"Just Believe in Yourself": Who and how sold the myth of self-esteem to the world
Although self-esteem has always been an important barometer the psychological state of a person, her influence is often exaggerated, and it is not quite correctly represented as the root of all human turmoil. Our failures do lead us to less value ourselves and our own abilities, and this, in turn, can suppress motivation and social adaptation skills. Once in an environment where they are being harassed or discriminated, a person really begins to feel overwhelmed and useless.
Dmitry Kurkin
Low self-esteem is also a sure sign of lack of quality, and it seems to give the opposite conclusion: if you want to succeed, work on self-esteem. This explains why the motto "You just need to believe in yourself!" still popular - and selling well - and high self-esteem is still considered a pledge of personal growth, a universal master key, thanks to which you can ignore complex social problems (such as the same discrimination) and personality traits. Moreover, some twenty years ago, it was considered not just a symptom of illness, but the root cause of almost any setbacks, so the work on self-esteem has become almost a religion. We find out who had a hand in creating a cult.
Threads of the modern self-esteem movement lead to Californian politics, John Vasconcellos. He, in turn, was inspired by the works of Carl Rogers, a theorist of humanistic psychology, and inherited his belief that man is good by nature, and his potential is limitless - you just need to open it correctly. A clue how to do this exactly, Vasconcellos found in research on the relationship between low self-esteem of a person with antisocial behavior and poor adaptation in society.
Having made a classic mistake and producing a correlation for a direct causal relationship (low self-esteem could just as well be a result of social disorder, as well as its cause — moreover, the connection between them should not be direct at all), Vasconcellos ignited the project of correct education of the new generation. He argued that many “social illnesses” - from unemployment, banditry and domestic violence to the increase in alcohol and drug addiction and teenage pregnancies - can be cured if, from an early age, to engage in improving people's self-esteem.
High self-esteem is still considered a guarantee of personal growth, a universal master key, through which you can ignore problems
Vera Vasconcellos, by virtue of positive thinking, was great. Will Storr, who devoted a policy to a separate chapter in the book "Selfies: Why we are fixated on ourselves and how it affects us," says that when in the early eighties a resilient idealist struck a heart attack, he asked his supporters to imagine small brushes scrubbing cholesterol plaque in its arteries (this approach did not really help, and in the end the policy had to resort to coronary artery bypass grafting).
With the idea of creating a committee to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility, Vasconcellos came to the office of the then governor of California, George Dukmedjian. There he was skeptical of his venture, but John insisted that his social project would save a lot of money for the state budget in the future, because working on self-esteem was much cheaper than eliminating what he considered the consequences of low self-esteem. This argument helped him convince the governor to create a special commission of scientists from the University of California to study the issue.
Taking up the public promotion of his concept, Vasconsellos was confronted with a profound misunderstanding of positive thinking. Everybody made fun of his ideas, from political opponents (one of whom offered to buy a bible for $ 2.5 as an alternative to a project worth $ 735,000) to the media, especially from the artist Harry Trudeau, who raised a movement for self-esteem to laugh. in the satirical comic "Dunsbury".
The situation radically changed when in 1988 the conclusion of the commission that studied the results of self-assessment studies was made public. "Correlations are recognized as positive and convincing" - this conclusion, published in the media, made self-assessment the main word of the next two years and became the basis of almost religious faith, which could now refer to "the opinion of scientists."
There was only one problem: the real results of the examination did not support Vasconcellos theory. In other words, scientific evidence of the influence of self-esteem on human behavior, replicated in press releases, turned out to be fake. “Self-assessment did not have any impact on any of the six social problems studied by the commission,” said one of its participants, David Shannhoff-Hals. “That report was an attempt to deceive people. There was no scientific basis behind it.” In fairness, he lied not a report, but his promo. “Most often, the results indicate that the link between self-esteem and its expected consequences is ambiguous, insignificant or absent,” was the real conclusion of the commission led by Neil Smelser. It is still unknown for sure how these words turned into a "positive and convincing correlation" that was published by the media, but, according to Storr, the University of California did not argue with Vasconcellos because of fear of losing funding.
Having broken the initial skepticism, the movement for self-esteem began to quickly recruit supporters (including Oprah Winfrey) and swept through the nineties of North America like a forest fire. Although the echoes of that fever are still heard - training to improve self-esteem is still in demand, the turnover of the relevant market for goods and services in 2015 in the US alone, according to one estimate, reached $ 10 billion annually - at that time much more epic character. Remembering about her, they usually cite as an example the children's book "Cuties in the Kingdom of Self-Assessment", written by Dien Lumens and published in 1991. But this sweeping mantra (“I am beautiful! I am beautiful! These magic words threw open the gates to the Kingdom of self-esteem to readers of all ages,” was an abstract) was only a cherry on the cake of numerous courses and target programs whose schools were the main platform.
One of the common practices was kushball: elementary school students had to throw a colored ball at each other, accompanying each throw with a compliment like "I like your T-shirt" or "You play good football." Similar sessions of mutual praise called the "Magic Circle" were held in a school in Toronto. Some educational institutions installed mirrors with inscriptions like “You look at the most special person in the whole wide world!”. Others have decided to abandon the use of red ink when checking the work of students.
The idea of a panacea was too seductive to abandon it and "instead recruit the best teachers and invest more money in schools"
According to Steve Salerno, the author of the book “Wiring: How the self-help movement made America helpless,” the US education system so eagerly grabbed the concept of self-esteem because it offered to solve complex social problems with one stroke of a magic wand. “You have distressed working areas in which children - primarily children of African descent - do not show the same academic performance as the rest. And here you are told that this is due to the fact that they have low self-esteem." The idea of a panacea was too tempting to abandon it and “instead recruit the best teachers and invest more money in schools” or fight systemically against discrimination.
A complete rejection of criticism, which can harm children's self-esteem (and, accordingly, worsen their academic performance), however, did not lead to the desired result - an increase in the quality of education, which could be confirmed by research. Moreover, in some cases, it even fell. A relatively recent example is Barrowford Primary School in Lancashire County, England: in 2014, she became famous for writing her headmaster, who told her students that grades are not as important as feeling their own uniqueness; a year later, Ofsted inspectors (a supervisory service assessing the quality of education) called the level of teaching in the school unacceptably low.
Another assumption underlying the Vasconcellos program was not confirmed - that the level of aggression and antisociality of a person is inversely proportional to his self-esteem. The results of studies published in the mid-2000s, including Scientific American, not only did not confirm this assumption, but also refuted it: among the convicted criminals there were enough of those who had a high opinion of themselves.
With what increased self-esteem really goes hand in hand (again, if we talk about correlation, and not causation), it is a person’s willingness to take initiative and good mood. However, people who are prone to narcissism, self-esteem can cause psychological addiction - and then the initiative goes not so much in the desire to change life for the better, as in the desire to get another dose of approval from others. Not surprisingly, in the late 2000s, many studies distinguished the surge in narcissism in the United States. According to one version, it is explained just twenty years ago by the fashion boom for self-esteem.
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