"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.
I know I always have been.....
But this guy is'nt a George Carlin more of an AL Gore.
Self-esteem arises from being consistent with our own internal value system. It is the effect, not the cause.
The societal benefit comes both from people being consistent with their value systems and from having a value system which promotes health. Falsely encouraging undeserved feelings of self-esteem by our children prevents them from being able to form a healthy value system.
Indeed, "true believer" liberals(*) consistently fail to recognize that all human endeavors are driven by the need to "improve". Whether it be improving themselves, their pocketbook, or the world in which they live, the "spark of creation" that drives humanity is the need for improvement. Unfortunately, in seeking to make things "good enough", liberals consistently undermine the forces that would make them better.
(*) Unlike some people, I do not impart any altruistic motives to liberal leadership. While they cast their claimed goals in all sorts of high rhetoric, the real goal of the liberal leadership is to create a class of slaves. To do this, they must break the human spirit. It is truly distressing to realize the extent to which they have managed to do this while hiding their true agenda.Satan isn't a person. "He" is modern liberalism--the most deadly enemy of the human spirit.
One thing I've said before and will say again: Even God failed to create an Eden which was compatible with the human spirit. Liberals seek to create Eden--a magical state of being where nobody needs to worry about anything, because all their needs will be provided for them. What the liberal idealists fail to grasp is that not only is Eden unachievable, but if such an existence were achieved it would be Hell on Earth.
The key to being a peaceful member of society is the characteristic of submitting to a power or value higher than oneself. That higher power can be GOD, the POLICE, LOVE, REALITY, or simply TRUTH.
When self-love is greater than other values, welcome to chaos and evil.
The Liberal American obsession with self-praising is a principal reason for our decline.
Only with credible facts and accomplishment is self-praising warranted - otherwise, it is a deadly and corroding lie.
The American education system is a big part of the problem. Want proof?
In a comparison of math skills across several countries, hard test results showed Taiwanese children ranking top of the list. American kids scored dead last.
Yet in response to a self-assessment survey question attached to each test "I am good at math", the Taiwanese children thought poorly of themselves - they ranked last.
But Buffy and Bubba in America, however, saw themselves as the world's math top guns, proving that the self-esteem curriculum was alive and kicking, despite the facts.
Self-esteem is the effect, not the cause, of a life well lived.
BUMP
My daughter and I have personal experience from the results of this Task Force. You can even read about it in Chapter 2-10, "Why 'We Three Moms' Headed for Sacramento," from the book by Robert Holland, Not With My Child You Don't [excerpt follows]:
. . . a mom from another school called me to express concerns with her third-grader's radical personality change since school began (actually, my daughter was in Kindergarten, not third grade; the grade was changed to protect her identity). The children in her class were twice-weekly involved in a "magic" circle--a teacher-directed, self-esteem program written by Jack Canfield [he was involved with the above-mentioned Task Force, BTW] ("1,000 Ways to Improve Self-Esteem in the Classroom").
The program instructed little children how to chant mantras, and it encouraged them to share very personal feelings with the group with such questions as "Which parent does the child care for most? Did the child ever wish one of his or her parents were dead? If so, which one and why?"
The child [my 5-year-old daughter] was not sharing as the group passed the stuffed teddy bear around. Unbeknownst to the mother, a male school counselor was called on the scene. The child's lunch was taken away [by her female teacher] until she gave the counselor a hug--a forced hug! Her lunch was given back to her [by her teacher who stood by and watched]. Recalled a parent aid, "she walked to the trash barrel and threw her lunch away." [The parent aid, my friend, said my daughter was almost in tears and wouldn't speak to her afterwards.]
There's more, of course, not printed in the Chapter. I pulled my daughter out of school after getting nowhere with my outrage with the teacher, the counselor, the principal (who, I learned, also stood by and watched the whole episode), the school superintendent, and the President of the Board of Education for the community. End result, I flew to Sacramento to speak to the California Board of Education. They did nothing about these programs. My complaints fell on deaf ears. However, the group in which I was involved successfully forced the school district to stop these programs unless WRITTEN PARENTAL CONSENT was first received by parents: thanks to the HATCH AMENDMENT (as in Orrin Hatch from Utah), which gives FEDERAL protections to students from privacy invasions and psychological manipulation.