Low Self-Esteem and Its Ramifications

In the comments to A Few Words On Stereotype Threat, tulio asks in response to Ken Hoop who said he was worried more about low self-esteem among Whites than among minorities:

How does low white self-esteem manifest itself in society? I’m curious.

Well, what you see a lot of in White society are these kind of shy, nice guy types, often overweight, or dorky, nerdy guys. A lot of times you get the feeling that they do not have a lot of confidence. It’s clear that they don’t have a real high opinion of themselves. With middle aged men, especially lower income, overweight, losing their looks, a lot of the time, they look downcast like they are not enjoying things. You don’t get the impression that this guy thinks he is King of the Hill anymore, if he ever did.

Basically it’s associated with neuroticism, niceness, caution, lack of risk taking behavior, stuff like that. Probably lower rates of drug and alcohol abuse too. Low self-esteem is not great, but it’s not the end of the world. Low self-esteem people tend to be nice. As self-esteem rises, people are not so nice anymore. Criminals have very high self-esteem. In White women, low self-esteem is associated with overweight or promiscuous sexual behavior, sluttiness, etc.

Not sure why that is. Prostitutes and porn stars, etc. have notoriously low self-esteem. A lot of these White women cutting themselves and whatnot, or with Borderline Personality Disorder, don’t have good self-esteem at all. Depression is obviously associated with low self esteem, and so is anxiety to some extent. About drug and alcohol abuse, I am not so sure.

High self-esteem is a way worse problem than low self-esteem.

One can argue that people only have so much love to give. The love can go to the self, to others, or to both. As self-esteem rises, a lot of love goes to the self and in many cases, there is less left for others. Further, there is a tendency to see oneself as superior. As self-esteem decreases, self-love is pretty low, but humans all have a great love potential. The love has to go somewhere. As it’s not going to the self too much, it will tend to go outwards. Furthermore, the low self-esteem person doesn’t feel very superior to others.

Alternatively, low self-esteem people send their anger inwards at the self, whereas with high self-esteem, there’s a tendency to project it out at others as a defense. I suppose one can argue once again that the psyche has a reservoir of anger or rage and it has to go somewhere, either inward at the ego or outwards at objects in the world.

That’s why people with low self-esteem are often very nice, and cocky bastards are often complete pricks.

Obviously, it’s ideal to love yourself and others well, but life’s not always so ideal.

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4 thoughts on “Low Self-Esteem and Its Ramifications”

  1. Many of these characteristics you name as low self-esteem overlap with introversion. There seems to be a genetic component to introversion.

  2. Dear Robert
    Most of us are unimpressive human beings. When we are objective, we recognize that. Objectivity is a manifestation of moral soundness because the moral point of view is the impartial point of view. Criminals tend to have low morality and because of that they lack objectivity, and their lack of objectivity in turn causes them to have an excessively positive view of themselves which does not at all reflect reality.
    When comparing themselves with others, objective people will recognize their inferiority if others are superior, as they will also recognize it when they are in the wrong. People who lack objectivity will do neither. They will follow their selfish preferences and feel superior and refuse to concede that they did something wrong.
    In a highly competitive society like the American, people are constantly comparing themselves with others and think that they should try to be the greatest. Since in a comparison some will look better than others, a lot of people will have low self-esteem because they aren’t among the best.
    It is unfair that criminals have higher self-esteem than perfectly decent people, but it is like guilt. Guilt is very unfairly distributed among people. The biggest wrongdoers don’t feel any and people who commit only minor misdeeds often feel plenty of guilt.
    It is a problem without a solution. One may as well try to find a solution for the tendency of nice, naive people to fall prey to conmen.
    Have a good day. James

  3. Actually Robert, it is NOT true that porn stars and promiscuous women have low self-esteem.

    http://www.livescience.com/25058-porn-stars-self-esteem-spirituality.html
    http://io9.gizmodo.com/5963415/contrary-to-common-belief-female-porn-stars-have-great-self-esteem
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201212/porn-stars-and-evolutionary-psychology
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201301/the-personalities-porn-stars

    The reality is that people (both male and women and regardless of race) with higher self-esteem also have bigger sex-drives, tend to by more hyper-sexual in all sorts of ways (within their orientation of course), have a higher number of sex partners over a life time, think and fantasize about sex more often, brag about it more and feel little-to-no shame/guilt about it. Thus are more likely to be kind of people to do porn in the first place. It is actually prudes that have low self-esteem. Biology shows that feeling bad about yourself in any way lowers sex drive while feeling great increases it.

    http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Race-Differences-in-Sexual-Behavior-Testing-an-Evolutionary-Hypothesis-1987-by-John-Philippe-Rushton-Anthony-F.-Bogaert.pdf
    http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/fuzzy.htm
    http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad384.pdhttp://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

    East Asians are consistently proven to have the lowest self-esteem of all races and are the least sexually active of all groups while the exact opposite applies for blacks.

    All of this info has been proven by hundreds of studies in behavior genetics, neurosciences and cognitive psychology.

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