Loved to Death
The self-esteem movement was created by the Californian Government, and has led to widespread neuroses, infantile adults and a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. By Will Jefferies.
Like most well-meaning, leftist cultural dogma, the self-esteem movement began in California, in 1986.
John Vasconcellos, a Democrat member of the state’s legislature, formed “The State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility,” an idea so daft that even The New York Times scoffed at it, saying it was an “improbable idea” that could only have emerged from the “geographic eccentricity” of the west coast.
Vasconcellos was more confident, saying the systematic promotion of self-esteem would act as a “social vaccine” to division and disorder, a “revolution in developing human potential,” and a path to “creating a truly multicultural democracy”. It would also solve problem behaviours such as alcoholism, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and dropouts.
This tenuous link was supposedly proven in the task force’s 1990 report, Towards a State of Esteem, which received endorsements from the Clintons and Bushes and favourable coverage on Oprah, the BBC and Australia’s ABC.
Within months of the report being released, more than 80 per cent of Californian elementary and high schools had established self-esteem programs. Business soon followed suit, as they were told boosting self-esteem maximised productivity.
This was despite substantial criticism of the report, not least coming from task force members David Shannafoff-Khalsa, who said the report “could have been written by a group of sixth-graders,” and Jack Mecca, who described it as “a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.”
Shannafoff-Khalsa and Mecca conceded there was a limited link between at self-esteem and social outcomes, but said the artificial inflation of one’s self-esteem would not have significant behavioural effects. Rather, they argued, a person’s positive societal relationships were the main factor determining self-esteem. In other words, a positive role in society led to higher self-esteem, not vice versa.
Nevertheless, the self-esteem movement has spread like a virus across the developed world. Teachers and parents have embraced it with conspicuous gusto even here in Australia. My generation’s parents told us they loved us unconditionally because we are all so special. This ego-boosting was compounded at school, where we were taught “just to be ourselves.”
Now at university, a large number of us are encouraged to “discover who we are,” and when we do, retreat to the appropriate safe space to shield us from whichever micro-aggressions torment the identity group to which we have coalesced.
All this can be traced back to Vasconcellos’s unbelievable report. The result is the widespread normalisation of treating young adults like infants in the futile hope of boosting their self-esteem.
The Safe Schools Program argues that schools must “raise awareness of destructive attitudes” and develop “best practice policies around gendered language in exams and assessments” to create a “safe and inclusive environment.”
Hurlstone Agricultural School, a competitive selective school in Glenfield, NSW, has abolished the terms “exam” and “test” to achieve a “20 per cent reduction in the number of students reporting feelings of anxiety and stress associated with study and a culture of high expectations.”
The University of Canberra has a pre-exam puppy-patting session that includes bubble wrap popping and pancake eating, and the University of Sydney in conjunction with its SRC have “therapy dogs” to help students “de-stress.
The University of La Trobe’s Student Union issues warnings for content relating to “classism, colonialism, Islamophobia, ableism, body image, child abuse, mental illness and weapons.”
Unlike their predecessors of the 1960s, today's campus activists are emphatically, even neurotically, in favour of censorship and the suppression of contentious ideas.
One of the best recent examples of this was the protest by the University of Sydney’s Wom*n’s Collective and Socialist Alternative against an appearance by Bettina Arndt to discuss the “fake rape crisis” at universities, which culminated in the arrival of the riot police.
One of the most insidious effects of the self-esteem movement is its perverted relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. In Australia, the number of children on anti-depressents has doubled in just six years to more than 100,000. Sebastian Rosenberg from the ANU Centre for Mental Health Research says the Australian system is “outcome-blind” – a reference to how the self-esteem movement has created an industry with a myopic focus on artificially boosting an individual’s dopamine, serotonine and norepinephrine so as to increase the individuals’ feelings of self-worth whilst ignoring the underlying issues that actually put them on the drugs in the first place.
The over-promotion of self-esteem by parents, schools and universities as a fundamental determiner of one’s future success has in reality had the opposite effect. Instead of teaching students to confront ideas with reason, prudence and an open mind, students have been trained that contentious ideas have the potential to threaten one’s self-esteem – a sacred psychological construct that must be protected at all costs.
As such, debate is no longer viable in a university determined to be a safe environment, and thus criticism is not followed by “I disagree” but rather “I am offended” – a sleight of hand to which there is little comeback.
Trigger warnings deprive students of developing an understanding of the complexity of openly discussing difficult issues that are integral to the pursuit of knowledge in an academic institution and the art of compromise in a hyper-competitive workforce.
If only students were taught of how the Greek philosophers contributed to the development of Western civilization. Instead of listening to Plato’s declaration that human beings can observe and analyse the natural world around them through the application of reason, my generation has been told that the civil discussion of certain topics and the genuine use of certain words is disallowed because of the risk of offending or hurting a student’s self-worth or identity.
The fatalism associated with the victimhood complex that accompanies a person obsessed with the protection of his or her self-esteem contradicts the other central strand of Western civilisation – Christianity. Whilst the conditioned left-wing millennial would say that one’s future and capacity to change the world around them is determined by the extent to which they are oppressed by the heteronormative patriarchy, the Christian would say that, as all humans are created in the image of God, all have the potential to co-operate in and imitate God’s creative genius.
The metastasising self-esteem movement has however received a pushback. Famous clinical psychiatrist and public speaker Professor Jordan Peterson has repeatedly said he is “blown away” by the number of young men seeking more responsibility in life, not less.
These young men are constantly told their “active engagement with the world is part of what is destroying the planet and social system,” Peterson says. The antidote is the pursuit of truth and one’s ability to “stand up, take responsibility and confront the world” – a powerful and hopeful message dissimilar to the fatalism of identity politics and the narcissism of the self-esteem movement.
Ultimately, Peterson is now challenging my generation to reignite the ideas that made the West so great. Unlike those who argue that artificial self-esteem is the key to happiness and success, Peterson tells men and women to actively seek truth by acknowledging that they are capable of rising above their physical and personal circumstances and possess the intellectual fortitude to engage with contentious and confronting ideas.
Finally, he argues that assuming substantial responsibilities - such as starting a family, pursuing the truth or serving one's country or religion - is far more conducive to a fulfilling life than the pursuit of “acceptance” and “diversity”.
As Nick Cater said on this site this week – “the 20th century belonged to the US and Europe. The 21st is still up for grabs.” Judging by the way my generation is being raised, the 21st century will not belong to the West.