Self-Esteem

 

Satan in his original glory, by William Blake

I recall reading somewhere the estimate that medical science only began doing more good than harm in about the 1920s. Bloodletting, inserting a bellows in the rectum, and introducing new infections with septic conditions was until shockingly recently the largest part of the trade.

Yet, for thousands of years, physicians have plied a recognized and profitable profession. 

Because people in pain are desperate, quackery always has an audience. Then, should the quack by chance achieve a cure, or a cure by chance happen after their ministrations, they will be venerated by the sufferer almost as a god. It works like fortune telling works: people always remember the hits, and forget the misses.

That’s medical science of the proper, physical sort. Psychiatry and psychology are nowhere near the point of doing more good than harm. The common advice given someone who is struggling with some mental conflict, “get help,” is therefore cruel. Unless you are directing them to a priest, you are as likely throwing them to the lions.

Modern psychiatry begins by throwing in the dustbin all the accumulated wisdom of the ages about the human soul. This is called the Humanities. It is what the Humanities is all about. It is what philosophy, the arts, and religion are there for.

One terrible thing psychology has done recently is the drive for “self-esteem.” Self-esteem is formerly known as pride, or hubris: the first and deadliest of sins. We are reaping the fully predictable benefits now in generations of narcissists, snowflakes, and acts of random violence.

It is not about either self-esteem or self-debasement. The problem is the same in either case: thinking of yourself all the time. The nature of consciousness is such that you experience yourself on an entirely different plane of existence than everyone else. In the end, we only know our own thought and our own perceptions—not anyone else’s.

It is easy to imagine that no one else matters—or exists.

Berkeley struggled with this in his otherwise seemingly unassailable esse es percipio philosophy: how can we actually know that anyone else is out there perceiving? All other life is alien life.

This is the core problem that must be overcome in bringing up any child, of making them fit for company. 

Encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wonderful, and you are making the problem irreparably worse, by taking out any objective measures of their limits by which they can calibrate self. It is just as damaging as if you encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wrong or evil. Either way, the self, the soul, is destroyed.

Will we, as a civilization, as a species, be able to escape the morass psychiatry and psychology has gotten us into?

While they keep coming up with new problems for us?