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June 26, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:31
2414 The Death of Self-Esteem - A Conversation with Michael R. Edelstein

Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Michael R. Edelstein on problems with the concept of self-esteem.

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Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
We are here to puncture your vanity.
Oh, so that's not quite right.
We are here to talk about self-esteem.
And I have here Dr.
Michael R. Edelstein, who is going to be talking at Capitalism and Morality 2013, which is a great...
It's a great seminar on libertarian thought.
I was hoping to be there.
I'm maybe trying to be in there remotely for a debate with Walter Block.
But unfortunately, health issues prevent me from traveling in the tuberculous load-laden tubes known as airplanes.
So I will be there next year, but I won't be there this year, I don't think, in person.
Thank you so much, Michael, for taking the time today.
Oh, it's my pleasure to be here, and I've been looking forward to speaking with you.
Now, okay, so we want to talk about self-esteem, and this is something that I think is a great, great topic.
I just saw something that Nathaniel Brandon posted today.
He's actually been on this show as well, where he basically says, if you have high self-esteem, that will raise your expectations of what you can do in your life, and that will make things better and so on.
And there does seem to be a little bit of magical thinking about self-esteem.
Which seems to run counter to the research.
Now, I'm an idealist and an empiricist, which is like two opposite ends of the mental spectrum trying to crush some reality in the middle.
So I was wondering if you could talk about self-esteem and the research, which I think you've pulled together, which is really very important and very powerful in challenging some of our notions of the value in self-esteem.
And not just the value, but in fact, talking about the danger of self-esteem.
Stephan, I'd be happy to discuss the research.
I wonder if it would be okay if I started by just giving an overview of my notion since it tends to be a non-traditional and very controversial notion of self-esteem.
My view of self-esteem is that it's unempirical, it's illogical, and it doesn't work.
Otherwise, I love it.
Other than that, you have no negative things to say about it, right?
Right, right.
But don't you realize you're puncturing the self-esteem of self-esteem?
That's right.
That's right.
So, killing two birds with one stone.
And that gives me very high self-esteem.
Now, about 80 to 90% of my clients have self-esteem issues, right?
And what I teach them is a lesson that was given by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, and he said, it's never situations themselves that upset us, but rather it's our judgments about those situations.
Or as Hamlet would say, there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Exactly, exactly.
And I use the traditional cognitive behavior therapy ABC model, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with.
And what that says is that A is an activating event.
Say, I lost my job.
And then C is my emotional consequence.
I feel depressed, hopeless, and that's normally called low self-esteem.
I have a feeling of low self-esteem, depression.
But as we psychologists know, A never causes C. A situation itself, no matter how bad, can't magically get into our gut and churn it up, but rather it's our ideas, thoughts, views, opinions...
Beliefs in our head, what we tell ourselves about those situations that cause our emotions.
And so B is beliefs, our beliefs.
So if I tell myself, I shouldn't have lost the job, I'm a horrible person, I'm a bad person, I'm a failure, I'll never get another job, then that's what leads to low self-esteem.
So our emotions of higher self-esteem don't come from situations or behaviors, internal or external situations, but from our thinking about it.
So that's the groundwork.
Then the other idea is that when we have high self-esteem, it's a two-step process.
One, we're rating our behaviors.
We might have an argument with our wife or lose a job or get a job, and then we rate that.
I got a job.
That's good.
Or I had an argument with my wife.
That's bad.
So that is...
Rating our behaviors, but then we overgeneralize from the rating of our behaviors to the rating of our total selves because I lost my job, I'm no good, I'm a worthless failure, and it's that that leads to low self-esteem.
So my position is rating your behaviors are very good, They're motivating.
That gives you an incentive to maintain the good behaviors and improve on the poor behaviors, but then there's no point to overgeneralizing, to rating your total self as a person.
So instead of high self-esteem, what I recommend is unconditional self-acceptance.
Accepting yourself unconditionally Whether you do well or poorly or people love you or hate you, you're still the same imperfect human who can set goals, work hard toward those goals.
