QotD: Self-esteem

The world is full of belligerent numbskulls; frequently, the more ignorant, the more belligerent.

It is a soppy, and dangerous, progressive cliché that lack of self-esteem among the indigent and the criminal is a cause of poor social integration. There's actually no evidence that the indigent and the criminal do have low self-esteem. On the contrary in fact, they tend to have rather too much of it.

Yeats got that. Polly Toynbee gets it too. Charles Darwin wrote, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

While this is distressing for the world's more sentimental do-gooders, and seems to have had no impact at all on the growing self-esteem industry, it is an important observation, having great explanatory power, and not just for the history of idea. It is, I submit, at the core of such diverse social phenomena as gangstas, bling, Islamism, dangerous driving, the bullying petty official, the modern media health scare, the conspiracy theorist, and large chunks of the content of the web. Combined with the tendency for the assertive and persistent to get their own way, because others can't bear endless futile arguments, it is much more than a marginal nastiness. Which is distressing even to the unsentimental.

Guy Herbert, "Doctor Bickle, I presume", Samizdata, 2007-03-06