EDITORIAL: Too full of our own importance

LOUIS PIERARD
Did you feel it? Did you even notice it? Wednesday was international self-esteem day.
It was started by an Auckland "attitude specialist" in 2000.
It has now, she claims, "become international with people in Australia and the US starting to support the concept". Mercifully, that initiative passed by here virtually unremarked.
The attitude specialist believes low self-esteem is to blame for "many of our social, and educational problems ... additionally, in the workplace there's underachievers and people lacking in the confidence to perform ... the self-esteem day is an idea whose time has come - everyone can learn to believe in themselves!"
The quest for self-esteem has become an obsession. Careers are built on spreading the word, careers fail for lack of it. We are told it is essential to our happiness and that low self-esteem is the root of a host of evils, from dropping out of school, to smoking, to violent crime. Yet most of the intractable social ills can be laid at the feet of the self-regarding impulse to ensure personal satisfaction at the expense of everyone else's. Because that is what happens when self-esteem is championed at the expense of that quaint, outmoded and much-neglected quality, "self-respect".
From being an odious weakness, self-absorption has achieved nobility. Constant examination of their emotional lives has become central to the lives of many people. Holding oneself in high regard, which must be the aim of raising self-esteem, is contingent on success and requires comparison with others. Self-esteem, Ellen J Langer, psychology professor at Harvard points out, is therefore prone to blame, guilt, regret, lies, secrets and stress.
"If we gave up self-evaluation, we could have more life before death," she said.
While he was still practising as a psychiatrist, Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), who spoke in Napier this year, wrote that in the prison where he worked he saw many men who had a "grossly inflated and indeed repulsive" self-esteem ... who projected self-satisfaction that was "horribly at variance with their actual place in the world".
"Walk down the main streets of any British city and you will see people with excessive self-esteem but no self-respect. They dress shabbily, for example, and in so far as they are concerned to create any impression on others, it is to warn them to treat them with what, in the language of street credibility, is known as 'respect': That is to say, not to challenge their inflated sense of their own importance in any way."
Self-respect, he wrote, was an altogether more valuable and admirable quality than self-esteem, because it was a civil and social, not a narcissistic and solipsistic, quality. "Take away self-respect and all you have is a vain whistling in the wind, in search of the chimerical and generally repulsive self-esteem."
Self-esteem, said Dalrymple, imposed obligation on others, that they treated one as if one were of supreme importance, far more important than anyone else. Self-respect, on the other hand, imposed obligations on oneself, for example that one behaved with decency and controlled oneself for the convenience of others, even in the most difficult circumstances.
So why, then, should anyone want to give self-esteem its own special day?