The Top 40

It gets much worse. Here's Psychologist Martin Seligman characterizing the problem with unearned self-esteem, from his second edition Introduction to Learned Optimism:

Individual failure used to be buffered by ... the large "we". When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare.

But it is ... the self-esteem movement that I want to emphasize. ... Twenty-five years ago ... the emblematic children's book was ... about doing well in the world, about persisting and therefore overcoming obstacles. Now many children's books are about feeling good, having high self-esteem, and exuding confidence.

This is a manifestation of the self-esteem movement, a movement which started, not surprisingly, in California in the 1960s. In 1990, the California legislature sponsored a report that suggested that self-esteem be taught in every classroom as a "vaccine" against social ills, such as drug addiction, suicide, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, and depression (Toward a State of Esteem, 1990). the self-esteem movement is a movement with teeth; this is the movement underlying the demise of IQ testing, lest children who score low feel badly about themselves. This is the movement that has made competition a dirty word. This is a movement that has led to less plain old hard work. Shirley McLaine suggested to President Clinton that he create a cabinet-level Secretary of Self-Esteem.

... I have scoured the self-esteem literature looking for the causality as opposed to correlation, looking for any evidence that high self-esteem among youngsters causes better grades, more popularity, less teenage pregnancy, less dependence on welfare, as the California report contends. ... There is nothing of this sort to be found in the literature. ...

Until January 1996, I believed that self-esteem was merely a meter with little, if any, causal efficacy. The lead article in the Psychological Review convinced me that I was wrong, and that self-esteem is causal: Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1996) reviewed the literature on genocidal killers, on hit men, on gang leaders, and on violent criminals. They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister's work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world.

[bold emph. mine]

Not all liberal academics are 'dumb'. They may ultimately drive their conclusions based on their liberal sensibilities, but some at least have the intellectual honesty to report what they observe.

Here's another one.

(sorry about the length/missing paragraphs - this comment widget appears to eat them - at least in the Preview)

Great comment. I'll try and see if the widget is wonky and why. Looks to be all there.

Thanks Gerard - it was just the Preview mode, as it turned out.

Humm. I see what you mean. Still it shouldn't do that. I'll look at the old code and see if I can figure it out.