That's what gives us enjoyment and pleasure in life and throw out self-esteem.
Right, right.
Okay, so now self-esteem generally is considered to be regarding oneself in a positive light, because it's not self-evaluation.
It's not truth or falsehood.
It is esteem is, you know, to hold something high, esteem generally means to think that it's really great.
And one of the things that's always troubled me about the self-esteem philosophy is the lack of falsifiability.
In other words, if we say that self-esteem produces good things, then people who do bad things should not have high self-esteem, right?
I mean, generally, that would be the argument that we would make.
But unfortunately, research has shown consistently that some of the worst people in society have very high regard for themselves.
And so if self-esteem is supposed to be healthy, and if, as Nathaniel Brandon says, you can't have too much self-esteem any more than you can have too much physical health, then high self-esteem should always be correlated with good behaviors.
And I don't mean like nice behaviors, like not strangling people, not killing people, not being narcissistically grandiose or megalomaniacal or anything like that.
But the problem is, as you pointed out, and as lots of researchers have pointed out, high self-esteem is not always correlated with good behavior.
But some of the worst behavior you could imagine is correlated with high self-esteem.
And then what the self-esteem proponents say is, well, that's not real high self-esteem.
That's just masking low self-esteem.
And it's like, well, how is this falsifiable then?
I mean, it doesn't seem to make any sense.
Well, I totally agree, and you asked about studies earlier.
There are many problems with the studies.
One is basically they've come up with mixed results.
As you point out, sometimes the worst criminals have high self-esteem and that to some extent motivates their criminal behavior because they think they're entitled to what you have, so they'll just go ahead and get what they're entitled to.
I'm too good to work for a living.
Other people owe me a living and therefore I'm just going to go and take it in this sub-Nichean predatory manner.
They have a very high regard for themselves which leads them to do some very bad things.
Exactly.
And sometimes people who have low self-esteem do quite well.
For example, Beethoven was depressed before he wrote the Third Symphony.
He was considering suicide.
Darwin had depression.
He had panic attacks, phobias.
He didn't work for years and was a recluse because of that.
Yet he came up with some brilliant theories.
He was a genius in his naturalist profession.
So he had low self-esteem, but he did quite well.
So the results are mixed.
Another problem with the self-esteem studies is that they generally, when they measure self-esteem, they ask people, how well do you do with this, that, or the other thing?
So that's what I call trait.
Esteem or disesteem.
You could think you do well at things.
This doesn't necessarily mean you have high or low self-esteem.
There was a seminal study done with 13-year-olds from six different countries, the United States, Britain, Spain, Ireland, Canada, and Korea, and they gave them two tests.
One was a test of math.
And the other was a test of self-esteem.
And the students from the U.S. scored highest on the self-esteem test and lowest on the math test.
So that's another illustration where you can have high self-esteem and do poorly.
And so if you look at the meta-analyses of the self-esteem studies, you find all kinds of results.
So they're really not very definitive.
Well, and in the mathematical example, if I remember correctly, the students in America were asked, are you good at math?
And the majority of them scored very high in their own perception of whether they were good at math, and they actually ended up with the lowest score.
So those who had the greatest belief in their own abilities, which would be high self-esteem, Ended up performing the worst.
And really, you could say that their belief that they were very good was actually contributing directly to them not being very good, because we tend to practice less the things that we're good at, and we tend to practice more the things that are important that we're not particularly good at.
And so high self-esteem can lead to a deficiency of outcome simply because, yeah, I'm already great at this, you know?
I'm Pavarotti.
I don't need to take an introduction to singing.
And, you know, you sound like William Hung with a head cold.
So I think that that can really contribute to low performance.
Yes.
And another explanation for those results, Stefan, was that these U.S. students were a victim of the self-esteem movement propagated in the schools.
So they learned to have high self-esteem or at least to say they thought well of themselves while not learning very much math.
Well, and, you know, the self-esteem stuff, I know it came – it's been around, obviously, off and on for a long time.
It really sort of came to its forefront in the mid to late 60s when, as a society, we seemed to become very adversity adverse.
