Amerika

The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils’ self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned.

Dr Carol Craig said children were being over-praised and were developing an “all about me” mentality.

She said teachers increasingly faced complaints from parents if their child failed a spelling test or did not get a good part in the school pantomime.

She told head teachers the self-esteem agenda, imported from the United States, was a “a big fashionable idea” that had gone too far.

She said an obsession with boosting children’s self-esteem was encouraging a narcissistic generation who focussed on themselves and felt “entitled”.

BBC

If you pick an unrealistic goal, you contort everything else to not contradict that goal.

So when you declare everyone equal, you’re pretty much forced to destroy anything to the contrary.

This means that when there’s a race at physical education, you reward the kid with the most average time.

When there’s a test, you make sure everyone gets a B+ and a few kids get As for extra effort.

Eventually, you’ve so saturated everyone in false positive assessment that people lose impetus to perform, much as they do under socialism.

It’s the same psychology, just transferred between grades and money.

A better way is to say that everyone has a place in a complex hierarchy unless they do a few taboo things, like murder, rape, smoke in bed, etc.

Our current society is based around the idea that everyone is equal, and every action is equally OK, until it offends someone else. That’s a minefield. It makes no sense.

To counter it, we’re trying to make everyone feel OK with themselves, which doesn’t help them when they need to change their behavior because they’re screwing up.

How societies decay. Plato predicted it:

Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the oligarchical man.

The manner of life in such a State is that of democrats; there is freedom and plainness of speech, and every man does what is right in his own eyes, and has his own way of life. Hence arise the most various developments of character; the State is like a piece of embroidery of which the colours and figures are the manners of men, and there are many who, like women and children, prefer this variety to real beauty and excellence.

The only qualification which she demands is the profession of patriotism. Such is democracy; — pleasing, lawless, various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and unequals alike.

Plato, The Republic

Modern people are so trained by rationalism that they reject any idea which has one (1) aspect they do not like, and they never assess whether on the whole it is more or less truthful than what they know now. Truly they have been domesticated.

Plato’s point is a good one, however. A state based on equality removes the impetus toward excellence that makes a nation healthy, and so all that’s left is commerce, conformity and patriotism — which even our left has in disgustingly powerful portions.

Tags: cognitive dissonance, devolution, eugenics, narcissism, rationalism