Oh, happy, happy Caligula!
Self-love, writes Dalrymple,
used to be a vice, but nowadays it is the nearest thing to a virtue, as a supposed precondition of our own mental health (whatever that might be).
The theory is that self-love
is a precondition to success, happiness, and resilience, and should therefore be taught early and probably incessantly.
Some people think
the promotion of youthful self-satisfaction and conceit an excellent idea, the key to the little ones’ future happiness.
Dalrymple points out that criminals,
especially the vicious rather than the merely pathetic ones, have very high self-esteem. They are generally proud of how awful they have been and positively swagger with satisfaction at their own competence in the matter of causing misery to others. They too have ‘core beliefs’ about themselves, all of them highly flattering. They even think they are lovable as well as admirable.
