by David Boyle
Despite all that, Vasconcellos began as a good Catholic. ‘I was the best Catholic boy in the entire world,’ he says now. In his valedictory speech in college he promised to devote his life to furthering the work of Jesus Christ. It was the time of the film Man of La Mancha, of dreaming the impossible dream, just to add to the Don Quixote impression, and Vasconcellos set up the La Mancha Fund to beat the impossible foe.
The trouble was, he put it later, that he didn’t like himself. In fact, he had such low self-esteem that he lost the first election he ever fought, for eighth-grade president, by one vote. His own.
Even as a politician, he was having to go through a period of disillusionment. The same year he was elected also saw Ronald Reagan take the reins of power as Governor of California, with a remit to dismantle everything he held dear. Soon he was storming out of meetings at the California Assembly.
Throughout the 70s, he grew his hair – at one stage refusing to cut it for three years. He got angrier and went through periods of heavy depression. Then he suddenly found himself in a process he described as ‘cracking open’. It was the start of a long struggle with himself under a protégé of the great humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, the bioenergetics therapist Stanley Keleman. ‘If I carry on we’re going to open up your rage,’ Keleman told him. ‘It may end your political career.’ But the political capital he had built up got him through. A committee of colleagues was set up to calm him down every time he exploded during a debate. When he went public about his personal demons, he became a national figure.
California was in crisis by the end of the 1980s. The voters were poised to cut back the state’s budget, but the prison system was 175 per cent full and two out of three people arrested in Los Angeles were testing positive for cocaine. Drug abuse was costing $235m in medical expenditure, $4bn in lost work, $2bn in law enforcement, $235m in prisons and $280m in premature death – in California alone. And nobody seemed to have anything new to suggest on the subject beyond lower taxes, tougher sentences and family values. But even these weren’t what they were. Not when half of California’s children will soon live in a single-parent household before the age of 18, and when 8 per cent of them live in traditional families where the fathers work full-time and the mothers stay at home.
It didn’t add up. This was the richest state in the richest country in the world: the normal methods of measuring such things didn’t seem to provide any answers. But what if the problems were symptoms of something so fundamental that the measurements for it simply didn’t exist? Vasconcellos consulted his friend the self-esteem guru Jack Canfield, later to become immensely successful by selling seven million copies of his book Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Together, they put together the proposal for an official task force about self-esteem, which would make the case of ‘feelgood’ as a personal and political issue, and suggest what could be done about it. The first attempt in 1984 passed through the California Assembly in Sacramento by 55 votes to 22, but while Vasconcellos was recovering from triple heart bypass surgery, it was defeated by the senate. The next year it got through both houses but was thrown out by governor George Deukmejian. ‘I do not agree that the creation of an additional quasi-governmental body is the appropriate way to address this problem,’ he said.
Next year, Vasconcellos was back, broadening the remit to include ‘personal and social responsibility’. The senators nodded it through and he went to see the governor himself. ‘Why not just hand it over to a university to study?’ asked Deukmejian.
‘Because by spending a few tax dollars, we can collect the information and get it out. If that helps even a few persons appreciate and understand self-esteem and how they can live their lives and raise their kids better, we may have less welfare, less violence and drugs, and that’s a very conserving use of taxpayers’ money.’
‘I’ve never thought of it that way before,’ said the governor, and signed it into law. The task force would have a budget the same as sending one person to prison for fourteen years.
In May 1988, Vasconcellos went to San Francisco for a brainstorming session with Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, and began advertising for task force members. A record number applied. They appointed an unusual mixture ranging from a gay therapist to a captain in the LA sheriff’s office, the vice president of a poultry farm, a poet and musician and the chairman of the board of the Evangelical Free Church. They appointed David Brooks in the chair, co-author of How to be Successful in Less Than 10 Minutes a Day.
It ran into trouble with the media straight away. ‘As if they needed to reinforce Sacramento’s credentials as the kook capital of the world,’ said the San Francisco Examiner. ‘The taxpayers had the right to hope that such silliness left the state with Governor Moonbeam,’ said one Republican assembly member, harking back to the great days of the semi-hippy governor Jerry Brown.
Nonetheless, the task force report Towards a State of Self-Esteem hit the streets on 23 January 1990. It hit the front pages right across the USA, dismissed by the Right as a waste of money and by the Left for obscuring the issues of poverty and deprivation, but it sold 60,000 copies. Similar task forces were set up immediately in Maryland, Louisiana and Illinois and in fifty of California’s fifty-eight counties. Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell drew up plans for a national task force on ‘human resource development’, which was withdrawn after a battering against it from the Christian conservatives.
The report wasn’t signed by the whole task force. The evangelical refused unless the definition of self-esteem included the words ‘accepting myself as the image-bearer of God’, the gay therapist refused unless it included a model programme for lesbian and gay youth, and the turban-wearing yoga teacher refused unless it included some simple yoga exercises to reduce stress.
