Rather than “low self esteem” being the culprit of every societal ill from thumb-sucking to murder, it is an overweening sense of self-importance that encourages many of us to conclude we can do no wrong.
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
George Eliot (nee Mary Anne Evans) Middlemarch 1871
Item: Monday, March 29
“Bricks were thrown through windows of a Republican Party office in the Charlottesville [VA] area late last week in an act that seemed similar to incidents of political vandalism reported elsewhere.”
The Washington Post
Item: Monday, March 29
“In an indictment…unsealed on Monday, the Justice Department said…a group of apocalyptic Christian militants…were plotting to kill law enforcement officers in hopes of inciting an antigovernment uprising, the latest in a recent surge in right-wing militia activity.”
The New York Times
Item: Monday, March 29
“Insults and threats followed 15-year-old Phoebe Prince almost from her first day at South Hadley [MA] High School, targeting the Irish immigrant in the halls, library and in vicious cell phone text messages. Phoebe…reached her breaking point and hanged herself after one particularly hellish day in January—a day that…included being hounded with slurs and pelted with a beverage container as she walked home from school. Now, nine teenagers face charges in what a prosecutor called ‘unrelenting’ bullying.
The Associated Press
If we are to make any sense at all of these three sorry tales of the American experience, I would submit that we must reach a more trenchant conclusion than the simplistic notion that Mondays are downers.
Rather I think the case could be made that these news items represent reaping the whirlwind after years of hitching our kites to the flighty air of the “self-esteem” movement.
If that notion sounds mildly outrageous, I commend to you a piece by Theodore Dalrymple (pseudonym of Anthony Daniels), a physician and author whose works include Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.
His “On Self-Esteem and Self Respect” appears on the website “In Character: A Journal of Everyday Values” (http://incharacter.org/authors/theodore-dalrymple/) and is a thoughtful discourse debunking a child-rearing concept many of us have adopted as sacred text.
In brief, Dalrymple makes the case that, rather than “low self esteem” being the culprit of every societal ill from thumb-sucking to murder, it is an overweening sense of self-importance that encourages many of us to conclude we can do no wrong; that indeed “self esteem” translates as our will being law, given our self-appointed place in our own right-thinking universe.
With Dalrymple’s thesis in mind, then, I’m forced to conclude that the Old Wives had it wrong: The devil is not “in the details.” Rather it’s in the letter “I,” the all-consuming obsession we have with ourselves, that makes up the devil’s playground.
Evidence?
Consider it is the myopic dominance of the “I,” the preoccupation with the self, that makes rational the outrageous behavior cited in the stories above.
“I don’t like the healthcare legislation, therefore my Congressperson deserves intimidation.”
“I think law enforcement officials represent authority I reject, therefore, I am justified in plotting their murder.”
“I hate my classmate, therefore I can harass her to my heart’s content.”
“The self-esteemist,” Dalrymple writes, “wants something for nothing, and because in his heart he knows that what he wants is impossible he is wretched and ascribes all the many failures of his life to it. Self-esteem is therefore, the first cousin to resentment.”
Exactly who is resented, in Dalrymple’s thinking, can never, by definition, be the self-esteemist, but rather others. And as “others” outside the self, and therefore, possibly hinderers of the self’s intent, “others” are enemies: to be intimidated, murdered or simply hounded to death.
Or to be run roughshod over, because hell, life’s just that way and as long as I get what I want, all’s right with the world.
Until…until that rationalization is followed to its logical conclusion: Namely that the self prevails over the good of the greater whole, which, the last time I looked, isn’t democracy, or even commendable human behavior.
In contrast, there is George Eliot’s “Victorian” notion that the self may actually be best realized when it considers, and acts for the good of others. That we are best and most truly ourselves when we forget or put aside our own druthers and act out of a concern for the common welfare.
Some of us today might deem that notion “socialism.”
I imagine the rest of us could come up with a more accurate definition.
Trish Bennett’s award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in the Main Street News for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and was adjunct professor of media history at Quinnipiac University before relocating Bryn Mawr, Pa. Her latest work appears in the up-coming volume of “This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women” slated for publication in association with National Public Radio this Fall.