I mean, so much of human – Evolution and progress is the result of mind-bending struggle.
As so many philosophers have pointed out, every time we climb up the rung of human progress, it's grueling and unpleasant and ghastly and sometimes bloody.
But in the 1960s, we seem to become very averse to the kinds of struggles.
And we wanted to put safety nets in for people who might be poor and, you know, we wanted to expand old age pensions for those who might have not made the right decisions in life and put Medicare and Medicaid in for those who hadn't taken care of their health or, you know, saved for their medical expenses or, you know, done the necessary work to get good jobs and so on.
And at the same time, we wanted to start shielding children from the inevitable frustrations of sucking at stuff.
I mean, kids generally suck at most things.
I mean, they're kids.
That's what they're supposed to do, you know?
I mean, my daughter sucked at walking when she was born and now she sucks at playing piano when she's trying and we all are that way, you know, in the same way that anything I haven't studied and isn't innate to me, I suck at.
I suck at Japanese.
I suck at interpretive line dancing.
You know, you name it.
And I think that the general suckiness of childhood became something that we didn't want children to be exposed to.
And so we sort of said, well, you're excellent simply for being a child.
And I think that that makes a child feel good in the moment.
But I think it really doesn't give them a very strong sense of how high up the mountain you have to go and climb and in what rare oxygen to achieve excellence.
Excellent point, excellent point.
So therefore, rather than teaching your kid self-esteem, you're a great kid and a scholar, it's much better to teach them self-discipline.
Set goals and work hard at the goals and it's not going to be easy.
Thomas Alva Edison defined genius as 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
There was no room for high self-esteem in there.
Yeah, I was just with my daughter today, and she's four, and she was banging her xylophone, you know, just randomly.
And she said, Daddy, what do you think?
I said, Hmm.
Kind of hurts my ears.
It doesn't sound good to me at all.
She's like, no, I'm making music.
I said, actually, you're not really making, you know, I hate to tell you, but you're not making music.
You know, making music takes a lot of study, a lot of practice.
And, you know, if you wanted to, and I'd be happy to facilitate it.
You know, I did 10 years of violin when I was a kid.
I know that it takes a long time to become decent at anything.
And she was, you know, because, you know, when you're a A new parent, you're just so amazed that they can breathe and do anything, right?
But I'm sort of trying to give her a realistic sense.
Not that, you know, it's bad what she does.
It's just, no, that is not, in fact, making music.
And I said, look, let me try.
And I just randomly hit things and it's like, does that sound pretty to you?
And she says, actually, no, not really.
It's like, yes, that's why people go to Carnegie Hall and not to your playpen to hear music.
Stephen, I think you're guilty of child abuse.
Most parents, when they heard that, would say, well, that's beautiful.
That's so wonderful.
Do it again.
You're going to be a great composer.
Well, I certainly want to encourage her playing with music, but I think what we owe our children is the truth.
I mean, God.
I mean, to me, self-esteem is one of these tricky phrases because I think what we actually just – philosophically, things are just much more simple, which is we're just aiming at the truth, the truth about ourselves, the truth about others, the truth about our own abilities.
And whenever we distort ourselves from the truth, either positively or negatively – We are just away from reality, away from a rational, empirical evaluation of our abilities, of situations, of our potentials.
And that's when we tend to, you know, it's like driving blindfolded.
You just tend to get a lot of wrecks when you don't have an accurate sense of your environment.
And so what I'm trying to reflect back to her now is, you know, when she sings a song well, I say, well, that sounded great.
You know, when she sings a song badly, I'm like, it's a bit pitchy.
I think you might be a little off, you know, let's try it again with the piano.
I want her to have an accurate sense of what she's doing, in proportion to her youth and her starting out new, but I really don't want to give her the sense that she's great at something she's not.
I certainly want her to be happy that she's exploring things, and I don't want her to say, well, that's not as good as Pavarotti when you sing, because she's four, but I think that my honest evaluation of where she's at is what I really owe her as a parent, and that, I think...
It's news to some people that we owe our kids that level of honesty because we feel we have to distort reality somehow to accommodate their sensitivities.
