Psychologists: Improve People's Character, Not Self-Esteem

There are some in psychology who see low self-esteem as the root cause of all social and personal problems and believe that such things can be eliminated by raising people's self-esteem.

This is ridiculous.

There can be any number of reasons for wrongful conduct. It can be due to ignorance, to bad values, to wrong beliefs. It can be wrong done intentionally and it can be wrong done unintentionally. To claim that the universal reason for such things is low self-esteem is just as wrong as the Buddhists claiming that all suffering comes from desire, or New Agers claiming that positive thinking will solve everything wrong with the world.

These people think that solution starts with high self-esteem. That is not the starting point; that is the end point. What you need to do instead is work on your character. Then there is more about yourself to esteem.

If that is not done, self-esteem becomes a goose chase. There will always be someone to tear you down, and keeping getting up will after a while get completely tedious. It becomes a Sysiphean labor. The reason is that nothing real changes. All that happens is that you feel differently about yourself. And that means that your house is built on sand.

Instead it makes much more sense to build the house on a rock. Create solid character. As for psychology, it needs to make much more headway into figuring out just how character can be built. I have some ideas on the subject, and I have experiential reasons for saying that this is in fact possible. I want to see psychology discard its self-esteem errors and figure out instead how to help people build character. And then the changes that do take place will be real and lasting and will actually make you a better person, resulting in there being more reason for you to esteem yourself well.