But the report was finally out, packed with figures and inspiring little quotations, and it had an effect. Slowly, fitfully, government attention shifted towards Vasconcellos’ three Rs: responsibility, self-respect and relationships – especially in small ways. Hillary Clinton even began keeping toys around the White House in case anyone needed to bring their children to work. The self-esteemers began drafting new laws for California: teaching art and creativity in prison; setting up parenting classes; putting self-esteem at the centre of the school curriculum; measuring the success of institutions by the self-esteem they created. The governor refused to sign the new law tackling teenage pregnancy, but designated February 1992 as Self-Esteem Month.
‘Self-esteem amounts to a social vaccine,’ said Vasconcellos. ‘It provides us with the strength not to be vulnerable to dropping out or getting pregnant too soon or getting violent or addicted. It’s a new strategic vision for the development of human capital. We need to give people material things but also encouragement to become able to protect themselves and take charge of their lives.’
Similar ideas in the USA had already succeeded in reducing delinquency figures, even truancy and teenage pregnancies. Some states already believed they could save six dollars in welfare spending for every dollar spent backing self-help programmes to boost self-esteem. There have also been some spectacular successes in schools, led by the superintendent of one schools district, in San Jose, which gave all pupils 40 minutes self-esteem training a week. Average attendance increased to 97.7 per cent and achievement scores shot up 10 per cent a year.
Self-esteem has become an American industry in itself. So why did the political movement for self-esteem not capitalize on its momentum? Maybe because of the difficulty with one of the task force’s recommendations – the so-called California ‘self-esteem czar’ was never appointed. But then, as one local paper put it: ‘Who’s got a sense of self-worth strong enough to step into the role? Big enough to deflect an entire stable of gag-writers?’
John Vasconcellos remains as convinced as ever of the vital importance of self-esteem, but frustrated by the criticism and the problem of measuring it. Even so, the movement he had given birth to had worked, h
e said. ‘Most people now take it for granted,’ he said. ‘It’s aspired to, talked about, written about, designed into programmes for kids. It’s become so widespread, in fact, that it has created a backlash. ‘Every government programme in operation could be operated by people with self-esteem, who can maintain their self-esteem with dignity and courage, can cherish other people as individuals,’ he said. ‘I think the whole culture’s going that way.’
It is true, as he says, that people are increasingly trying to take control of their own lives. But there remains the crucial problem of how to measure it. Because self-esteem is so fundamental, it is extremely hard to get a measuring tape to it, and therefore hard to get it accepted in our hard-nosed culture. ‘Isn’t there a bottom line?’ I asked him. ‘Doesn’t the government have to find out how to provide people with self-esteem?’
‘The government doesn’t bestow it,’ he told me. ‘The family is the crucible of self-esteem. The government’s role is the assessment of institutions. But there is a bottom bottom line that is whether I have it. If I just talk about self-esteem and just measure it and never experience it, then I’ll never appreciate it.’ It’s an exciting and innovative approach to take a leap at what’s really important, knowing that it can’t be measured. It means that, in the end – however much policy-makers may demand the figures, the fundamental question can only be measured intuitively. ‘Do I have self-esteem?’ is a pretty fundamental question, and one I answer differently for myself every time I wake up. That’s the bottom line. The leap in the dark is to extend that to anyone else.
‘Measuring it, knowing how it’s destroyed and created, takes a lot more knowledge than we have so far, because there is so much involved in being a human being,’ says Vasconcellos.
What made things even more difficult was that, as well as finding it hard to quantify and so almost impossible to measure how much self-esteem was being built in institutions like schools and prisons, there was also hardly any research being carried out on the idea. Worse, some academics brought out papers saying that self-esteem was the same as egotism. The report defines it as ‘appreciating my own worth and importance and having the character to be accountable for myself and to act responsibly towards others’. When you’re going to count something, it has to be defined. When it’s as complex a definition as that, it’s pretty hard to count.
Next the cartoonist Garry Trudeau – who had lampooned the task force for months – went public about research which showed that North Koreans were best at maths but thought they were the worst, while for Americans it was the other way round. Was US self-esteem actually getting in the way? Or are we defining it in the wrong way again? Then there were the seven professors the task force had commissioned. They admitted that the links between self-esteem and the social issues Vasconcellos had been committed to tackling remained unproven. However much they stacked up the statistics, and talked about common sense, they just couldn’t prove that crucial link.
Vasconcellos defended the idea: ‘Just because the causality chain is incomplete with regard to self-esteem, it does not mean that it is implausible.’
The problem of cause and effect keeps coming up when you rely too much on quantification. Are people on drugs because of low self-esteem, or is it the other way round? Four out of five studies show a link between self-esteem and teenage pregnancy – ‘anti-social teenage girls don’t get violent,’ said Vasconcellos, ‘they get pregnant’ – but can you be absolutely sure they don’t have low self-esteem because they’re pregnant? Are the schoolchildren improving because of the self-esteem training or just because people are paying them more attention? Or even more centrally, are people successful because they have self-esteem, or do they just like themselves because they’re successful? Once again, it has to come down to common sense and intuition.
