But let's leave that out; what's interesting is that there is some recent research I came across which suggests that sociopaths in particular do not suffer from low self-esteem; in fact, they have unusually high levels of the the stuff. And there is also a body of results that suggest that people who do genuinely suffer from low self-esteem, and who make very bad life-choices as a result, wound up in that condition because of early, severely abusive treatment as children, not because they came in near the bottom of the pack in spelling bees in grades 4 and 5.
I am not surprised by the fact that sociopaths have very high self-esteem. They do, afterall, live in a world of their own creation with standards that the rest of us cannot comprehend.
Its a very odd thing. Schools are, by their very nature, hierarchical institutions. Children are given marks and are thus ranked one against another. Yet nobody seems to understand that when you have a system like that someone will be at the top and someone will be at the bottom. If people cannot accept that their children might not have an aptitude for something, then the school system is going to have to be changed so every child gets the 'you're special' mark. Of course tertiary education will collapse (sorry Ex) because no one will have a clue who should attend, but then the mediocre advocates will simply say, "Good riddance. It was elitist crap anyway. You don't need to know about critical thinking, you just need to know you're special."
It would be much more beneficial to everyone if we allowed people to understand that they may suck at something and be great at sometnhing else.
If only. But nobody, it seems, wants to be thought of as not good at something. Its a shame really, because once you stop wasting your efforts on things you just don't get, the things you do get improve immensely. We can't all be Leonardo da Vinci.
I don't think it is a "martial arts thing." I've seen plenty of mediocre martial artists plateau and be content to stay there. How many times have you seen guys who have years in, but their skills haven't improved, they are happy to instruct, but don't get on the floor and bang anymore. They've been in the art 20 years, they've been at the art for about 6, But because they run a school and because they pay dues to an org, they are getting rank promotion.
You're right its not a martial arts thing. We all know that time-serving can achieve high rank in martial arts. I presented our pursuit as something that was generally outside this unpleasant pattern of hammering down the tall nail which has infected our society. Most of us in the martial arts strive to make ourselves better in someway. That attitude seems to have been stamped out in general society.
Even those people of mediorce talent chose to go into the martial arts to challenge and improve themselves. The fact that they were unable to reach the heady heights of skill and understanding should not detract from the mindset of wanting to be better. It is the desire to get rid of this attitude which disturbs me the most. And it is being catered to. Nobody wants to earn anything through hard work and perseverance anymore, because they have been told that they don't have to. The standard has been set so low you can achieve it without trying.
This is true, of course, but I thing Steel Tiger was talking about something else: not just the kind of comfortable inertia that some people fall into and leads them to stop striving, but a much more pernicious attitude: the notion that excellence itself is a social evil, or at least reflects a destructively competitive view of life, and that people who excel are not to be praised for the quality of their work but criticized because they put others in the shade. This is what I think of as the `hive-insect' mind-set: the collectivity is all that matters, and the role of the individual should be no different from that of a single cell within an organism.
This is the crux of the matter. It has killed industries across the world. Just look at the US engineering industry. It was once the envy of the world, but now you guys have got some serious problems in that field. If this continues I can see some very odd things happening. Look at the disturbing prices for artworks from yesteryear. A rather ugly Faberge egg auctioned for 29 million. There seems to be no craftsmanship to match that of 100 or even 50 years ago. Look at art. Contempory art is pretty ordinary. They seem to have taken Pollack's words to heart when he said, "Even when an artist spits its art." Could this be the motto for our society now?