I don't think that's particularly wise.
Yeah, exactly.
If I were to put all my clients' problems in a nutshell, it would be they have a distorted view of reality.
It's my job to help them get more in touch with what the real world is like.
The problems and how to deal with those problems and a realistic assessment of themselves and teaching kids all these wonderful ideas certainly is no help in raising healthy, happy kids.
Yeah, and I mean, we've sort of, I think from some of the religious side of things, we had, you know, pendulum a little bit too far over.
You know, you're born sinners and Satan has your soul and, you know, you can't ever achieve grace.
I think we've kind of ground kids down a little bit too much.
But as is so often the case in human society, you know, you swing from one pole to the sort of other extreme to the point where, you know, you're born originally, stained with original sin and you can never achieve grace.
But maybe if you slave away, you'll get to heaven, which I think is...
maybe shining a bit too dark a light on the future.
We've kind of gone to the other side now where we want to tell kids they're great.
And I think some of that has to do with this.
I just had Dr. Peter Gray on the show recently talking about the educational system.
And I'm, of course, facing these choices with my own daughter.
You know, we have this, I think, fairly destructive and inflexible educational system.
And rather than attempt to reform that, which kind of puts us face to face with some pretty entitled and belligerent public sector unions, you know, we just want to change the sliding scale so that kids look like they're improving or kids look like they're doing better rather than actually confront we just want to change the sliding scale so that kids look So it's not just parents, but I think there is something systemic in the way that we deal with children where we'd rather move the goalpost than reform the field, so to speak.
Yes, yes, I agree.
But I'm very unhappy with our discussion, Stefan, because we've just been agreeing on everything.
Can we find something about self-esteem that we disagree with?
Or do you agree with me, the whole idea of self-esteem is unempirical, illogical, unpragmatic, and there's no point to it?
Is that your position also?
Well, before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about the dangers.
If we can talk a little bit more about the research and the dangers of the high self-esteem thing, of the high self-esteem approach, because obviously the people who are proponents of the self-esteem movement would say that the self-esteem shown by I mean, to use obviously an example of Hitler.
Hitler, did he have low self-esteem or high self-esteem?
Well, he considered himself the savior of Germany.
He considered himself a manifestation of a world historical figure in a Hegelian sense.
He obviously rose from almost nothing to be dictator of Germany.
Did he have high self-esteem or low self-esteem?
And it seems to me impossible to look at his achievements, you know, just from a purely sort of achieving power kind of way.
It seems impossible to look at his achievements and say, well, he had really low self-esteem.
You just, you cannot become the dictator of Germany without having grand ambition and the ability to execute.
And he went from being an infantryman in the First World War to being, you know, the master of an entirely new style of blitzkrieg warfare in the Second World War without necessarily having gone to military college in the interim.
So is that low self-esteem or high self-esteem?
I think you could argue that it was high self-esteem, but the self-esteem advocates would say, well, that's not really high self-esteem.
That's masking low self-esteem, which again takes away, you know, it's like, okay, so any way you shake it, it comes out true.
So would you make the case that somebody like Hitler would have high self-esteem according to the self-esteem model or low self-esteem masking high self-esteem or something else?
Well, my case is self-esteem is a fiction like Santa Claus.
It doesn't exist.
There are just people doing things, to quote someone I'm speaking to right now.
Just people doing things.
Hitler doing things.
Some of them are bad.
Some of them are good.
Different people have different evaluations of those things.
So there are people doing things.
Saying this is high self-esteem or low self-esteem just doesn't make sense.
It's out of the blue.
It has really nothing to do with the case.
His bad things are still bad things.
His good things are still good things.
So I wouldn't, I don't know what they would say, but I would say forget about self-esteem and just calmly assassinate him because he's doing very bad things.
Now, in a case closer to home, let's take Ayn Rand.
Now, Ayn Rand had some great traits and some very poor traits.
She was, for 40 years, she was addicted to nicotine, dexedrine, caffeine.
She was offensive to many.
