Anirudh Silai

After finishing the "personal integrity" section of Branden, I feel it has raised a question: Suppose Adam steals from Bob. If Adam dis-values theft, then he will surely feel guilty because he has also defrauded himself in a sense - through his mind. But what if Adam does not dis-value theft?

On 7/9/2016 at 2:23 PM, SteveWolfer said:

My Masters was in Clinical Psychology, I studied under Nathaniel Branden (the expert on self-esteem) for many years while going through California's licensing for psychotherapists.   And I've watched, with great sadness, what has been done to the concept of 'self-esteem' since the late 60s.

I've read that research paper you refer to.  It was commissioned by the APA and the psychologist who carried it out, Roy Baumeister,  (who was associated with the APA in the past), 'measured' self-esteem with a Likert scale drawn from answers to a set of 5 questions given prison inmates.  Questions like "Do you think you have high self-esteem?"  Or, "Do you like yourself?"  He did an almost identical study where the same asinine measurement technique was used to rate the self-esteem of bullies in elementary school.  The conclusion was that high self-esteem leads to bullying.  This particular psychologist has done a number of what I'd call anti-self-esteem 'studies.'  He has some strange, negative ideas about self-esteem.

Roy Baumeister is a "social psychologist" who has done a great deal of research, written or edited about 20 books,  and is respected in the field (which says a lot to me about the state of psychology as a discipline).  Much of his work has been about what he has posits as the "need to belong" which is at the heart of his theoretical orientation.  He has written that “the defining thrust of human psychological evolution was selection in favor of cultural capability" by which he means a socializing capability, and in his view the major capacities that we exercise are all used to help us act in pro-social means.  He describes free will as an evolutionary advanced mechanism that helps us act in more pro-social ways.

The misunderstandings about what self-esteem really is have been increasing with time.  About 15 years ago I edited the self-esteem page in Wikipedia... or at least I tried.  It was a mess and I wasn't able to make enough head-way to continue.  I just took a look at the page and it has grown worse.  The current set of editors believe that "Self-esteem is attractive as a social psychological construct because researchers have conceptualized it as an influential predictor of certain outcomes..."  Modern psychology is more about research (much of which is ill-conceived and shoddily conducted) while a kind of political correctness drives theoretical orientation, goals and purposes.

Like every other soft science it has become about society, about social constructs, about cultural relativity, and subjectivity.

I see what you mean. You might have seen the ABC 20/20 report by John Stossel called "Feel Good about Failure." Stossel actually uses Baumeister in his own argument that self-esteem comes from achievement. But Baumeister defined self-esteem in a different way than Branden, I guess. Thanks for the correction!

Hey everyone,

Here's an interesting thought to consider:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/the-objectivist-ethics.html - Here Rand says, "if some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing...The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals...Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own." - By destruction, she means physical and psychological (with regard to self-esteem).

But what about criminals who get away with it successfully?

Consider that man must act with reason in order to survive. Consider a thief who reasons that the risk of getting caught is very low, even that the likelihood of his victim even reporting the crime is low. Finally consider that criminals, on average, even those who are caught, have higher-than-average self-esteem, according to the APA.

Or, as an insignificant example, consider that once, when I was in school, I was feeling hungry and I easily snagged a couple of potato chips from a friend.