[GBA]

For every comment by Sinkspur that I felt needed comment, you beat me to it and said it as well or better than I would have.

As you have stated, there is a difference between self-confidence and self-esteem. Self-esteem is sometimes a path to self-confidence or is often found on the road to self-confidence, but in a normative sense, self-esteem is not what people should be chasing after.

[mongrel]

Several additional points to all of this: The National Assocciation of Self-Esteem's website has a hard time defining self-esteem, leading them to say this, "Since self-esteem has both psychological and sociological dimensions, this has made it difficult to come up with a comprehensive definition, and rarely have both dimensions been taken into consideration together in conducting research studies." When a psychologist says it's hard to define something, watch out. He's probably trying to have it both ways without being pinned down.

The problem with some of the arguments here is that if someone with a seemingly positive self-regard does something negative, there is an a priori assumption that underneath that is self-loathing. Everyone has had some sort of negative experiences that could contribute to that, so the theory can never be disproven.

In NASE's definition they divide self-esteem into two components, competance and worthiness. But then they claim "the worthiness component of self-esteem is often misunderstood as simply feeling good about oneself, when it actually is tied to whether or not a person lives up to certain fundamental human values, such as finding meanings that foster human growth and making commitments to them in a way that leads to a sense of integrity and satisfaction."

At this point, we've completely left a rudimentary understanding of the word self-esteem itself, and loaded it up with all kinds of baggage that makes it useless.

Underneath all these arguments promoting self-esteem is a fundamental lie: that if I can discover my true self, I am basically a good person and will live a positive and healthy life. Boomers as a generation have been on a 30-year journey of self-discovery and have only demonstrated their ability to fool themselves. In their twenties, they rebelled against authority. In the marriage and child-bearing years, they weakened marriage and abandoned their children. Now as they approach their senior years, I am afraid they will bankrupt our economic system as they insist on getting what is theirs while doing little to generate a savings to live on.

The cult of self-esteem tends to mask the need for a healthy doubt of one's inherent goodness. That is the basic problem.