Everyone talks about the dangers of low self-esteem.... what about high self-esteem?
Caused by new styles of parenting that irradiate the child with praise and a sense of achievement and specialness. Rising rates of narcissistic disorders....
All those surveys showing that an ever growing proportion of young people want to be famous or otherwise do something extraordinary and heroic with their lives
When that destiny fails to manifest itself as a life outcome...
'Permissive parenting' (and the entitlement society it creates) is a familiar conservative boogeyman, but in my experience, not only are toxic high and toxic low self-esteem often two sides of the same coin, but they both emerge from the opposite place - as an inverse and/or complimentary reaction to abuse, neglect, and persecution from parents/peers/etc.
ReplyDeleteTwo relevant quotes here: from a rare Terrence Malick interview, discussing the Starkweather surrogate in Badlands: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014130814/http://www.eskimo.com/~toates/malick/art6.html
'...Kit, on the other hand, is a closed book, not a rare trait in people who have tasted more than their share of bitterness in life. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It inclines you to say deep things. It builds character and is generally healthful. It teaches you lessons you never forget. People who've suffered go around in movies with long, thoughtful faces, as though everything had caved in just yesterday. It's not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It's had this kind of effect on Kit.
"Kit doesn't see himself as anything sad or pitiable, but as a subject of incredible interest, to himself and to future generations. Like Holly, like a child, he can only really believe in what's going on inside him. Death, other people's feelings, the consequences of his actions-they're all sort of abstract for him. He thinks of himself as a successor to James Dean-a Rebel without a Cause-when in reality he's more like an Eisenhower conservative. 'Consider the minority opinion,' he says into the rich man's tape recorder, 'but try to get along with the majority opinion once it's accepted.' He doesn't really believe any of this, but he envies the people who do, who can. He wants to be like them, like the rich man he locks in the closet, the only man he doesn't kill, the only man he sympathises with, and the one least in need of sympathy. It's not infrequently the people at the bottom who most vigorously defend the very rules that put and keep them there.'
And Rick Perlstein on the average psychological background of the American presidential candidate: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kai-bird-jimmy-carter-outlier/
'People driven to become the most powerful person in the world are not normal people. Think Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy (as well as Bobby and Teddy), Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama: All had mothers who inculcated in them the conviction that they were so special that they could accomplish anything and should ignore what anyone else said on the matter. And also fathers who were either emotionally or literally absent, stern figures who haunted their sons with the nagging feeling that no matter how much they accomplished, it would never be enough to win them over. Jimmy Carter was no different. He once even wrote a poem about it: “And even now I feel inside / The hunger for his outstretched hand, / A man’s embrace to take me in, / The need for just a word of praise….”
A childhood like this is a pitilessly efficient machine for producing a preternatural drive for accomplishment: the sort of drive it takes, for instance, to run for president as a free-spending Keynesian and then to govern as a penny-pinching austerian, all while claiming utter honesty as your political calling card—and performing the claim so unflinchingly that much of the world still buys it.'
As I recall, psychologists have undergone a volte-face in their view of school bullying. In the 70s, it had been assumed that school bullies operated from a position of low self-esteem, and were lashing out at their inculcated inadequacy by making others feel worse. Subsequent research indicated that bullies had very high levels of self-esteem, and they sought to harm vulnerable peers because it bolstered their entitled ego.
ReplyDeleteThe 70s movement to teach kids the value of self-esteem, seemingly a commonsense desire, was based on a massive failure to understand the distinction between causation and correlation. It was noted that successful people had high self-esteem, but bizarrely it was concluded that successful people succeeded because they had high self-esteem (rather than the obvious conclusion that success breeds self-esteem).
And shall I be the first to mention the elephant: Trump?
Well, Trump obviously - but I was also thinking about all those people who apply to be in The Voice or X Factor or American Idol. Sometimes the series would start with the auditions held around the country and people would turn up absolutely convinced they were the next Mariah Carey, with a completely mistaken idea of their own vocal ability - one wondered if family members had lied to them, encouraged them, just for a quiet life, or whether it was just this maniacal delusion self-belief.
ReplyDeleteBut it's an old syndrome, predates "you're so special" parenting or "everyone gets a prize" teaching. In the early days of Hollywood, people arrived from small towns all over America, convinced it was their manifest destiny to be a star. Fueled by magazine stories of actual stars who had been waitresses or whatever in some podunk town and then had done a screen test and something about them lit up the camera and they'd been through the studio system mill and become screen idols.
Did you see The Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years? It has that montage of wannabe, go-nowhere hair metal acts being asked what they would do if they didn't make it, and each and every one automatically responds, "I will make it".
ReplyDeleteyeah I have a whole bit on that film and hair metal in the Aftershocks section of Shock and Awe - very struck by how inconceivable the idea of failure was to all of the wannabe groups.
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