Self Esteem

So My dad decided that he is going to have a cameo position on my blog.  I said, "Let's do it!" because he is one wise man and we think a lot alike.  Ok, lets be real, we read each other's minds.  So, here is Dave Roberson................

During the Holiday Season, which now seems to run from the weekend before Thanksgiving until the weekend after New Years Day, you seem have more down time than the rest of the year.  You find yourself with family and friends and have time to wander into topics that you may not during the rest of the year.  It was during one of these days of having some down time that I got into a discussion about people in general and self esteem in particular.  It caused me to think, when did self esteem become such a big deal?  Or better yet, why was it invented?  When I was young, that was during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, I never remember anyone worrying about my self esteem.  When I did something wrong I got whacked and was told not to do that again.  Seemed like a simple choice for me going forward, change my behavior or get whacked again.  During the holidays I spent some time with the next older generation.  I asked some of those who grew up during the FDR Administration if anyone ever remembered someone being concerned about their self esteem.  The answer again was no.  So, when did self esteem enter the culture?  Seems I now had a quest.

Let’s start with a definition.  I opened my 1976 American Heritage Dictionary to page 1176 and found one of the shortest definitions in the dictionary, self-esteem n. Pride in oneself.  Well now that is interesting.  With pride being number one among the seven deadly sins, does this sound like something we want to heap upon our children?  But maybe back in the primitive years of the Ford Administration we really did not have a full understanding of self esteem.  I mean, man was just learning how to stand upright and starting to venture outside of the cave.  So I took a look at what modern pop culture says about self esteem.  I keyed it into Wikipedia on Al Gore’s great invention and wow! 35 years makes a world of difference.  It now takes several pages to say “pride in oneself”.  But just like your favorite infomercial on cable television there’s more.  It adds a belief system, an evaluation process, and on and on.  There is however one little piece of information that Wikipedia puts in its Introduction that I find very informative.  “It is not the “facts” about one-self but rather what one believes to be true about one-self (Sarah Mercer, p. 14). Early researchers used self-concept as a descriptive construct, such as ‘I am an athlete’ (Rosenberg 1979).”  So it is comforting to know that when you are evaluating yourself facts do not matter.  If you are 40 pounds overweight you should not immediately jump to the conclusion that you are fat, but rather, if you want to preserve your self esteem, you could say that you occupy a greater presence on this earth than those who are not 40 pounds overweight.  It is also instructive as to why the 1976 definition was so short.  Early research did not even start until 1979.

What does this mean?  To me it means that self esteem is a luxury of a very pampered, “me focused” culture.  When you fight for survival each and every day you have no time nor desire to evaluate yourself; you just want to make it to tomorrow.  But when you have plenty of food in your belly (especially if someone else provides it), a warm bed to sleep in at night, and plenty of time on your hands, you can sit around and worry about your self esteem.  And it is my guess that  the more you focus on yourself, the less you are worried about those around you.  When parents raise their children with a focus on their self esteem, the world starts to revolve around the child.  When the child grows to adulthood, what kind of value system will that child have?  My guess is not a very healthy one.  You might invent financial schemes that greatly enrich yourself to the detriment of others.  You might vote for leaders that promise goodies that other people have to pay for.  And when you have an entire nation of people worried first and foremost what is in it for them, you have a nation that is probably headed for the history book.

To summarize.  From the beginning of humankind (whenever that was) until the end of World War II, no one seems to have worried about self esteem.  In our part of the world we were too busy building a country, re-building it again after the Civil War, climbing out of a Depression and saving the world from facism.  In fact, one could say self esteem was not even a favorable attribute.  When people encountered problems, they faced it.  Popular phrases were “may the best man win” and “he was the last man standing”.  And as I recall, our country was considered by most as the greatest the planet had ever seen.  Then a new normal began to take over the mainstream culture.  Excellence and winning were replaced by attending and trying.  We created games with no winners or losers in which everyone gets a trophy, taught to the lowest performing students, and spoke no critism of anyone or anything.  The result is that we are not raising the next “Greatest Generation”, but rather we birthed the “Occupy Movement”.  Do you hear anybody talk about personal accountability?  I do not.  But let’s hope the Chinese, who do excel and try to win and who also own most of our nation’s debt, will be sensitive to our self esteem.

Self Esteem – Who invented it and why did it become such a big deal?

By Dave Roberson