“Happiness is self-contentedness.”
ARISTOTLE, C. 300 B.C.
“Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right
Well manag’d.”
JOHN MILTON, 1667
“Appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly toward others.”
OFFICIAL DEFINITION OF THE CALIFORNIA TASK FORCE TO PROMOTE SELF-ESTEEM AND PERSONAL AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY, 1990
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I opened a newspaper to discover that California’s legislature had created a statewide Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. In the phrase of Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, the legislator most responsible for its formation, self-esteem is a “social vaccine” against an epidemic of school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, child abuse, and other destructions of the self and others. As chair of the Ways and Means Committee, he had convinced his pragmatic colleagues that a little money spent on prevention could reduce the skyrocketing billions being spent on welfare, illiteracy, drug programs, crowded prisons, overburdened courts, academic under-achievement, and other public penalties of self-destructive behavior.
Finally, I thought, self-esteem is being presented with such pragmatism that even an outer-directed society like ours will take it seriously. Right?
Wrong. The Task Force captured our national imagination—but in quite a different way. “Hold on to your hot tubs,” began one typical newspaper report. Other articles ridiculed this government interest in self-esteem as soft-headed California-think at best, and as a ridiculous misuse of public funds at worst.
Soon, self-esteem jokes were turning up in the monologues of television talk-show hosts. Garry Trudeau, creator of the literate, loony, delightful comic strip “Doonesbury,” began to immortalize the Task Force’s meetings in a nationally syndicated story about a fictional Task Force member, Barbara Ann (“Boopsie”) Boopstein, an actress and mystic who was already well known to “Doonesbury” fans for her suspiciously Shirley MacLaine-like adventures. Since her qualifications included “twenty years of feeling good about myself” and “a history of out-of-body experiences,” other Task Force members were not surprised when she turned out to be the channel for “a really good-looking 21,355-year-old warrior named Hunk-Ra,” though they did question mildly whether Hunk-Ra should be allowed to vote. The “Doonesbury” series ended only after this ancient cynic had disrupted so many meetings with his un-Californian skepticism that both he and Boopsie were asked to move on.
I don’t know whether popular misconceptions about self-esteem created this media ridicule, or vice versa, but in the case of the Task Force, it stuck. My picture of this group’s work would have been very unserious, too, if I hadn’t kept track of its proceedings over the three years of its legislative life. What I discovered was a very different story.
For instance: There had been more applications to serve on this Task Force than on any other body in state history—and this was true in spite of its heavy part-time work with no pay. The twenty-five members finally chosen were a very un-Boopsie-like group of ten women and fifteen men, a rainbow of European-American, African-American, Latin, and Asian-American leaders in education, small business, psychology, criminal justice, civil rights, sex discrimination, domestic violence, welfare, drug and alcohol abuse, religion, gay and lesbian rights, and the delivery of social services.
In the first stage of their work, they assembled and commissioned expert studies and scheduled ambitious, statewide public hearings to discover whether self-esteem was a root cause in any of seven major areas: “crime and violence, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, child and spousal abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and failure to achieve in school.” The outpouring of public interest and the unprecedented number of people asking to testify were the first clue that the Task Force had struck a populist nerve. These hearings turned out to be more like the civil rights meetings of the sixties and the feminist speak-outs of the seventies than the usual dry, government-run proceedings. Though national media had lost interest once the Task Force was under way, local reporters were so impressed that they began to temper their past ridicule.
When all the results of both the expert studies and the public hearings were in, low self-esteem had been documented as “a primary causal factor” in each of the seven areas of targeted social problems. News of these results created requests for information from experts and ordinary citizens in all fifty states, as well as in many foreign countries.
In its second stage, the Task Force looked for effective programs in elementary schools and prisons, drug-treatment centers and battered women’s shelters—all the settings where problems in the seven target areas were being addressed—and put out a report on those, plus their own hearings and studies. In the third and final stage, model programs and policies were recommended for replication.
