#spurious

There was a time—I’m talking of the 1990s, so almost of prehistory—when every bad decision that people made was attributed to lack of self-esteem, rather than to such human phenomena as, say, weakness, folly, cowardice, laziness, or even fear or duress, the first four of which were dismissed as being incurably judgmental and therefore useless as scientific explanation.

The problem with self-esteem is that it is entirely egotistical and self-regarding, unlike self-respect, which is a social virtue and imposes discipline and obligations upon the person who has, or wishes to have, it.

By contrast, self-esteem is like a medal that one pins to one’s own chest merely by virtue of existing. I am, therefore I esteem myself, and I demand that you esteem me too.

Curiously enough, at the height of self-esteem’s popularity most people knew, or at least had some inkling, that the whole idea was completely bogus. Sometimes when patients would say to me, “I have low self-esteem, doctor,” I would reply (admittedly not in every last case), “Well, at least you’ve got one thing right, then.”

Far from becoming angry, they started to laugh, as if they had been caught out in a naughty game that they had been playing. It came to them almost as a relief: they didn’t have to pretend to believe an evident absurdity any more, and then they could begin to examine the real causes of the devastation of their lives, some internal and some external

- Theodore Dalrymple