She started to have a relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, and she really wanted to be friends with him, but he rejected her because she was so obnoxious.
And she smoked two She smoked heavily for 40 years.
She wound up having lung cancer, which she told her in a circle not to mention to anyone.
And then when she recovered from the lung surgery, she was back smoking two packs a day and then died about eight years after the surgery.
The lung surgery.
So that sounds like execrable behavior.
On the other hand, she wrote some terrific novels that are still selling quite well.
And she converted lots of people to libertarianism.
Some people think she was a really great philosopher.
So she did great things.
She did very bad things.
Do we give her high self-esteem or low self-esteem?
Well, that's an unanswerable question because it doesn't make sense to rate specific behaviors and then try to add them up in some kind of calculus.
We have apples and oranges and pears and grapes and come up with a total rating or a total report card on someone's wealth.
It just doesn't make sense.
Okay, well, let me put a counter-argument into that.
And by dexedrine, are you referring to the diet speed that she was on for decades?
Yes, uh-huh.
Okay, okay, yeah.
So I only found out about that much more recently, and I wasn't aware that she had told people not to talk about her lung cancer.
I assume that's because she had praised smoking so often in her novels and wanted to retain the sense of infallibility.
Okay.
So, you know, I mean, one way you could approach that from a self-esteem standpoint is to say, well, you know, this non-native English speaker wanted to write some of the greatest novels in English.
And I personally think she succeeded.
I think that they are some of the greatest novels in the English language, which is remarkable for anyone, let alone somebody who didn't grow up speaking English.
So, of course, she had a belief in her own abilities prior to her success.
Now, that is having, I think, in the model, that's having high self-esteem.
Because in order to achieve great things, you have to believe that you're capable of great things.
It doesn't mean you're going to.
It just means it's necessary but not sufficient to achieve them.
So she had an accurate sense of her own abilities as an artist, as a thinker, as a writer, and so on.
She was actually correct in her evaluation of that.
But if the self-esteem went too high to the point where she then had to become infallible, then a lot of other mistakes came out of that.
Her sort of dictatorial and domineering personal style, her identification of the most rationalist, the most virtuous, is the most lovable.
I'm the most rational, therefore I'm the most virtuous, therefore everybody must love me, seemed a tad on the narcissistic side.
So, it's almost like, I think what the self-esteem people would say is, you know, she didn't quite reach that balance.
She was, you know, to get where she did in life, she did these amazing things, and she had to believe that she could do them before she did them, and she was right.
So, that's accurate self-esteem, but she went too far and then believed that she had to be infallible thereafter, which produced a lot of obnoxious behavior and brittle interpersonal conflicts and so on, and a lot of this, you know, semi-Stalin-style purges of the inner circle and so on.
I think from the self-esteem model, they'd say, well, good on the achievements, bad on the rigid desire for perfection.
You would say that none of that really makes any sense.
Is that correct?
That's right.
You said that her belief in her own abilities, that's accurate self-esteem.
What I would say is a belief in her abilities is what I would call task confidence.
She believed in her abilities.
My abilities are good.
As I said, rating your abilities, making judgments on your abilities is fine because it leads to motivation, incentive, and to keep on trying to do well and work toward your goals.
Albert Bandura called that self-efficacy.
She felt she was efficacious as a philosopher, as a novelist.
That's fine.
I'm not against trait rating, rating what you do, Or the pattern of what you do, that makes sense.
But when we overgeneralize from the ratings of our behaviors to the ratings of our total self, that's what I'm calling self-esteem, and that's why I don't think that's accurate.
It seems like an overgeneralization to me.
Yes, I think that we had a switch there, though, because, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think we had a switch in that I was talking about potentiality, right?
So, I mean, obviously, you and you, but you're a young man, you're like, hey, I want to get a PhD in psychology.
And you had to believe, you know, prior to having done it, you had to believe that you could do it.
And so that's not ranking your behavior, that's ranking your potentiality.
So, I agree.
We definitely want to rank our own behaviors, and that sort of third critical eye is very important.
