There is a famous passage somewhere in Tolstoy that illuminates the power of

Excessive Self-Regard Tendency. According to Tolstoy, the worst criminals don’t

appraise themselves as all that bad. They come to believe either (1) that they

didn’t commit their crimes or (2) that, considering the pressures and

disadvantages of their lives, it is understandable and forgivable that they

behaved as they did and became what they became.

 

The second half of the “Tolstoy effect”, where the man makes excuses for his

fixable poor performance, instead of providing the fix, is enormously important.

Because a majority of mankind will try to get along by making way too many

unreason- able excuses for fixable poor performance, it is very important to

have personal and institutional antidotes limiting the ravages of such folly. On

the personal level a man should try to face the two simple facts: (1) fixable

but unfixed bad performance is bad character and tends to create more of itself,

causing more damage to the excuse giver with each tolerated instance, and (2) in

demanding places, like athletic teams and General Electric, you are almost sure

to be discarded in due course if you keep giving excuses instead of behaving as

you should. The main institutional antidotes to this part of the “Tolstoy

effect” are (1) a fair, meritocratic, demanding culture plus personnel handling

methods that build up morale and (2) severance of the worst offenders. Of

course, when you can’t sever, as in the case of your own child, you must try to

fix the child as best you can. I once heard of a child-teaching method so

effective that the child remembered the learning experience over fifty years

later. The child later became Dean of the USC School of Music and then related

to me what his father said when he saw his child taking candy from the stock of