On the Internet, there are countless web sites that offer advice on building self-esteem. One of them, geared to school-age children, says the reason self-esteem is important is that having it makes for a confident person, one with the courage to say no "if your friends are doing something dumb or dangerous". To judge by the pages on the Internet, there are a lot of people making a living out of this esteem business. There are tests to determine how little of it you have, courses designed to increase it, speakers who will get you fired up about it, psychologists to diagnose it, psychiatrists to find out why you have so little, lawyers to help you use it to get out of trouble, writers to sum it up and a great long line of others, experts one and all, who have some kind of stall in this bazaar.

Low self-esteem, we have been told for years, is responsible for the majority of crime and most other social ills. Is some able-bodied young man spending his life sitting on a wall? It's because he has low self-esteem. Are young men more attracted to spending their lives dealing in dope than to the Bermuda College and a career? It's that low self-esteem, again. Is a child making a nuisance of himself in school? Low self-esteem, of course. Has someone been shoplifting cashmere sweaters at shops on Front Street? Exposing himself to children on Church Street? Begging from tourists on Victoria Street? The Magistrates will be told by earnest young lawyers that life has played dirty tricks on these accused, causing abnormally low self- esteem, which translates directly, of course, into diminished responsibility and diminished penalties.

But does this low self-esteem stuff have the ring of truth to you? Increasingly, it does not to many people in the psychology business, and I'm with them. I don't think that character on Victoria Street who keeps asking for money has low self-esteem. He simply believes he's big and ugly enough to intimidate us into giving him money. The Church Street flasher gets a kick out of scaring people half to death. Shoplifters think they're too quick and too clever for the sales staff.

The problem with these people isn't too little self-esteem, it's too much of it. Studies in the United States and elsewhere seem to be bearing that out. They are pointing out that people with high self-esteem can be a great deal more anti-social than those whose sense of self-worth is low. Self- esteem can be just as high among street thugs, school bullies and drunk drivers as it is among Nobel laureates. People with an irrationally high sense of self-worth are more likely to commit crimes, drive dangerously or risk their health with drugs and alcohol. They don't think they're bad, they think life's being unfair to them. They're not acting out their outrage at being oppressed or abused. They are dangerous because they are narcissists. They believe that what they want, they should have, for nothing.

Conversely, exceptionally low self-esteem is damaging only to the victim, not to anyone else. Those with low self-esteem are more likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, to become victims of bullying, loneliness and social ostracism. Justin Kroger and David Dunning, professors in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, have published an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that detailed some of the research in the field. They suggest that many people have an inflated view of their abilities because they suffer a dual burden - not only do people come to poor conclusions and make poor choices, their incompetence also robs them of the ability to recognise they're doing it.

The authors found that in tests of ability in humour, English grammar and logic, those who scored in the 12th percentile were under the impression they had scored much higher, in the 62nd. They cited the case of a bank robber who robbed two banks in Pittsburgh without trying to disguise himself in any way. When he was arrested, he was incredulous because he had been under the impression that if he rubbed his face with lemon juice, video cameras would be unable to capture his face on film. That may sound like a comic example, but if you change the context, it jumps great distances in a single bound and becomes quickly - almost laughably - familiar. The paper, available at http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html if you are interested, says we are now able to make four predictions about the competence of people when they are compared with their peers. They have a depressingly circular nature.

Incompetent individuals will dramatically overestimate their own abilities.

Incompetent individuals will be less able to recognise competence, when they see it, whether it be their own or someone else's.

Incompetent individuals will be less able to use information about the performance of their peers to judge their own performance.

Incompetent individuals can increase their competence, but only if they become more skilled in the area of their incompetence.

But it is a great mistake to assume this condition is confined to incompetents. A Time magazine-CNN poll asked voters in the last US election whether they were in the top one percent of income earners in the country. Nineteen percent said they were. Another 20 percent said they expected to be soon.

If you're not chuckling, go back and read the last paragraph again.

In this part of the world, we behave in ways that encourage this kind of overestimation. Doting parents indulge their childrens' every whim, to the point of shielding them from reality. When reality tries to intrude, in no matter what form, parents pride themselves on having fought it off, almost no matter what its basis. Schools discourage teachers from any form of confrontational discipline. Educational testing and grading is weighted in favour of making average students look like great students and poor students average. Teachers are expected not to send negative messages of any kind to children (including bad marks for bad work). Children are encouraged to write and repeat those sugary little affirmations of the "I'm special, no matter what" variety.

The theory is that children who feel good will be good. But that's a psychological myth. On the contrary, praise by itself does not produce high achievement. The way to produce good students hasn't changed since the days of clubs and raw meat. Teachers must have high expectations of those in their charge. The rules must be clear. Penalties for breaking them must be tough enough to be feared and must be applied consistently. Only then will accurate, supportive feedback and praise work its magic - children who actually do achieve high standards. Only this carrot-and-stick approach can lead to students being capable of knowing themselves accurately, and therefore of having a well-judged confidence in their ability to surmount challenge.

The result of the education system's falsely positive reinforcement of children is that they often graduate believing the world is a kind of perpetual entitlement programme. They expect the same kind of treatment as they got in school from their spouses, their employers, the community and the legal system. Some of them, unused to confrontation, react in the worst possible way when, inevitably, it visits them. How can a child who has never known any form of discipline other than inaccurate praise know how to react to the demands of what might be described as an un-amused policeman, for example? They have no experience that might help guide them, and the unlucky ones can be marked for their lifetimes by the experience.

Often, employers reinforce the unreasonable expectations of those with false high esteem by awarding jobs and promotions, not on the basis of ability and performance, but on the false expectations created by already-skewed educational qualifications. Managers write personnel reports based on what they know will affirm the personnel department's decision to hire an employee, not on what is deserved. Unions fight the corner of the incompetent and the dishonest. (I must in fairness acknowledge the praiseworthy stand that recently seems to have been taken by the good Mr. Ball of the Bermuda Public Services Association, although I predict, with sadness, that unless he modifies his tune, he'll find himself one day singing in some other choir.) Society seems to want to avoid at all costs acknowledging that some behaviour is simply wrong, or simply criminal, or even simply evil. Stupidly, we always seem to want to find a more complex explanation that will diffuse blame and help the culprit avoid the consequences of his or her action.

Our refusal to face the facts is itself a kind of incompetence. And unless we force ourselves to gain more skill in this area, we are doomed never to escape from the trap that incompetence represents.