Will Storr writes: For much of human history, our beliefs have been based on the assumption that people are fundamentally bad. Strip away a person’s smile and you’ll find a grotesque, writhing animal-thing. Human instincts have to be controlled, and religions have often been guides for containing the demons. Sigmund Freud held a similar view: Psychotherapy was his method of making the unconscious conscious, helping people restrain their bestial desires and accord with the moral laws of civilization.
In the middle of the 20th century, an alternative school of thought appeared. It was popularized by Carl Rogers, an influential psychotherapist at the University of Chicago, and it reversed the presumption of original sin. Rogers argued that people are innately decent. Children, he believed, should be raised in an environment of “unconditional positive regard”. They should be liberated from the inhibitions and restraints that prevented them from attaining their full potential.
It was a characteristically American idea — perhaps even the American idea. Underneath it all, people are good, and to get the best out of themselves, they just need to be free.
Economic change gave Rogers’s theory traction. It was the 1950s, and a nation of workmen was turning into a nation of salesmen. To make good in life, interpersonal sunniness was becoming essential. Meanwhile, rising divorce rates and the surge of women into the workplace were triggering anxieties about the lives of children born into the baby boom. Parents wanted to counteract the stresses of modern family life, and boosting their children’s self-esteem seemed like the solution.
By the early 1960s, wild thinkers in California were pushing Rogers’s idea even further. The “human potential movement” argued that most people were using just 10 percent of their intellectual capacity. It leaned on the work of Abraham Maslow, who studied exceptional people such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt and said there were five human needs, the most important of which was self-actualization—the realization of one’s maximum potential. Number two on the list was esteem.
At the close of the decade, the idea that self-esteem was the key to psychological riches finally exploded. The trigger was Nathaniel Branden, a handsome Canadian psychotherapist who had moved to Los Angeles as a disciple of the philosopher Ayn Rand. One of Rand’s big ideas was that that moral good would arise when humans ruthlessly pursued their own self-interest. She and Branden began a tortuous love affair, and her theories had an intense impact on the young psychotherapist. In The Psychology of Self-Esteem, published in 1969, Branden argued that self-esteem “has profound effects on a man’s thinking processes, emotions, desires, values and goals. It is the single most significant key to his behavior.” It was an international bestseller, and it propelled the self-esteem movement out of the counterculture and into the mainstream.
The year that Branden published his book, a sixteen-year-old in Euclid, Ohio named Roy Baumeister was grappling with his own self-esteem problem: his Dad. [Continue reading…]
The fame and influence of the guitarist Paco de Lucía, who has died aged 66 from a suspected heart attack, reached far beyond the intense and sometimes enclosed world of Spanish flamenco. His musical role in Carlos Saura’s Carmen (1983) was as arresting in its way as the first glimpse of Laura del Sol, the film’s luminous lead. The director-choreographer Saura cleverly reinvented the opera as a contemporary fable while retaining the original’s elements of passion, possession, jealousy and obsession. De Lucía’s interpretation respectfully returned Bizet’s score – a French fantasy of Spain – to its Moorish antecedents. He also gave Carmen’s timeless melodies a fresh, international appeal that chimed with the movie’s arthouse success. [Continue reading…]
Timoteo “Dino” Saluzzi was born in 1935 in Campo Santo, a small village in the north of Argentina noted primarily for its sugar cane refining factory, around which local life revolved. Despite the absence of records, radio and indeed electricity in the Saluzzi household there was always music. His father played guitar, mandolin and 
What can we learn from the protest wave of the last years? How does social media impact the capacity for collective action? Does social media contribute to blunting movement impacts by facilitating horizontal, non-institutional and “leaderless” movements? How do these movements compare with their predecessors like the civil-rights or anti-colonial movements? In this talk Zeynep Tufekci — assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, a faculty associate at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University — discusses these questions by drawing from research on a variety of social movements including the “Arab Spring”, European indignados movements, Occupy and Turkey’s Gezi protests. (October 15, 2013, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.)
