no evidence that low self-esteem leads to delinquency, violence, drug use, alcohol abuse, educational under-attainment or racism. As for high self-esteem, that's a real problem. High scorers on self-esteem questionnaires are often racists and often engage in antisocial activities, such as drunk driving. In one study, conducted in Massachusetts and California, researchers gave standardized self-esteem tests to men serving time for murder, rape, assault or armed robbery. They discovered that the self-esteem of these criminals wasn't notably different from five other samples of men the same age: Vietnam veterans, problem drinkers, dentists, college students and recreational dart throwers.
An article by Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan, "The costs of seeking self-esteem," in the current issue of the Journal of Social Issues, describes the two most disastrous effects that flow from "the vicious and costly cycle of seeking self-esteem." First, people pursuing self-esteem tend to avoid acknowledging their errors. They attribute failure to external causes and can't learn from mistakes. Because they are committed to a high opinion of themselves, they react to criticism by protecting their self-esteem rather than improving their work. Second, the pursuit of self-esteem makes it hard to get along with others. In hundreds of studies, people whose self-esteem is threatened respond with avoidance, distancing, blame, excuses, anger, antagonism, and aggression -- each of them a way of undermining love or friendship. "The degree of self-focus required by the pursuit of self-esteem," Crocker argues, "is incompatible with awareness and responsiveness to others' needs." So the quest for self-esteem stands in the way of fulfilling two essential human needs, to be competent and to form relationships.
Nicholas Emler says that in England violent criminals and racists have been put through every test the profession has developed. The results are always the same. The men don't lack self-esteem. They like themselves. "These men," Emler has decided, are racist or violent "because they don't feel bad enough about themselves."
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, says the old cliché, and we might add that there's nothing more pathetic, and nothing more embarrassing, than an idea whose time has come and gone.
"Love your neighbor as you love yourself" has endured longer than the fulminations of some obscure Canadian.
He ridicules psychologists for touting the effects of self-esteem, then uses psychologists to debunk same.
He can't have it both ways.
"The degree of self-focus required by the pursuit of self-esteem," Crocker argues, "is incompatible with awareness and responsiveness to others' needs." So the quest for self-esteem stands in the way of fulfilling two essential human needs, to be competent and to form relationships.
Love your neighbor? The narcissist is incapable.
Much of psychology is sound science. Much of it is junk "science." The self-esteem movement is not just a fad. It destroys the soul, weakens resolve, and is written about in the Bible as the Serpent's seduction of Eve, Satan's temptation of Christ and Peter's words to Jesus upon learning of His coming sacrifice. The self-esteem movement is a blanket excuse for not doing what we know we need to do, for taking the easy path, for blaming others.
Neither could Oedipus.
Those who truly value themselves, who have true "self-esteem," ironically don't think much about themselves at all. They are so confident that they are loved children of God that they know their worth, and they can't help but share the good gifts they have been given with others.
Whatever Crocker is talking about, he is not talking about true self-esteem. He is, as you say, talking about narcissism, which isn't self-esteem at all, but a loathing of self.
Bill Clinton was a perfect example of a self-hater. He simply couldn't live a moment without knowing what other people thought of him. A narcissist NEEDS people; he leeches off of people and sucks them dry, emotionally, because he has no sense of self-worth.
The self-esteem movement is a blanket excuse for not doing what we know we need to do, for taking the easy path, for blaming others.
On the contrary, a self-confident person, secure in his self-esteem, always moves outward. He doesn't need other people; rather, he gives to them because he is secure in what he is and what he has.
Mother Teresa was supremely self-confident because she knew she didn't have to hoard her gifts. Her path was not easy, but she loved it, because she knew she was doing what her life's calling brought her to.
We may be talking about semantics here, but self-esteem means knowing yourself thoroughly, faults as well as strengths, and sharing the strengths, while working to overcome the faults.
That's better described as "self-confidence".
"Self-esteem", however, is (or at least has been co-opted as) an ersatz form of self-confidence. It's a kind of phony self-confidence that is not based on any real ability or merit, but instead is form of constant patting yourself on the back, whether it's deserve or not. Maybe even *especially* when it's not deserved.
It's satirized in the slogan of Al Franken's SNL character, Stuart Smalley: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and gosh darn it people like me!". It's the self-conscious *forced* self-regard, the kind that becomes a practiced goal unto itself. It's someone who would rather learn to "feel good" about themselves than actually become someone worthy of genuine pride.
It's the liberal touchy-feely version of self-confidence, where how you *feel* about something is more important than what it actually *is*.
It's what leads to such Alice-in-Wonderland ideas as doing away with grades in school, and instead giving all the students gold stars for "trying" (even if they didn't) so that no one's feelings will be hurt and they'll all go home happy and full of "self-esteem".