Then two things happened to blunt the growth of the self-esteem idea. The first was the California budget crisis, after the electorate voted to seriously cut taxes. The second event was ‘emotional intelligence’.
Daniel Goleman, a journalist on psychological matters on the New York Times, published his book with this title in 1995 and it was an immediate bestseller (selling getting on for three million copies around the world). Goleman tells the story of a elderly Japanese man on the Tokyo metro who calmed a large and aggressive drunk who was threatening the passengers. The last thing they saw was the drunk in tears, laying his head on the lap of the old man and telling him about his dead wife. ‘That is emotional brilliance,’ said Goleman.
America had bought into self-esteem in a populist way. Writers like Jack Canfield and Nathaniel Brandon had bestselling feelgood books out. Corporations were organizing humour workshops for their staff. There were even cartoons poking gentle fun at families standing outside in their gardens, feeling the warm night breezes instead of sitting indoors watching the final episode of Falconcrest. It has been enormously influential (though slightly embarrassing to Europeans) to have children wear T-shirts that say ‘If it needs to be done, I’ll be the one’. Even so, self-esteem bumper stickers can occasionally give you a jolt. ‘Commit Random Acts of Kindness’ even reached Britain.
What Goleman tried to do was to turn the toe-curling aspects of self-esteem into something respectable for policy think-tanks. Emotional Intelligence did just that. Emotional intelligence, he showed, helped people to work better. It meant they were able to defuse tension, deal with racial diversity, work in teams and handle criticism – at a time when many premature deaths are caused because young men are completely unable to deal with shame. But that wasn’t all. Goleman argued that emotional intelligence also made you healthier. Breast cancer sufferers, for example, found that a weekly meeting of emotional support doubled their period of survival.
Lay self-esteem and emotional intelligence side by side, and you won’t see much difference, but the advent of the latter drove out the attention self-esteem was getting. ‘Culture has this curious awful fascination with novelty,’ Vasconcellos told me, with a slight edge to his voice.
But the problems of measuring emotional intelligence are exactly the same as measuring self-esteem. And when Goleman talked about the concept of ‘flow’ – that sense of letting go in the moment, that sportspeople or artists feel at their most creative and victorious – it gets even more difficult. It may be possible to start measuring such states of mind with electrodes in the brain, but in practice it’s not going to be an everyday tool to check each other’s pulses. Let alone the success of our schools.
Then there is hope, which he describes as a crucial element of emotional intelligence. To measure hope, you have to define it, and Goleman does it like this: ‘Believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.’ Try putting a steothoscope up to that one. But then just because measuring what’s really vital is extraordinarily hard, it doesn’t make those elements any less important.
IV
‘What we are doing is deeply political and seriously radical,’ said Gloria Steinem, the leading feminist, dressed in what looked like leopardskin trousers. ‘The truth is there is already at birth a unique fellow human being – someone with all the human qualities in a unique combination, which has never happened before and will never happen again. Any process of child-rearing which isn’t devoted to finding out exactly who that child is, is not proper education. Emphasizing what goes in during education, rather than what comes out, will convince a child that in order to live safely, they must become someone else.’
It was the second international conference on self-esteem, and speakers from as far afield as Poland, Ukraine and Australia took the story on further. Steinem has been the most articulate modern promoter of self-esteem, describing the moment when she meekly accepted being thrown out of a hotel lobby before interviewing a celebrity because she was an unaccompanied woman – before going back the next day and clearly and confidently making things clear to the manager. She is also an exponent of a healthily un-pragmatic and non-Utilitar
ian social philosophy: that we are not all numbers and we all have something individual that counts. ‘Most of all we have to have faith that everything we do matters,’ she told us in Cambridge. ‘And understand that the end doesn’t justify the means.’ Bentham wouldn’t have liked it.
The conference was organized by the UK Self-Esteem Network, launched the same year as a similar but higher-profile organization. Antidote was founded by film journalist James Park. He had been advised by therapist Susie Orbach that, if he wanted there to be an organization working for more ‘emotional literacy’, he would have to start it himself. The economic case was already being made – legal costs related to marital breakdown in the UK come to £330 million, alcohol costs the country £2.4 billion, a third of all sick leave is related to anxiety and depression – but it somehow required a different kind of counting, they felt. They wanted to measure ‘emotional and social well-being’.
‘We keep on using economic data when it comes to talking about the causes of crime or well-being, when it really doesn’t tell us anything,’ he told me in their offices in London’s Barbican. ‘The idea is to bring the reverence for economic data down a few notches and show how little it actually reveals, and allowing emotional “indicators” to be used alongside.’
‘But isn’t that just swapping one set of bizarre measurements for another?’ I asked.
‘No, we don’t want indicators for that. We want emotional indicators to give us a revised basis for hypotheses about what might be going on. It’s not about saying that the reason why crime has gone up is that the emotional indicators have gone down by 0.2 points. That would be absurd. But at the moment, one element in the equation lacks the spurious credibility that the figures give it.’ The really frightening thing about being director of Antidote, Park told me, was meeting economists who really couldn’t see the point.