In Hans Kohn’s The Mind of Germany he states, “In the early twentieth century the youth of Germany lived in a bewildering tension between a rapidly industrialized and outwardly westernized environment and Innenleben, an inner life, dominated by neo-romanticism and myth.” Dr. Rogoff, in her Ted Talk video describes this Weimar Era observation in terms of developments in America as one where protecting the children of the Industrial Age from exploitation by child-labor bosses led to cloistering in controlled environments that restricted participation and contribution by the young. If the inner life yearned for escape into freedom and participation it evoked a romanticism here in the United States as well, for children are children. The question is whether the bewildering tension is better understood and whether we have arrived at insight, particularly into the cultivation of character in young persons.
There is no paucity of research on self-esteem. One reason may be that it captures attention boldly in the crescendo of primary introductory courses on psychology as one of the major themes towards which the river of study courses. It is evaluated as a trait not only in personal assessment but as a performance value, pro or con, and it spans the generations, with studies about its effect for example on the children of parents with disabilities (Krauss, L., & Olkin, R. 2019). It is a humanizing theme as well as a hotly contested ideological one. Self-esteem is a subset of what many feel is the central concern of society: race matters and some of the most important legal decisions in our society’s legal system, such as Brown vs. Board of Education.
In order to answer the question of self-esteem offering my definition it is possible (for me at least) to strip it down to a simple, and primarily ideological abstraction. This isn’t to favor or rule on the merits of that approach, simply to invest in realism about my own personality. Then in order to show the characteristic I describe in drama, it is possible to satisfy the real interplay of self-esteem on bewildering tension and unfortunately extreme situation past. However, I wouldn’t want to examine this perspective authoritatively, and so I will add a few lenses about how the issue is coached by authorities properly in the field of psychology.
My statement in class is that the ability to appreciate, for example things done better than you by others, works of art that you love, people that you admire, comes from self-esteem was met with some skepticism and I admit there is an ideological component that simplifies this down to a rule of the thumb. For good example, a focal point of my appreciation about appreciation, which was validation rather than what you might call indoctrination due to its widely held to be suspicious source, Ayn Rand, occurs in a beautiful moment of her novel The Fountainhead where an impervious architect meets a shattered but talented sculptor and is unsettled by the other man’s collapse due to being manipulated by flattery and false admirers simply out to hurt him. The architect says essentially why can’t you just support yourself, given your obvious abilities? It is made into an almost holy theme for Rand that perversely cuts against the ability to entirely respect it, but the moment is in good faith and deserves to be read in good faith. Rand has simply shown the power of recognition in good insight about what is talented. I am not a sculptor myself, nor was the protagonist, he simply was in this case willing to carry his friend’s heart a little while based on appreciation, but encouraged his friend not to need such a crutch. She says she wants such men not to be in danger of being crippled by public opinion. Given the base role that scandal plays in the world of celebrity, it’s easy to sympathize on that one. Who wants to see talent crying on the floor that ways?
I realize that self-esteem and the subject of egoism in Ayn Rand are too bilious to credit.
If however, we trespass beyond self-esteem as being this self-transcending ability to appreciate things and persons of value without taxing and demanding personal reward beyond that ability to admire and benefit from appreciation, it is necessary to consult the experts because that is where my limited grasp of the subject ends.
In one study (Brummelman, E., et al, 2014) conceiving of praise as a factor in self-esteem, the research poses a theory that wrongly worded praise can backfire on children with low self-esteem. In the Rand scenario the shattered sculptor would become hateful towards his own work in response to the attempt to moralize or build up the awareness that someone else is impressed favorably. What this says about low self-esteem however is that a person loses the ability to accurately assess that someone else actually admires them and that the praise that person would be offering is real. Rand makes clear that the person in question is factually tormented by persons who insinuated sincerity while meaning nothing real or admiring towards him at all. This quandary of appreciation and esteem continues to define my belief that the practice of appreciation, when genuine, is a fairly good measure of self-esteem.
Logically a person might contradict me by saying a person who is realistic enough to see fine achievements and measure themselves low by those fine achievements would naturally suffer from low self-esteem, but that isn’t clear just because it is logical. The measuring rod that is brought to bear on appreciation of achievement isn’t sufficiently standardized text to be a fair counter measure to pit upon oneself. In fact, the logical answer would be, my fineness isn’t in my ability to do that wonderful work but in my ability to appreciate it, where another sad man might close their eyes in envy or scorn, making up that it is worthless. Why should I turn such a heartless tactic on myself who I know only as well as I know life, which no one knows well or entire?
G. Gordon Liddy once put me down in public by scorning my ideas about life as a fantasy world, but the memory brings me satisfaction not for agreement with his choice of words but because there is a certain poetry about what he was criticizing, which is the idea that making society more healthy by appreciation emboldens people to demand the peace we deserve. He saw all this talk as naive and useless against the guns of enemies and hatred. All very nice, but more a characteristic exhibition of low self-esteem from an incompetent person enthralled with himself as a braggart, useless to try to escape though bullies are.
Another area in which the tragedy of targeting the mind of the prey comes out in Seattle’s ripper hatter of Forensic Assertive he-thinks-he’s-better-than-us when the peers play like that they like Carrie, kissy kissy all face caress, and then dump a bucket of pig blood on the golem.
In the case of being kidnapped and gassed in a Special Education Holocaust Survivor Community project of extreme, surreal trauma as a grade school child, my self-esteem was all but destroyed and rebuilt along an empathy model with my surroundings as my tormentors patiently indoctrinated me into the holocaust survivor mystique and why I was the object of hate crime. Tragically, it was possible for me to see their point of view enough to feel that I should take it as something that while not really earned was only victimizing me and therefore not relevant. Of course, I begged out when I realized there were other people being victimized, but the self-esteem involved in being targeted for slaughter isn’t masochism, a cruel idea about the tragedy.
What I feel is that an extreme situation pitted me against defamation so brutally that my self-esteem asserted itself by simply seeking a way to compel myself to survive non-violently and campaign for my right to speak of the forbidden. I came to admire what Liddy scorned, the ability to express rather than punish, to educate, rather than destroy. Certainly, I believe the legal system let me down, but I don’t feel that my self-esteem should be adversely affected, although, to be sure, I am often derided as a humiliated individual.
Having been interrogated by the perpetrators and called out repeatedly from their support in the streets as a liar, I was indoctrinated to say the first thing that came to mind or be subverted by cries of subverting transparency, a loaded notion, given the impacted nerve agency they used for brainwashing, it is therefore very ironic that my subconscious mind actively asserts an affinity from my readings of Michael Burleigh’s research into the mental health ward practices of the Third Reich to illustrate which he includes a beautiful, unimpeachably dignified letter from a doomed child in girlhood. Her self-esteem is dignified and calm against an immensity that she chose to destroy that ways before perishing under policy.
Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Overbeek, G., Orobio de Castro, B., van den Hout, M. A., &
Bushman, B. J. (2014). On feeding those hungry for praise: Person praise backfires in children with low self-esteem. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 9–14. https://doi-org.tacomacc.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/a0031917
Krauss, L., & Olkin, R. (2019). Exploratory research with young adult children of parents with
disabilities. Stigma and Health. https://doi-org.tacomacc.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/sah0000169