But in terms of evaluating whether you can do something or not in the future, of course, lots of people who try to get PhDs, I don't know what the statistics are in psychology, but I know in the… In the sciences, I mean, the number of people who start in college and the number of people who get PhDs, it's, you know, the huge amounts fall off.
I mean, in some engineering classes, like half the class quits every year kind of thing.
So lots of people start with the belief that they can go further, and then it turns out that they're incorrect.
And I think if I were to look at a place where self-esteem could have value, it's in the, I can achieve something very difficult, even though I have no proof of it as yet.
Well, isn't that still task confidence?
You have confidence in your ability or even your potential, that's part of your ability, but not overgeneralizing to your total self.
I have confidence I can get a PhD, therefore I'm a good person, I'm a worthwhile person, I'm a total success.
That second part is where the self-esteem comes in rather than the self-efficacy or task confidence, and that is what I'm saying is unempirical.
Okay, so if I understand it correctly, then the major issue you have is with the word self.
In that you can focus on specific tasks.
You know, I'm good at climbing stairs.
I'm bad at, you know, gymnastic ribbon dancing.
But neither of those would have impact on what would be called the self because they're task-specific.
Whereas if you have something around yourself that is, in a sense, too general to be of any particular value.
I want to make sure I really understand the criticism of the concept as a whole.
Well, that's part of it.
I object to the self in the term self-rating, and I object to the rating.
But I don't object to each individually.
I say it makes sense to have this hypothetical construct of the self, and it makes sense to rate behaviors and potentialities and other things about us, but not the total self.
So when you put those two reasonable words together, then I have a problem.
Okay, so let me just, okay, so if somebody comes in who's, you know, a pretty decent guy and all that and says, I deserve love.
I'm worthy of love.
The self-esteem people would say, well, that's, you know, that's good.
That's good self-esteem.
But you would say that there's a task competence here around being able to sustain a positive and loving romantic relationship, and that's something much more specific than I am worthy of love, which would be too nebulous.
I do want to make sure I drill down on where it would diverge from the self-esteem view.
Well, it's three ways.
Unempirical, illogical, and unpragmatic.
But it's unpragmatic because to say I'm worthy of love, that doesn't get every woman to fall in love with you, right?
What gets women to fall in love with you is you're a good communicator, you're concerned, you're warm, you're a good provider.
All these things get women to love you, not you're worthy.
Try to put it on a Match.com profile, I'm worthy of love.
Right?
See how far that gets you.
So it doesn't tell you where to go from there.
So, okay, I want to make sure, because I'm really trying to squeeze this in my head.
So this is, if I say I'm good at building houses, you would say that's too general to be of any particular value.
You could say I'm good at digging foundations, or I'm good at laying brickwork, or I'm good at installing plumbing or electrical or something like that, or even if I'm good at all of those things.
But it's more task-specific rather than...
In a sense, broad-based, goal-specific?
Not exactly.
The broad base that I have a problem with is when you go so broadly and evaluate your total self.
I could say I'm a terrific psychologist because I cure 90% of my clients.
Now, that's somewhat of a generalization because some I don't cure and sometimes it takes longer than other times.
So that's a little more general than just talking about my specific behaviors, what I do in a session every day.
But I'm willing to let that go.
The big problem with self-esteem is when you go from even evaluating your roles.
I'm a good psychologist.
I'm bad at financials.
I can't play the piano, but I haven't addicted myself to heroin, so I have good and bad behaviors.
But my real problem in terms of the self-esteem issue is then rating yourself and then rating your total, rating yourself based on the rating of these behaviors or even these roles.
That's the problem I'm trying to highlight.
Okay, so it is...
It's not productive and it may in fact mask areas where specific improvement could be of value by just saying I have high self-esteem or I'm a good person or I'm great at things or whatever, it may mask also areas where specific work could definitely improve you.
Oh, yes.
When people have high self-esteem, that tends to lead them not to look at themselves very closely because their ego is on the line if they find big holes in their character.
So, that's definitely right.
It tends to mask and block improvement.
Because they want to prove themselves rather than do well and enjoy themselves in life.
