Self-Worth is NOT Self-Aggrandisement

{this article appeared in the LA Times and is written by the author of a booked called "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless." The thing I find fascinating is that his entire premise is predicated on identifying boastful conceit and self-aggrandisement as self-esteem, WHEN IT IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. My comments are in italics throughout.}

By Steve Salerno for the LA Times, 1-1-2006

EVER SINCE the United States began weaning itself off the sociological junk food of victimization and its culture of blame, the pop-psychology menu increasingly has been flavored by an antithetical concept — empowerment — that can be summarized as: Believe it, achieve it.

Nowadays, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft business plans with bullet points drawn from Laker coach-cum-inspirational guru Phil Jackson's Zen optimism. Couples write partnership covenants based on the utopian blather of John Gray. Millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to erstwhile firewalker Tony Robbins, arguably the father of today's mass-market empowerment. And there is Oprah, who is seldom categorized as a guru in her own right but whose status as the movement's eminence grise is beyond dispute: The road to self-help's promised land, and a bite of its $10-billion fruit (as tracked by Marketdata Enterprises), runs straight through Harpo Productions. The nostrums delivered by these and other self-help celebrities form a cultural given, an uncontested — and, we are led to believe, incontestable — foundation for today's starry-eyed zeitgeist.

Lost in the adulation is the downside of being uplifted. In truth, the overselling of personal empowerment — the hyping of hope — may be the great unsung irony of modern American life, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party that it was meant to replace.

{Interesting point, and I agree to a great extent. Hope is integral to any life; the problem is that the marketing whizzes attach hope to hopelessly ineffective products so that hope is dashed again and again. It's the process of hope disappointed that is harmful, not hope itself.}

In U.S. schools, the crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions — self-esteem — has been unambiguously disastrous (and has recently been disavowed by a number of its loudest early voices). Self-esteem-based education presupposed that a healthy ego would help students achieve greatness, even if the mechanisms necessary to instill self-esteem undercut scholarship. Over time, it became clear that what such policies promote is not academic greatness but a bizarre disconnect between perceived self-worth and provable skill.

{Okay, this is the nitty gritty. Self-esteem has nothing to do with boasting, braggadocio, conceit, or proclaim your greatness, especially in light of less than stellar provable skill. The writer is pointing out - correctly, I believe - that conceit does not take you anywhere except to the stupid shack, and to places like American Idol and the Apprentice, where we get to laugh at the talentless fools who nonetheless proclaim their talents. This is NOT self-esteem: this is the puffery and self-deception that comes with a LACK of self-esteem. What this writer has done is point out a legitimate problem, but falsely fingered the cause.}

Over a 20-year span beginning in the early 1970s, the average SAT score fell by 35 points. But in that same period, the contingent of college-bound seniors who boasted an A or B average jumped from 28% to an astonishing 83%, as teachers felt increasing pressure to adopt more "supportive" grading policies. Tellingly, in a 1989 study of comparative math skills among students in eight nations, Americans ranked lowest in overall competence, Koreans highest — but when researchers asked the students how good they thought they were at math, the results were exactly opposite: Americans highest, Koreans lowest. Meanwhile, data from 1999's omnibus Third International Mathematics and Science Study, ranking 12th-graders from 23 nations, put U.S. students in 20th place, besting only South Africa, Lithuania and Cyprus.

{Yes, yes, "supportive" grading policies promote self-aggrandisement, not self-esteem. A pox to that.}

Still, the U.S. keeps dressing its young in their emperors' new egos, passing them on to the next set of empowering curricula. If you teach at the college level, as I do, at some point you will be confronted with a student seeking redress over the grade you gave him because "I'm pre-med!" Not until such students reach med school do they encounter truly inelastic standards: a comeuppance for them but a reprieve for those who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath their second-rate scalpel.

{Yes, good, a little reality would be fine now. And when that medical intern does well in a class, she can garner a legitimate sense of self-worth from the accomplishment.}

The larger point is that society has embraced such concepts as self-esteem and confidence despite scant evidence that they facilitate positive outcomes. The work of psychologists Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman suggests that often, high self-worth is actually a marker for negative behavior, as found in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Even in its less extreme manifestations, confidence may easily be expressed in the kind of braggadocio — "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" — that stunts growth, yielding chronic failure.

