Ideas

You’re bad and you should feel bad: Against the self-esteem movement

Americans have been complaining about the narcissistic culture among our nation’s youth for decades. We’ve been inundated with opinion pieces griping about how by coddling our precious cherubs from the moment they exit the womb to the day they graduate college, parents are raising the next generation to be overconfident, hypersensitive, and self-absorbed. Moored in a crisis of expectations, Millennials today are paralyzed in a state of indignant indecision, or worse, hedonistic indifference once they enter the real world, directionless and crippled by hubris and student debt.

Depending on your political ideology, you might dismiss such critiques as misguided liberal hysteria over the “dangers” of selfishness or conservative nostalgia for an imaginary era of boundless freedom in which everyone responded to challenges by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, maybe you just think it’s a basic human tendency for people to believe that the next generation is doomed to rot in its own degeneracy.

While it’s true that many social commentaries on narcissism are superficial and overwrought, there are reasons to be legitimately concerned about the weight our present society places on the importance of self-esteem. Systematically stuffing heads both big and small full of their own wondrousness, to borrow Will Stor’s phrasing from this excellent Medium piece, has led to troubling implications for our individual well-being and our relationship to the state.

As the analogy goes, fish often don’t perceive the water they are swimming in. Today, the belief that high self-esteem is an unparalleled good is so ingrained in the bedrock of American culture that few people realize that for most of human history, self-regard was not considered an integral factor in motivating people to work hard and succeed. Instead, with religion serving as society’s primary source of authority, the emphasis was on personal restraint and self-sacrifice. In their book Willpower, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney illustrate how religion offered us a predictable system of rules and responsibilities as well as a community to monitor and enforce self-discipline.

By the middle of the twentieth century, this system fell out of vogue as modernization stripped traditional sources of morality of their power. In need of a new prism from which to make sense of the world, we adopted a new moral framework, what James L. Nolan calls “therapeutic emotivism” in which the self became the touchstone of cultural judgment. As Charles Rogers described, “No longer is society something the self must adjust to; it is now something the self must be liberated from…Where once the self was to be surrendered, denied, sacrificed, and died to, now the self is to be esteemed, actualized, affirmed, and unfettered.” (Nolan 19)

With the rise of the humanistic approach to psychology in the 1970s, psychiatrists and psychologists replaced priests and pastors by the dozens and the human potential movement was born. Nathaniel Branden, a Canadian psychotherapist and Ayn Rand’s closest associate for many years, ushered in the mainstream self-esteem movement in 1969 with his international bestseller, The Psychology of Self-Esteem. In it, he wrote that self-regard “has profound effects on a man’s thinking processes, emotions, desires, values and goals. It is the single most significant key to his behavior.”

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Vox: The most biased speakers, the most obvious questions

The midterm elections have come and gone. Predictably, the Republicans retook the Senate, profiting off a feeling of general unease with the Obama Administration. The commentariat class was abuzz with speculation over the meaning of the election and what it portends for the pomp and decadence show known as the presidential election. Nick Gillespie of the libertarian Reason magazine naively believes the election results mean nothing because both parties are “going extinct.” Politics is a team sport with intense loyalties. The jackass and elephant aren’t leaving American life any time soon.

As journalists debate over how a Mitch McConnell-run Senate will govern, they all agree on one thing: the sanctity of the process that brought Republicans to power. Progressives, in particular, love the voting process. They revere it like a religion, and treat casting ballots as no different than worshiping at the altar. Every Election Day brings columns and blog posts about the importance of “making your voice heard.” These puff pieces laud democracy as the god that brought simpletons to the promised land.

Likewise, the writers often play a cunning game of pretending to be open-minded and independent, while simultaneously hacking for their preferred political party. No other media outlet wears this veil better than Vox. Run by former Washington Post blogger and self-styled “wonk” Ezra Klein (and financed heavily by the corporatist giant General Electric), Vox is supposed to be a home of objective analysis for plebes too busy to read stacks of white papers. It’s just a coincidence that every conclusion Klein and crew come to happens to be über progressive. Vox is the journalistic embodiment of the hack Stephen Colbert trope “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Such ideological motives should arouse suspicion in conservative-minded observers.