Even such simple and short-term efforts as holding classroom discussions on the importance of self-esteem, or asking students to keep daily notebooks on what made them feel either empowered or powerless, were found to create a practical, measurable, positive difference. In one school district that addressed self-esteem among teachers, for instance, those who said they planned to retire dropped from 45 percent to 5 percent in one year. In a high school that explored connections between self-esteem and unwanted teenage pregnancy, the number of such pregnancies fell over three years from 147 to 20. In a mostly Hispanic school district that was also the poorest per capita in the state, student discipline problems fell by 75 percent after self-esteem became a subject of discussion.
In the Task Force offices, positive letters about its work began to outweigh negative ones by a ratio of ten to one. State legislators and officials from Maryland, Michigan, Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Missouri were impressed enough to consider using the California model for legislation and programs of their own. So were several members of the U.S. Congress.
Many of California’s own lawmakers had been skeptical in the beginning—“self-esteem” had sounded so suspect in the title of a government commission that they had agreed to it only after Vasconcellos added “and Personal and Social Responsibility”—but now, their main concern was how to continue the Task Force work. By enacting new legislation, they empowered each of California’s fifty-eight counties to create a local Self-Esteem Task Force of its own.
The cost of this entire three-year effort? Exactly $735,000: less than the price of keeping one twenty-year-old in prison for a life sentence. Even Assemblyman Vasconcellos was surprised by the high return on such a small investment. What splitting the atom had been to the 1940s and exploring outer space had been to the 1960s, he predicted, exploring “the reaches and mysteries of inner space” would become to the 1990s—and beyond.
Given the effect of Task Force work on the very problems that polls show Americans fear most—violent crime, drug addiction, and declining standards in schools—one would think so. In fact, however, to this day, few people have heard about its practical successes. Its final report was met with more media coverage of seven dissenting members who criticized its philosophy (mainly for failing to “recognize the eternal God as the origin of all human worth”) than with reporting of its programs. As a result, the California experience is known to those who have read its published summary, or who have heard of the private foundation to whom the Task Force passed its work after its mandate expired.3 But for the majority of us who depend on public sources for information and ideas, its lessons are largely lost.
Indeed, at the national level, the wheel seems to be in the process of reinvention at best and rejection at worst. When U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island was impressed enough with results of the California Task Force to introduce a similar bill to create a National Commission on Human Resource Development, for instance, it was defeated by a campaign of pressure from the religious right wing. Even though “Self-Esteem” was nowhere in the title and “Human Resource Development” seemed to safely distance the center of power from the individual and put it in the hands of authorities—and even though Pell and co-sponsor Senator Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas had asked for no public funds at all—it was condemned as “godless,” “dangerous.” Senate offices were deluged by well-orchestrated phone calls and letters, and the bill was indefinitely withdrawn. By 1991, Pell so despaired of it ever receiving government support that he began his own Human Potential Foundation in the hope of attracting private funds. Meanwhile, the Bush administration had announced a plan to improve the public schools by subjecting teachers to more paper tests.
Why is there such a split between grass-roots interest in self-esteem and support from much of the government, religious, or even media establishments? I think the idea of an inner authority is upsetting to those accustomed to looking outside for orders—and certainly to those accustomed to giving them. Moreover, if only outside authority is serious, then any inner experience becomes a frivolous concern.
Perhaps we would feel more comfortable with the concept of self-esteem if we knew that it was neither new nor frivolous. Far from being a product of California-think or of a selfish Me Generation, it goes beyond the West and modern individualism. It is as old and universal as humanity itself.
Everyone has a word for it. Indeed, there has always been a way of saying it.
In France and French-speaking parts of the world, self-esteem is amour-propre, “love of self,” in Italian it’s autostima, in Danish selvvaerd, and Spanish speakers everywhere call it autoestima. To the Germans it’s selbstachtung, to the Dutch, zelfwaardering. Arabic speakers say al-jtibar al-dhati. In Hebrew it’s haaracha atzmit; and in Yiddish, zelbst gloibn.
Samouvazhenie is the single word in Russian; kujistahi in Swahili; and swavhimani in Hindi. The Chinese combine the pictogram for self (pronounced zi) with the one for esteem or respect (pronounced zun) and say zizun. The Japanese say ji son shin.
