Summary

Over the past half century, our society has labored furiously to breed the perfect strain of self-esteem junkies. We have succeeded.

Body

Here's the link to the article. It's from a religious site, so some of you may have problems with some of the conclusions. However, I've extracted parts relevant to this community.

Self-esteem promotion has a 50 year history. Before that, people perceived that the road to hardy, confident well-being came from an intensive process of learning, failing, and improving multiple times.

In the 1960’s, psychologists noticed commonality among high academic and life achievers. The high achievers were more confident and had a more positive outlook than their under-achieving peers. The psychologists knew the causes of the hardy well-being but thought that they could shortcut the long, laborious process of cyclical learning, failing and improving.

Self-esteem was universally bought into as the panacea to achievement deficits on the merits of reason alone with no actual testing for 50 years. If there were an FDA equivalent to psychological remedies as there is for drug remedies, self-esteem promotion would have never made it beyond the trial stage and certainly would have never been applied to children’s education.

Self-esteem promotion as currently administered does two things. It creates hoards of praise junkies and it enables an entitlement class. As with narcotic addiction, praise junkies are dysfunctional without some form of consistent, external infusion of the drug, in this case, adulation or validation.

The withdrawals a drug addict experiences has self-esteem withdrawal counterparts including depression. Common also with narcotic addiction, the praise junkie’s world is divided between the good people who supply the praise and the bad people who either withhold it, expose what actually is, or launch insults.

It really doesn’t matter how well meaning the bad person is, if the fix is not supplied, the withholder is the enemy.

Lessons

  • Desire for validation is innate and healthy, but we now put so much emphasis on it that it has crossed over into the realm of substance abuse (repeated endorphin shortcuts).

  • Self-esteem is counterfeit confidence.

  • Confidence comes from accomplishment. Self-esteem comes from rationalizing away lack of accomplishment.

------> Corollary: purge yourself of self-esteem and replace it with confidence by accomplishment.

  • A validation withholder is an enemy.

------> Corollary: the only time that withholding validation won't make you the bad guy is when you're already the Chad guy.

  • Obviously don't be unnecessarily rude, but don't facilitate someone's mental-reality dysfunction either.