No matter what "self-esteem" may have meant 100 years ago, it has long since been pirated by the "feel good about yourself even if you're a worthless bum" crowd who use that exact term as their ideal.
Those who decry "self-esteem" think they're demonstrating its falsity by going to prisons and interviewing criminals.
These people are, by definition, liars and self-haters. They manipulate and cajole, something Dr. Crocker seems not to take into account. Why on earth would you go interview a liar and expect to get an honest answer?
If I wanted to know about self-esteem, I would go to the saints, to the producers, to the successful. These folks are supremely self-confident and are as prominent as they are precisely because they are generous and gregarious.
No, he isn't.
"Love your neighbor as you love yourself" has endured longer than the fulminations of some obscure Canadian.
Huh? Yours is a non sequitur. The article says nothing to the contrary. In fact, it points out that the "pursuit of self-esteem" (as a goal unto itself) gets in the way of "love your neighbor" and the author rightly considers this a bad thing. So what's your beef?
He ridicules psychologists for touting the effects of self-esteem, then uses psychologists to debunk same.
He can't have it both ways.
It's not "having it both ways" to use the findings of psychologists who have performed proper studies and research, in order to refute the claims of psychologists who had not and were just engaging in pop self-help sloganeering.
Bingo. Absolutely true.
Well, that's not self-esteem. A person who truly knows his worth is also aware of his failings. These failings, however, don't cause a person of high self-esteem to hate himself; rather, he succeeds in spite of them and works to overcome them because he knows he can.
Sinkspur, your talking about genuine self-esteem. The self-esteem movement produces a counterfeit self-esteem, not based on reality.
It's Dr. Spock and spare the rod, teachers and parents lying to (appeasing, spoiling) the children to control them, rather than doing the tough job of disciplining and real instruction based on hard work. It's 2+2=5, affirmative action, political correctness, victimization, moral equivalence, grade inflation, it's historical revisionism, "women's studies", "gay rights", today's NAACP, the DNC, PETA, Hollywood, Jack Nicholson's character in Carnal Knowledge, Kafka's cockroach salesman in Metamorphosis...it's the formula for the downfall of civilization, "poor baby."
These people are, by definition, liars and self-haters.
Feel free to present your evidence for your absolute claim. A few viewings of "Escape From Alcatraz" won't count.
While it's true that people who robe, rape, and kill don't often mind a bit of lying as well, all the studies (of various sorts, in verious disciplines) show that in general felons don't suffer from "self-loathing", they suffer from *arrogance*.
This only makes sense, as it takes a real superiority complex to think that you're actually so *entitled* to someone else's property, sexual favors, or life as to take them by force.
And consider the biggest "criminals" of the past century -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Saddam Hussein -- these aren't guys who showed any signs of "self-loathing", these are men who had far more egotism than the average joe, who felt that they *deserved* to rule as much of the world as they could get their hands on, and were qualified to judge the fates (and lives) of millions.
On the whole, it's not self-loathing that drives violence, it's an insane amount of self-confidence.
They manipulate and cajole, something Dr. Crocker seems not to take into account. Why on earth would you go interview a liar and expect to get an honest answer?
Read the article again.
It says nothing about "interviews" being the basis for the studies.
It *does* talk about *testing*, which is almost always done in a way that properly avoids the possibility of a subject lying about himself.
Not surprisingly, psychologists (who by definition study human behavior) are way ahead of you when it comes to realizing that people may lie, and finding ways to remove that as a factor.
If I wanted to know about self-esteem, I would go to the saints, to the producers, to the successful. These folks are supremely self-confident and are as prominent as they are precisely because they are generous and gregarious.
Um, okay...
Things are very simple to you, aren't they?
It is to the "self-esteem movement", which is the whole point.
You're too hung up on word choice, you're not paying attention to the actual mental states being discussed (which are made clear enough from the context of the article and subsequent discussions, even if the single term "self-esteem" in isolation may mean different things to different people).
A false sense of self worth (and the drive to promote it) *is* what's being discussed in the article. Don't let the fact that you may use the same word to describe something else confuse you. No one's denouncing true self-confidence.
It's like posting an article discussing the "gay lifestyle" and clearly talking about homosexuality, and then having someone keep responding, "but there's nothing wrong with being joyful, this is silly".
Simple things are simple. Self-confident people have every reason to be.
I notice you don't mention Bill Clinton in your list of personalities. He is the most glaring example of a self-loathing person who relied on the opinions of others for his every action.
Those who possess true self-esteem are not afraid of criticism; people like Hitler would brook no criticism because he really had no confidence in himself.
Those who abuse or seek to dominate other people are the worst self-loathers of all. No truly selfp-confident person would have any need to harm another person in any way.
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