But however different the words, their meaning is the same. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the primary definition as a “favourable appreciation or opinion of oneself,” and cites uses of “selfe-esteem” from the 1600s. North American dictionaries shorten its meaning to “belief in oneself” or “self-respect.” Thesaurus synonyms are “self-reliance,” “self-consequence,” “poise,” “confidence,” “assurance,” “pride,” or “self-sufficiency.” Antonyms run the negative gamut from “self-doubt” and “self-effacement” to “self-hatred” and “shame.”
Tracing the English word even further back, we find unfamiliar spellings: silfe, soelf, suelf; and extyme, aesteam, extseme. By 1657, when Augustine Baker, a mystical theologian and Benedictine monk, declared “Selfe-esteem, Selfe-judgment, & selfe-will” to be the three requisites of independence, the term had been used by scholars in Latin and by common people in English for centuries, with origins in the Western world dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. Allotriosis, “self-alienation,” for instance, was the greatest evil in Greek philosophy, and oikeiosis (“self-love,” “self-acceptance,” or “self-contentedness”) was the greatest goal. Plato called “rational self-love” crucial to progress because it alone “requires a man [sic] to be concerned for his own future condition.” Aristotle equated self-contentedness with happiness. For him, the full realization of one’s own specific nature was the ultimate good. Indeed, in that Golden Age of Greece more than three centuries before the birth of Christ, oikeiosis was seen as the root of almost everything positive. From this center radiated successive circles of love: first for oneself, then for one’s children, then for one’s family, and finally for the whole human species.
The Stoics added another circle to this progression: love of nature. Thus, self-love became the keystone of their belief that unity with nature was a greater good than obedience to social convention. Self-alienation was seen as destructive far beyond the boundaries of the individual self: it prevented one from honoring the natural world.
But even this thinking came relatively late in written history. Some 2,500 years before the birth of Christ in what is believed to be the first formal book, a priest named Ptahhotep, a sage and prime minister of Egypt, recorded wisdom gathered during his no years of life, and its core was: “Follow your heart.”
In the same era, Asian religions were exploring an outer circle that extended even beyond nature in radiating out from the self: the universe, the cosmos, the mind of God. The idea that self-knowledge was God-knowledge—that the self was a microcosm of the universe, and that knowing the self was our individual way of knowing the mind of God—was central to the origins of Hinduism, and thus to Buddhism, Sufism, and the many other religions that sprang from it. Self-realization became a goal placed over caste duties, external rules, obedience—everything.
In the Upanishads, dialogues that codified the wisdom of the Vedic period in India from 2500 to 600 B.C., there is one central text from which all else derives: Tat tvam asi, “That art Thou,” a circular statement that is often translated, “Truth is within us.” Instead of creating a hierarchy in which humans were placed above nature, and kinds of knowledge were ranked, Vedic teaching described a circle: starting at any point could complete the whole. Thus, Brahman (the truth discovered objectively through observation) and Atman (the truth discovered subjectively through introspection) could become one and the same. As scholar Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan summed up the belief at the core of these ancient commentaries: “The real which is at the heart of the universe is reflected in the infinite depths of the self.”
This quest for universal understanding through self-understanding has been misused to create the uncaring, navel-contemplating stereotype of Eastern philosophies. In fact, their turn toward passivity had more to do with the politics of poverty and despair superimposed upon them. Even in rich countries, religion, psychoanalysis, and self-help theories have been used to justify passivity and enshrine external injustices. In many ways, Freud’s biological determinism is a simpler and more passivity-producing theory than Eastern ideas of a present life set in the context of past lives and the forces of the universe.
It seems that the older the teaching, the more it presents self-wisdom and self-honor as a source of strength, rebellion, and a kind of meta-democracy—a oneness with all living things and with the universe itself. Returning to this concept of circularity and oneness that preceded patriarchy, racism, class systems, and other hierarchies that ration self-esteem—and that create obedience to external authority by weakening belief in our natural and internal wisdom—is truly a revolution from within.
“When we realize the universal Self in us,” ask the Upanishads defiantly, “when and what may anybody fear or worship?”4