A significant part of the foundation of the PC edifice rests upon a misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of "self-esteem." Along with the quasi-Marxist dialectical differentiation of identify groups as either victims or oppressors, much of the rationale for PC thought involves efforts to avoid offending or hurting anyone's self-esteem.
Self-esteem may well be the psychoanalytic concept most thoroughly perverted by the pop psychology movement since the 1960s. It has led to especially pernicious effects in pedagogy. Schools routinely refuse to rank students, demur from teaching actual math or spelling skills (versus allowing and encouraging students to find their own approach to math and spelling with the correct answer being less important than the effort), ban games of tag or dodgeball, and reduce competitive games to unscored exercises, all in the name of protecting the self-esteem of their young charges. This does a disservice to the students, who too often graduate from our schools without knowing that they don't know what they don't know. It encourages a populace to believe that facts are inconsequential and feelings trump reality since there is nothing more important than the students' feelings. This is highly corrosive.
Dr. Sanity described part of the confusion over self esteem in her post on Narcissism and the Self-Esteem Gurus:
Most people confuse "self-esteem" with what I will refer to as a "sense of self". It is the latter--not the former, that is so often screwed up in the angry, violent, grandiose, and generally narcissistic people in the world. If you have a healthy "Self", you are likely to have a healthy self-esteem--which is not the same at all as a high self-esteem.
The psychological defect that leads to so many problems is a defective or distorted sense of one's SELF. The excessive self-esteem you see in a bully comes from a distortion of reality that person has with regard to their self. It was once widely believed that low self-esteem was a cause of violence--and you see that idea reflected today in the platitudes and rationalizations of terrorism-- but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves.
....
The pop-psychology that promulgated the widespread belief that if you nurture kid's self-esteem neglected to mention that if the sense of self was already damaged, all you managed to do was to create a narcissist; and it is simply a waste of time and money....
In my post on The Rising Tide of Narcissism, I added to Dr. Sanity's discussion by pointing out "another problematic aspect of the disorders of self known as narcissism."
One point often glossed over is that the Narcissist’s self esteem is actually quite fragile. Since it is based on an inflated sense of the self, ie it is not based on a realistic assessment of the self, the Narcissist needs constant affirmation by the environment that they are, indeed, the "special" person they have always been told they were. Such people have a noticeable lack of resiliency. When the Narcissist inevitably smacks up against an indifferent environment, as when the young person graduates college and enters the work force, reality intrudes in unmistakable fashion. Your boss does not consider you special unless you can actually do a good job. It is very easy to see how the Narcissist, who already tends to use projective defenses to avoid knowing of his own short comings, can very easily slip into a paranoid position with the real world.
"Since I know I am special, and have never really been challenged, when my boos tells me I have done a poor job, it can’t be true. ------> He must have something against me!"
Now, multiply that attitude to a much larger scale. Major societal problems arise when a large group of people with fragile self esteem and a poor sense of self collide with modern day tribalism, ie, identity politics. Then the problem becomes the system, or the man, or the ruling class, or the Jews, or Bush and the Rethuglicans, or racism; never does the person take responsibility for their own failures because to do so risks a psychological catastrophe. Suddenly, one’s always fragile self esteem, artificially buttressed all these years by a facile environment, crumbles. The result is devastating despair. Alternatively, reality can be denied and the despair defended against by externalizing the rage and directing it at those you believe now oppress you.
Unfortunately, once an idea has been established that feels true to large parts of the MSM and important political cohorts, it is extraordinarily difficult to undo the damage and replace fantasies and delusions with reality. This can be as overtly fantastic as the Jeremiah Wright espoused shared delusion that the government created AIDS to kill blacks, or the paranoid conspiracies popular in the Muslim world about the United States and Israel. In a lesser form, we can see the persistence of the meme that "Bush lied" about WMD in the absence of any data supporting the contention that he knowingly fabricated the intelligence about Iraq's WMD. Among those who control our children's education, the myth persists that by never criticizing children or pointing out when they are wrong (since criticism always hurts those with fragile self-esteem) we will somehow build up their self-esteem and make them feel better about themselves. In reality, we engender a false sense of competence and superiority that is likely to catastrophically fail if and when reality ever intrudes upon their bubble of comfortable and constant praise induced bland euphoria. Those who require such praise in order to temporarily feel better about themselves are those who cannot tolerate the kinds of criticism that can actually lead to learning, change, and progression. Those who do not require such disingenuous praise soon realize that the praise has very little substantive value.
