EGO, self-esteem on steroids

 

It is often said that we live in a narcissistic society and that’s probably not far from the truth. In his 2018 book Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us British journalist Will Storr investigates the roots of this phenomenon. Of course, the West has always been much more individualistic than collectivist areas like East Asia. Western societies are WEIRD in this respect, as our ancestors have lived pretty communal lives until recently. Robert Nisbett traced back the origins of individualism to ancient Greek rationality, which is, however, only one piece of the puzzle. Modern Greece is far more collectivist than most other Western countries.

It’s no big secret that the USA has always been at the forefront of driving individualism. Robert Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community has become a classic read and one of the most cited books. Will Storr starts his take on the story with the arrival of Ayn Rand in the USA. Her extreme form of individualism and meritocracy were continued by many influential people like Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 and is still highly popular among the Silicon Valley startup culture. However, nobody preached self-actualization by boosting self-esteem more than John Vasconcellos, who had suffered from low self-esteem and self-loathing himself. In the late 80s raising self-esteem among kids was thought to be the panacea for everything. After all, it was a well known fact that successful people had higher self-esteem, were richer, more popular and happier than people with low self-esteem. However, there was a catch and it couldn't have backfired in a much worse way:  

By the mid-2000s, when the children of the self-esteem generation had become parents, the problem was accelerating. Narcissism, the researchers argued, was now an ‘epidemic’, rising as quickly as obesity. The increases they’d discovered were equivalent to ‘the height of all men going up by about an inch’. The irony was intense. ‘Narcissism causes almost all of the things that Americans hoped high self-esteem would prevent,’ wrote Twenge and Campbell, ‘including aggression, materialism, lack of caring for others, and shallow values. In trying to build a society that celebrates high self-esteem, self-expression, and “loving yourself,” Americans have inadvertently created more narcissists.’

Not only had America raised a generation of narcissists, but mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation among kids and teens were going through the roof. Upon closer inspection the equation

People with high self-esteem = happy and successful people

didn’t really hold up. All you need to do is look inside prisons, they are full of people with high self-esteem. This is an interesting paradox, high-self esteem makes people both more likely to succeed and more likely to fail.

[...] today’s social psychologists have a much more tempered view of self-esteem. It’s now thought that people with too much of it fail more, because they’re in denial of their own weaknesses or incompetences. They’re also likely to give up challenging tasks sooner, as struggling at anything painfully contradicts their concept of who they are. They’ve also been found to engage in self-defeating behaviour, prior to a challenge, perhaps so they have a ready excuse when they fail to excel.

Like Will Storr, who is as successful as can be as far as journalists go, I was a teen with very low self-esteem. The most successful kid from my year was the one kid whose self-esteem seemed to be even lower than mine. He finished college in record time with two doctorates to everyone’s surprise. I am not claiming that people with low self-esteem are more likely to succeed than people with high self-esteem, it can have the very same effect: people with low self-esteem are more likely to fail or succeed. There is just no simple correlation. The kids who dropped out earliest in high school were the kids with the highest self-esteem, and some of the kids with the lowest self-esteem. The same is true for the kids who became successful later on. The kids with the healthiest kind of self-esteem seemed to follow safe, stable profitable, but not extraordinary careers.

This is something that I didn’t experience merely from my own time in high school. It’s something I am seeing year by year among my own students in high school. The kids who drop out are typically those who have a very high self-esteem and sometimes those who have a very low-self esteem. Psychologists are aware that self-esteem has many correlates with personality traits. Of course, nobody will be surprised to learn that extroverts tend to have a higher self-esteem than introverts. That doesn’t mean that extroverts are born with a higher level of self-esteem. They might simply have more self-esteem because they have more friends and society values extraverted traits more than introverted ones. A study found that emotional stability (negative neuroticism) had an even higher influence than extraversion:  High self-esteem individuals were emotionally stable, extraverted, and conscientious.

Colin G. DeYoung showed that the Big Five factors can be divided into two metatraits: Stability and Plasticity.  Stability is defined by one's maintenance of stability and hypothesised to be related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, while Plasticity is seen in one's adaptability to novelty and hypothesised to be related to the neurotransmitter dopamine. This is exactly what we would expect from biological adaptations to sedentism vs nomadism, respectively.

I have argued that these profiles have their evolutionary origins in farming and nomadism (herders and foragers) and that they are highly congruent with Myers-Briggs temperaments (SJ = farmer, SP = herder, NT = hunter, NF = gatherer). What I typically tend to find among my students is that SP/herder types often have heightened self-esteem, SP/farmer types a normal/healthy self-esteem and N/forager types often struggle with low self-esteem. Low self-esteem is also extremely common among neurodiverse teens (ASD, ADHD). I have called this group of people the “hunter-gatherer neurotribe”, which may seem ridiculous at first glance.

Hunter-gatherer children and teens have been described as mentally very healthy and having a high level of self-confidence, most recently by Michaeleen Doucleff in her 2022 book Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans.  However, Doucleff lived with the Hadza, who are still largely able to follow their traditional way of life. Things look much bleaker for Native American teens, whose ancestors had to give up their way of life a few generations ago.

Even if they've had good educations, many Native American teens experience serious problems. These include some of the highest rates of diabetes, teen suicide, domestic violence, drug use, struggles with authority (e.g. school) and lowest graduation rates of any minority group.

The whole high self-esteem craze may not only have led to a more narcissistic generation in general, it may have made potential problems with self-esteem much worse in forager types. And it may have done a lot of harm to today’s kids/teens and society in general. It’s time to hit the brakes.

For more on the hunter-gatherer neurotribe check out my book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0836LW5QV