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Chris Morgan on Don Colacho

A great writer on a great thinker, go read his piece in TAC on Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

“Democracy has terror for its means and totalitarianism for its end,” Gómez Dávila once wrote. In that single stroke an argument is initiated and ended. It is just one of thousands of sentences Gómez Dávila composed in his nearly 81-year life, but which very few have read. They covered every deep subject imaginable in the same terse, confident, clever, and intransigent manner, at only slightly varying lengths. These aphorisms, called escolios (“scholia” or “glosses”) by their author, stand on their own, ever at attention like a verbal infantry with bayonets armed, ready to return fire rather than to facilitate civil dialogue. In his lifetime Gómez Dávila would publish these passages only reluctantly, often at the insistence of others, and usually on his own publicity-averse terms. …

“If the reactionary concedes the fruitlessness of his principles and the uselessness of his censures,” Gómez Dávila wrote in his essay “The Authentic Reactionary,” “it is not because the spectacle of human confusion suffices for him. The reactionary does not refrain from taking action because the risk frightens him, but rather because he judges that the forces of society are at the moment rushing headlong toward a goal that he disdains.”

Gómez Dávila’s reactionary gaze was a vast one applicable to any subject previously worthy of intellectual dissection: from politics to economics to the arts to manners, and certainly religion. Gómez Dávila found corruption not only in democracy but in capitalism (“The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world’s future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography”); in the rise of industry and technology (“God invented tools, the devil machines”); in individual liberty (“Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade oneself, provided one’s degradation does not impede the degradation of one’s neighbor”); and in blind patriotism (“That patriotism which is not a carnal adhesion to specific landscapes, is rhetoric designed by semi-educated men to spur the illiterate on towards the slaughterhouse”). This is to name but a few cultural felonies that protrude from our mundane striving for betterment. As Gómez assesses: “The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.”

Whole thing here.

From the "Chandelier" music video.

Sia’s “Chandelier” hangs in the cathedral

The first album I ever bought with my own money was Britney Spears’  …Baby One More Time. I was a nine year old girl in Real America, so my preferences were predictable (if not a complete given). As legend has it, the album was released with the ellipsis in the title because Hit Me Baby One More Time was a reference to sexual promiscuity at best and sadomasochism at worst. And while most nine year olds’ comprehension of sadomasochism was limited in those backwards days, it was extremely important that we not be exposed to even a hint of it, so help us Tipper Gore.

I remember catching wind of the Britney controversy through the elementary grapevine, and learning through muffled giggles that it was some sort of reference to sex. I shrugged and moved on with my adolescent life. My friends and I played the album constantly — under the watchful eyes of our mostly conservative parents, of course.

I am not a parent, but I am now a grown up, so perhaps it’s my turn to overanalyze what #kidsthesedays are listening to.

We’ve been indulging in media like it’s our job for as long as we could get away with it; panic over our favorite melodious pastime is unsurprisingly alive and well. Elite nail-biting over the residual effects of music on our toddler brains has a long and amusing history: Before Robin Thicke became the living embodiment of rape culture, we blamed Popeye for window-smashing and the dulcet tones of The Beatles for brutal murders.

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Fiction and the Real

“… It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us…” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We take a moment’s hiatus from our long discussion of poetry to talk about Reality. The purpose for this discussion is mostly clarity; but clarity in this sense is not so much trying to expand our knowledge of something but to show its limitations more clearly. The subject of this essay is realism and what will enable our digression is the set of genres known as ‘fiction’.

The term realistic can refer to at least two different concepts that are related. The first is the concept of things being most like what actually happened, such as a realistic re-enactment of a battle. The second, and seemingly identical idea, is the concept of things being most like what would have happened given a set of circumstances. The relationship between the two concepts is clear, pertaining to a conceptual real, but only one actually pertains to facts. From this second concept we have the literary genre called ‘Realistic Fiction’ – which I think we will find is actually a misnomer, or at the very least conceals an important qualifier.