Yeah, and you know, something that struck me as well, just during the conversation, I just want to share my thoughts, tell me what you think.
And I'll try and keep this brief.
But in my experience, areas of competence or areas that I feel like I'm really good at things don't last at all.
In other words, if I sort of said, well, you know, my self-worth is based upon me thinking I'm really good at stuff tends to not last the reason being so I can imagine I'm some sort of I'm an athlete or whatever.
And I'm really good.
I'm the fastest runner in my local track and field team.
Well, look, yeah, I'm the fastest guy or whatever.
But...
The reality of what used to be called, I don't know if they still have a phrase for it now, resting on your laurels, it used to be.
It's like, then I need to go to the citywide track team and try and be the fastest there.
And if I'm the fastest there, I need to go to the county, the state, the country, the Olympics.
And let's say I get the gold medal in the Olympics, well, I need to try and get it again next year.
And then at some point, I'm going to start getting old and not be able to compete and so on.
So it seems like every time...
For me, at least in my life, I think I'm really good at something.
Generally, what I want to do is to become bad at something.
In other words, to continue to expand what it is that I'm doing right at the edges of what it is that I'm competent at and not do the same things that I did last year.
Because I know I can go back.
I can tie my shoes.
I was trying to tie my shoes as a kid.
It was really tough.
Now I don't even think about it.
But if my whole life I said to myself, I'm a great guy because I can tie my shoes, that would be pretty retarded because I want to keep expanding what it is that I'm doing.
So I'm always surfing on the edge of not doing it well, if that makes any sense.
So for me, aiming for high self-esteem is almost aiming for stagnation, if that makes any sense.
Yes, and as you're pointing out, you're never really satisfied because there's always something more to prove and a higher goal to accomplish.
John McEnroe, the tennis player, wrote an autobiography called You Can't Be Serious.
I think that title refers to what he used to say to the referees when they made calls against him.
And he said that the closer he got to Wimbledon, the more stressed and pressured he felt.
Because he felt he has more to lose.
And I think that reflects, again, self-esteem.
What he had to lose was his big ego, and so he put more pressure on himself, more stress on himself.
So when you have self-esteem, you're more likely to focus on the negatives Because that's the human tendency to focus on what's wrong rather than focus on what's right.
So you're more likely to focus on your negatives and you're never really satisfied.
So it's an endless problem that you keep creating for yourself.
But again, we agree...
Well, and I think it was Martina Navratilova who said that the thrill of victory lasts about 15 minutes, you know, which for 20 years of work doesn't seem like much of a payoff.
I mean, you get better with 20 minutes in an orgasm, but she's like, work for 20 years, win Wimbledon.
15 minutes later, you're like, I guess I'm back to where I was before, kind of thing.
And there does seem to be this, you know, we...
We generally tend to return to a similar state of happiness that we've already had.
At least I think that's generally the case.
I had this diagnosis of cancer and literally within a couple of days, I was kind of back to my usual state of actually even a little bit more happiness than usual just because everything is so much richer now.
And then, you know, if I get cured and better, then I'm sure I will be back to my usual state of happiness relatively quickly.
And I think trying to move that needle, you know, the idea that we can move that needle in some sort of permanent way other than with the slow, grueling process of self-knowledge and applying yourself to excellence and so on… I think it's really tempting, this idea that we can convince ourselves that we're better than we are.
It just seems that this needle tends to go back to the middle.
And you can generally move it a little bit over many years with a lot of work, but it's like trying to talk yourself into being thin.
I mean, you have to put down the donut and pick up the barbells, and that's a multi-year process.
So I think it is a little bit of a quick and easy approach that, like all quick and easy approaches, just tend to get people stuck in life.
I agree.
We're back to agreeing again.
So let me ask the question I asked earlier.
So you now agree that the pursuit of self-esteem is based on unempirical data, illogical thinking, and unpragmatic results.
Is that right?
I think so, and I think in particular reading the research about the degree to which some extremely toxic individuals have extremely highly positive views of themselves, to me is kind of a nail in the coffin of the whole concept.