{What could possibly have lead these psychologists to label sociopaths and drug kingpins as people who had "high self-worth"? Bravado, braggadocio, conceit, or an attitude of "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" have NOTHING to do with self-esteem or a true belief in the person's self-worth. They are about self-deception, self-puffery, self-ignorance. A person with an inate sense of his worth would never say no to growth, change, insight, or acknowledgement of truth. }

Then again, one never really fails in this brave new (euphemistic) world. "There is no such thing as failure," posits a core maxim of neuro-linguistic programming, the regimen from which Robbins drew much of his patter. Among empowered thinkers, reality becomes an arbitrary affair, with each individual deciding his or her personal truth.

{"There is no such thing as failure" is a classic example of an affirmation that is false on its face. Of course there's failure. Anyone who tells themselves this "belief" is not being honest. If what you mean is, "I can learn from every experience, even if I don't succeed," then okay, maybe we've got something. It what you mean is, "Success is measured in many different ways, and sometimes looks like failure," all right, I can get behind that, too. My personal belief? "Failure does not affect my sense of self-worth - lots of people fail at things they try to do, and not everyone can succeed. Outcome is not always an indication of the effort and desire put towards a goal. There are many factors that affect outcome. Just like most people, I will succeed at many things in my life, and I will fail at many things. " I hope you can see that these materially false affirmations are set-ups for ineffectiveness, because they are not "beliefs," they are "wishes." I wish I never had to fail. I believe I will fail on occasion. I believe my self-worth will remain strong through many instances of success and failure. I am not setting myself up to fail just because I acknowledge it's a possibility.}

Consider healthcare, where vague notions of personal empowerment are a key factor in the startling American exodus from traditional medicine. A comprehensive study reported in the medical journal JAMA pegged the number of patient visits to alternative-medicine practitioners at 629 million a year, easily eclipsing the 386 million visits to conventional MDs. In theory, these defections represent a desire for "self-empowered healing" that will "put people in charge of their healthcare destiny," to quote one holistic health website. In practice, the trend puts hordes of Americans at the mercy of quacks who shrewdly position themselves at the nexus of mind and body. It behooves us to remember that feeling better about a health problem is not the same as doing better.

{I think we've come to the writer's true agenda here - he's pissed that people are rejecting traditional medicine. He teaches in a Pre-Med program. Aha! Isn't the exodus from traditional medicine more about factors such as cost, availability, and effectiveness of treatment? People are disillusioned about traditional medicine because it's a multi-billion dollar factory run by self-proclaimed Gods who don't have the time to listen to their patients, and who prescribe solutions that may not take into account the unique attributes and experiences of the patients. To proclaim that America's search for alternative treatments is based on feelings of self-worth just might be true - after all, if you believed in yourself and wanted to get yourself excellent care, it might be reasonable to look at the traditional medicine machine and say, "That's not for me." It doesn't mean that alternative treatments are better, necessarily. I love how the writer says that "qwacks" are shrewd to position themselves at the nexus of mind and body. Qwacks or not, this is exactly what people seek and don't find in traditional medicine. The body is processed like a plucked chicken on its way to the deep fat fryer at KFC. }

Nonetheless, with such highly visible exponents of latter-day empowerment as Robbins, Winfrey and Winfrey's principal protege, Dr. Phil McGraw, fanning the flames, a generation has come of age on the belief that a positive mental attitude will carry the day. Far from helping his disciples, the empowerment guru does them a disservice by making them "think positive" about a situation in which the odds of success are exceedingly low. As top management consultant Jay Kurtz argues: "The most dangerous person in corporate America is the highly enthusiastic incompetent. He's running faster in the wrong direction, doing horribly counterproductive things with winning enthusiasm."

{Well, I happen to agree that "think positive" is not very effective, although it's certainly a lot more pleasant for the people around you. I think that "believe truthfully" is a MUCH more effective way to live. Enthusiasm is usually a good thing, and a little cheerleading can work wonders. But at the core, a wrongly-held belief will not work. If you think "I'm competent" but you aren't, there's gonna be trouble. If, however, you think, "I can improve my competency with work, study and experience," then guess what? You will have a much greater likelihood of being more competent.}

You cannot have a life plan predicated on the belief that everything is equally achievable to you — especially if that same message has been sold indiscriminately to all comers. In the grand scheme of things, knowing one's limitations may be even more important than knowing one's talents.

{True. I'm glad to see the writer has ended his poorly considered piece with a statement I can believe in. But I want to point out that "knowing one's limitations" and "having good self-esteem" are not mutually exclusive. "Knowing one's talents" and "having good self-esteem" are not mutually exclusive. "Being a self-aggrandizing person" and "having good self-esteem" ARE mutually exclusive.}