We need to challenge our own thinking.
The American mind in particular has been trained to equate success with victory, to equate doing well with beating someone.
Human beings aren’t rational animals; we’re rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.
Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it’s also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.
It is possible to achieve mastery of a problem or a skill without hurting another person or even without attempting to conquer.
The person who is easiest to brainwash is the person whose beliefs are based on slogans that have never been seriously challenged.
Thus, if passionate love is like cocaine, then companionate is more like a glass of fine wine – something delicious and pleasurable, but with fewer health palpitations and less mania.
What do Hitler’s inner circle, Nixon’s close advisers, and NASA administrators have in common, aside from the fact that they made terrible decisions? Each was a relatively cohesive group isolated from dissenting points of view.
An appreciation of the power of self esteem helps us understand therefore why people who have low self esteem or who simply believe they are incompetent in some domain are not totally overjoyed when they do something well why on the contrary they often feel like frauds.