Americans need to stop self-deluding and obsessing about themselves.


In an episode of Saved by the Bell, Jessie Spano tells her boyfriend, "What I look like is not as important as who I am, Bubba." New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched a $330,000 self-esteem initiative aimed at convincing prepubescent girls that Jessie was right.

The NYC Girls Project, said Human Resources Administration Commissioner Robert Doar, "reminds girls that substance and character are more important than appearance." It tells girls that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that they are the only beholders. In other words, it totally lies to them.

Why is the city doing this? Because low self-esteem "has negative public health consequences," Bloomberg said. It (supposedly) leads to "eating disorders, bullying, alcohol abuse, early onset of sexual activity and obesity" — in short, to everything but dieting and exercise.

Supporters of the NYC Girls Project believe that young girls are especially vulnerable to societal pressures and need a Big Brother to psych them out of bulimia, depression and cutting themselves. "This campaign is as vital to the well-being of girls in this city as chicken soup and penicillin," said Pam Maldonado, executive director of Girls, Inc. of New York City.

As part of its public reeducation campaign, the city is running a 30-second video in taxis and putting up posters of girls declaring how awesome they are. "I'm friendly, smart, curious, brave, healthy, sincere, hardworking, unique and creative," says one, omitting modesty. On every poster is the slogan, "I'm beautiful the way I am." The hope is that girls who read this sentence are naïve enough to believe it.

One discovers, after uttering this catchphrase out loud a few times, that it is not self-fulfilling. Just as wars are not won simply by declaring victory, intelligence is not acquired by saying "I'm smart" nor beauty pageants won by exclaiming, "I'm beautiful the way I am!" (Trust me, I've tried.)

The nexus between achievement and self-esteem is murky at best. Time and again, when students from different countries take a math test, the result is the same. The Americans, despite testing the worst, are the most confident about their math skills, proving that having a big head is not the same as having a big brain.

Americans love to love themselves. Our obsession with self-esteem, concomitant with our passion for equality, is why Zack Morris, in Saved by the Bell, says to his friend Screech, "Wheelchair basketball happens to be a very popular sport." He says this both because a girl in a wheelchair is listening and because social etiquette dictates that we say whatever is necessary to make each other feel good.

Rather than telling the harsh truths, we grasp for what Edmund Burke called "the pleasing illusions."When self-esteem is the goal, self-delusion is the practice.

Just as one can have too much self-esteem, one can have too much faith in others. Leon Trotsky predicted that in a communist society the average person would "rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx." If everyone were to ascend to such heights, there would be no one to look up to, nor anyone to look down upon. There would be no basis for self-esteem, only insufferable equality — "the horror of mediocrity," as the insufferable Ayn Rand called it.

Self-esteem, as the philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out, arises from our inequalities. "When everyone, or almost everyone, has some thing or attribute, it does not function as a basis for self-esteem," Nozick wrote. Having hands, or being a girl, is not enough. You have to be exceptional to be estimable. And the NYC Girls Project is neither.

Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.


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