And the degree to which it is wished away by the self-esteem movement as being false self-esteem, I mean, that just strikes me as a Marxist approach.
You're either for the class warfare, or if you're not, then you're still part of the class warfare, you just have false consciousness.
Okay, so this is non-falsifiable.
And anything to me that is non-falsifiable is, well, obviously not part of philosophy, but rather part of some other quasi-religious approach.
So I think that I'm going to be much more delicate, if not oppositional, to the phrase and to the term.
I definitely will put your article in the links to the video and the podcast, but in reading the work and also I've been reading about, prior to you being in contact with me, reading stuff about parenting, about how praising a child...
For their achievements rather than their work tends to make them work-averse, right?
So if a child makes a beautiful picture and you say, oh, that's a beautiful picture and so on, then they're actually afraid to do another picture because it might not be beautiful.
Whereas if you praise the work, you can always work.
You can't always control whether you succeed or not.
But you can always control how hard you work.
And focusing on the praise for the work actually gives the child significant motivation to do what they can do and control it, which is the work, rather than the outcome, which we can cross our fingers sometimes and hope that it works.
And I've really been trying to adjust to that in my parenting, and I think that sort of lays the groundwork to...
To the ideas that you're putting forward and the research that you've done put together about some of the dangers of this stuff.
So I think it has been, you know, I'm a huge fan of Nathaniel Brandon.
The Psychology of Self-Esteem was a massive work, which I read in my teens.
But I mean, most of what I got out of it was the need to relentlessly remain in contact with your own emotional nature.
I mean, because, you know, I grew up British and, you know, For the British, the body is like this big glass tank to carry the only important part of you around, which is your brain.
So I like the idea that you stay more in contact with your emotional side and listen to your instincts and don't just be a sort of brain in a tank ordering the body around.
I like that sort of mutuality of relationship that you've got a second brain called the gut, which actually has really important things to tell you.
It doesn't dictate you, but it provides information that's really important.
I got from Jung the idea of the instincts and the dreams that can have great value in your life.
But I don't think I've ever felt that the self-esteem thing has been something that I should really focus on or just tell myself I'm good.
I've always been really focused on just trying to get things done that are of value and important and let my self-esteem take care of, you know, trail after me like some shark after a A ship with some unsteady sailors.
But I think that the arguments you put forward in this, the arguments you put forward in your article, the parenting stuff, I think has really given me a really great and critical and I think very true view of some more than significant deficiencies but actually catastrophes in the whole self-esteem approach.
Yes.
Well, that's wonderful.
So now you can say, you don't believe in the state, you don't believe in God, you don't believe in self-esteem.
Stefan, you're a pariah on society.
Yeah, I mean, that makes me almost sound like, you know, neck deep in nihilism.
But we fight.
We fight back from it.
Now, just before we part ways, and I'm sorry I won't get a chance to meet you in Vancouver directly, but the resources that for my listeners you would like to provide, websites that you have or books that you have or areas where people can get in contact with you, if they like.
Yes, I've written three books and a fourth one coming.
But my main book, which I wrote with a noted libertarian, David Ramsey Steele, who wrote the book from Marx to Mises, is called Three Minute Therapy.
And my website is threeminutetherapy.com.
And the important thing is three is spelled out, threeminutetherapy.com.
If you make it the number, you'll get an Australian rock group.
So make sure.
Not to be confused with.
Yeah, 3MinuteTherapy.com is one word.
And I think my article on self-esteem, Stephan, that you were talking about is the article that appeared in Liberty Magazine called The Trouble with Self-Esteem.
And that's also available on my website, 3MinuteTherapy.com.
Well, thank you.
I really appreciate you taking the time to chat, and it has been very, very interesting.
I have a lot to mull over about, and I'm frankly going to chat about it with my wife, too, who practices psychology as well.
But I really appreciate your time, and I look forward to seeing your speech from the Capitalism and Morality Seminar.
Thanks again so much, and yeah, go read this man's books.
They're well, well worth it.
Thank you so much, Stephan.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
Take care.
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