Fiction is in a particularly odd position in regards to reality. In the original sense, fiction cannot be realistic because it cannot pertain to facts; it being a fiction is it being made up, for if it were not made up it would be ‘nonfiction’. This distinction does not clarify, however; fictions employ various factual elements, and some nonfiction employs fictional elements (sometimes called ‘dramatizations’). We must say, to be as clear as possible, that something is a fiction to the degree that it is made up, and a fact to the degree that it is not. Some forms of fiction push this boundary by, for instance, taking historical personages or events and fictionalizing them; but we sense that if the overall work is a contrivance it is still fiction.

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No panaceas: Libertarian challenges to open borders

Traditionally, libertarianism has welcomed a plurality of views on the immigration question. While nearly all free market proponents agree that current government policies restricting freedom of movement around the world are riddled with problems, we lack a consensus on what exactly these problems are and what should be done to solve them. However, it seems that a growing segment of (mostly young) libertarians are becoming more vocal in their view that unequivocal support for open borders should be *the* libertarian position on immigration. These libertarians tend to emphasize the moral case for open borders, though folks like Bryan Caplan have done a good job of presenting the economic benefits as well.

Unfortunately, advocates of open borders almost always fail to acknowledge important and fundamental tradeoffs when it comes to immigration. As Gene Callahan has written recently, it is strange that libertarian economists, who are usually eager to point out that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, “treat immigration as if it were immune to this principle, and argue as if unlimited immigration is simply an unalloyed bundle of benefits with no associated costs.” Advocates of open borders should recognize that not all opposing arguments are veiled conservative prejudices rooted in xenophobic hysteria and that there are practical downsides worthy of consideration. Here, I will discuss some of these legitimate challenges to open immigration. But first, a few disclaimers on what I will not be arguing.

I will not be arguing that the potential costs of open borders necessarily outweigh the potential benefits. I suspect there isn’t enough evidence to make a compelling case either way and I’m certainly not informed enough to adopt a strong position on the subject. Ultimately, I think that some level of immigration fosters innovation and the exchange of ideas and I have no doubts that the majority of immigrants are hard-working, honorable people who just want the opportunity to create a better life for their families. Nor will I be arguing that the practical challenges of open borders should necessarily drown out the moral arguments, which I generally find compelling. In fact, my path to becoming a libertarian began when I was exposed to the corrupt and unfeeling actions of several bureaucrats towards Haitian immigrants in a congressional office where I interned during high school.

However, I am very skeptical of what appears to me to be an emerging tendency to institute a libertarian litmus test around open borders and a reluctance to engage in a conversation about the many tradeoffs of such a policy stance. I would like to push back against the tendency of open borders advocates to frame the conversation as if immigration is a zero sum game. A writer at SpawkTalk has criticized Bryan Caplan for such framing:

He [Caplan] analyzes whether immigrants on the whole depress native wages, or whether immigrants as a whole use a lot of welfare, etc. It seems to not occur to him that there may be a good case for restricting immigration even if immigrants as a whole do no net harm. After all, some subset of immigrants might do harm in these various areas even if immigrants on the whole do not. And so it would make sense to ban this subset of immigrants from immigrating to your country. Just about no one actually advocated banning all immigration. And yet this is the position that Caplan’s analysis directly argues against. In so doing it fails to address the vast majority of proposals for immigration restriction actually in existence.

It’s especially worth lingering on the point that virtually no one is calling for a ban on immigration across the board. In fact, there is probably no other policy position more implicitly excluded from mainstream debate than immigration restriction. Nearly everyone is against it, from Brookings to Karl Rove to the ideological left to libertarians — and most have self-interested reasons for doing so; the business right wants cheap wages, the left wants more voters, and so on. Advocating for open borders isn’t as radical of a position as many libertarians make it out to be.

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