Now the psychological research may be starting to catch up to reality: [HT: Dissecting Leftism]
High self-esteem is not always what it's cracked up to be, says UGA psychologist
Oscar Levant, a mid-century pianist, film star and wit, once watched noted keyboardist and composer George Gershwin spend an evening playing his own music at a party and clearly having a great time.
“Tell me, George,” Levant said, somewhat jealously, “if you have it to do all over again would you still fall in love with yourself"”
Increasingly, psychologists are looking at such behavior and saying out loud what may go against the grain of how many people act: high self-esteem is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem. And new research by a psychology professor from the University of Georgia is adding another twist: those with “secure” high self-esteem are less likely to be verbally defensive than those who have “fragile” high self-esteem.
“There are many kinds of high self-esteem, and in this study we found that for those in which it is fragile and shallow it’s no better than having low self-esteem,” said Michael Kernis. “People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth.”
The research was published today in the Journal of Personality. Kernis’s co-authors are Chad Lakey and Whitney Heppner, both doctoral students in the UGA social psychology program.
Amid the complexity of perspectives on the human psyche, a slow but relentless change is occurring in how psychologists view self-esteem, said Kernis. It was once thought that more self-esteem necessarily is better self-esteem. In recent years, however, high self-esteem per se has come under attack on several fronts, especially in areas such as aggressive behavior. Also, individuals with high self-esteem sometimes become very unlikable when others or events threaten their egos.
Read the whole thing for a nice perspective on Oscar Levant versus George Gershwin.
Pop psychology has exercised a terribly pernicious effect on society, especially when wielded by the narcissistic baby boomers who have used it to excuse their excesses, immunize them from the need to be responsible (ie, frustrating) parents, and avoid facing the unhappy reality that while all men may be created equal, we are not all endowed with equal abilities. Lying to ourselves, which is what PC generally amounts to, will never help us resolve the difficult problems we face as a society. Only by encouraging the best in our children, which requires acknowledging the weaknesses in them as well, can we hope to develop young people ready, willing, and able to expend their creative energies on problem solving, with all the real life frustrations that attend to such efforts.
Two years ago I re-posted one of my first posts, and it remains germane to this discussion:
A healthy person has a reasonably realistic grasp of his own capabilities, is able to use his abilities to gain satisfaction, is able to love another and accept being loved by another, and is able to appreciate what the world has to offer. In Freud's words, to be healthy is to have the ability to "work, love and play." Inherent in this is having a relatively stable positive self esteem. There are many factors that go into developing self esteem. The very young child who is loved unconditionally, but also allowed to suffer some frustration, is able to experience himself as a worthwhile, lovable, individual. He grows up with sensitivity for others and is sensitive to their opinions and feelings about him, but is not dependent on the world for confirmation.
[This is where so much of our current pedagogy and the entire world of PC fails most dramatically. Children can tolerate losing; they know when another child is better at sports or math or spelling than they. A healthy child is not defeated by this but learns what he or she is able to do, and can do their best. The PC victimology in speech codes on so many campuses is worse than nonsensical; any person whose self esteem is damaged by cross words, is an individual with exceptionally fragile self esteem. The so-called Self Esteem movement has things exactly backwards. People do not achieve self esteem by never being hurt; they maintain their self esteem in the face of disappointments and hurts.]
It is long past time that we demanded that teachers return to teaching rather than the illusory self-esteem management that is both easier and more destructive.
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