LOST
IN SELF-CONSUMPTION
The global recursive violence model in the age of self-esteem
LOST IN SELF-CONSUMPTION
Pathomorphic Social Selection and the Evolutionary Trap of Cybercapitalism
Liviu Poenaru
In Press: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
EXCERPT [Chapter 5]
The model I develop here is a critical framework derived from what the Vasconcellos experiment made visible once the self-esteem paradigm moved beyond its original context and became a globalized mode of subject formation. The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem promised that raising individual self-worth could reduce crime, school failure, dependency, violence, and social disorder. Yet its failure exposed a deeper historical paradox. When self-esteem is institutionally promoted as an autonomous good, detached from moral education, communal obligation, and structural transformation, it does not necessarily produce secure or responsible subjects. It can produce fragile subjects whose sense of worth depends on constant confirmation.
The danger lies not in self-respect, but in the inflation of self-regard without corresponding ethical formation. A person trained to believe in their own exceptional value, but not trained in humility, responsibility, restraint, or solidarity, may experience criticism, failure, rejection, or invisibility as an attack on the self itself. Violence then emerges not simply from low self-esteem, but from threatened selfhood: the defensive reaction of an ego that has been promised recognition but encounters contradiction, humiliation, or exclusion.
The model that emerges from this historical experiment unfolds through several interconnected mechanisms. This is the basis of what I call The Global Recursive Violence Model of Threatened Selfhood.
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Institutional inflation of the self
Schools, therapeutic cultures, corporations, media systems, digital platforms, and self-help industries teach the subject to understand personal worth as something that must be felt, affirmed, displayed, and protected. -
Detachment from moral formation
Self-esteem becomes increasingly separated from humility, restraint, responsibility, honesty, courage, duty, solidarity, and care for others. Feeling valuable begins to replace becoming ethically accountable. -
Neoliberal invalidation
The same subject is inserted into systems organized by ranking, competition, insecurity, debt, exclusion, status anxiety, and continuous evaluation. The promise of unconditional self-worth collides with the reality of conditional recognition. -
Threatened egotism
When the world fails to confirm the subject’s inflated or unstable self-image, criticism becomes humiliation, disagreement becomes disrespect, failure becomes annihilation, and invisibility becomes symbolic violence. -
Production of violent subjects
The subject becomes defensive, resentful, narcissistically wounded, dependent on validation, and less able to tolerate limits, contradiction, frustration, or loss. Violence and hostility become a compensatory attempt to restore recognition, control, dignity, or power. -
Production of violent ecosystems
Institutions themselves begin to operate through comparison, visibility, competition, emotional extraction, outrage, self-branding, and symbolic injury. The environment no longer merely contains fragile subjects; it actively produces and rewards them. -
Recursive systemic violence
Late liberal systems damage the climatic, democratic, biological, psychological, and social conditions of life, then sell compensatory solutions to those harmed by that damage: wellness, self-optimization, motivational coaching, lifestyle consumption, therapeutic branding, digital visibility, and identity performance. -
Economic extraction from injury
One violence feeds another in loops of destruction organized around profit. Ecological destruction produces anxiety; anxiety becomes a market. Social fragmentation produces loneliness; loneliness becomes a platform economy. Democratic erosion produces fear and resentment; fear and resentment become media and political commodities. Psychological suffering becomes a source of commercial extraction. -
Crime, aggression, and self-violence as extreme outcomes
The model does not claim that self-esteem alone causes criminality. Rather, it argues that inflated selfhood, moral erosion, systemic humiliation, economic exclusion, and threatened egotism can converge to make crime, aggression, domination, addiction, self-harm, or social hostility more available as distorted forms of self-restoration.
This model argues that the self-esteem paradigm became dangerous when it was absorbed by neoliberal and late liberal systems organized around competition, consumption, insecurity, and permanent evaluation. The subject is told to love the self, invest in the self, believe in the self, brand the self, and optimize the self. Yet the world in which this subject must live is marked by precarity, social comparison, institutional distrust, democratic erosion, ecological breakdown, and the collapse of shared moral horizons. The contradiction is structural: society inflates the self while simultaneously destabilizing the conditions that would allow the self to feel secure, meaningful, and socially grounded. This produces a subject who is both over-addressed and abandoned, constantly urged to affirm personal worth while being exposed to systems that deny durable recognition. Under such conditions, the ego becomes defensive. It demands validation, interprets limits as oppression, experiences disagreement as injury, and converts frustration into resentment.
The erosion of moral values is central to this model. Earlier ethical frameworks, however imperfect, situated the self within obligations to others: family, community, citizenship, religion, character, duty, courage, honesty, and care. These frameworks did not eliminate violence, but they offered symbolic restraints against narcissistic escalation. They taught that worth was not reducible to feeling good about oneself, but was bound to conduct, responsibility, sacrifice, loyalty, and service. The culture of self-esteem reverses this hierarchy. The inner feeling of being valuable becomes more important than the difficult work of becoming morally accountable. Emotional self-regard replaces ethical formation. As a result, the subject is encouraged to protect the self rather than discipline it, to demand recognition rather than earn trust, and to interpret discomfort as injury rather than as a possible condition of growth. Once these moral restraints weaken, the threatened ego has fewer resources through which to transform humiliation into reflection, failure into learning, or frustration into responsibility. It turns instead toward blame, resentment, victimhood, domination, aggression, or self-destruction.
The model therefore explains not only violent subjects, but also violent ecosystems. Contemporary liberal systems are increasingly unsustainable climatically, democratically, biologically, psychologically, and socially. They exhaust the planet, weaken democratic legitimacy, commodify attention, fragment communities, destabilize mental health, and reorganize life around production and consumption. These systems produce wounded subjects, then sell them compensatory solutions. Wellness, self-care, self-optimization, motivational coaching, lifestyle branding, digital visibility, therapeutic consumption, and identity performance become markets for subjects damaged by the very systems that now promise relief. One violence feeds another in recursive loops of destruction organized around economic profit. Ecological violence produces anxiety and futurelessness; these are converted into markets for comfort, distraction, and personal reinvention. Social violence produces loneliness and distrust; these are monetized through platforms that sell connection, comparison, outrage, and recognition. Democratic violence produces fear and resentment; these are transformed into political branding, polarization, and media profit. Psychological violence produces suffering; suffering becomes a market. The system injures the subject, then profits from the subject’s attempt to survive the injury.
One of the central violences of this system is permanent extraction through digital and economically driven performance, where subjects are required to remain visible, productive, responsive, competitive, and emotionally available until depletion. Society is then divided between those who can still compete and perform — at the cost of exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, and self-exploitation — and those who are pushed outside the performance regime altogether: the excluded, the depressed, the unemployed, the marginalized, the socially invisible. In both cases, the system profits from the injury it produces, extracting value either from hyper-performing subjects who consume themselves in order to remain viable, or from wounded subjects whose exclusion becomes another market for management, therapy, surveillance, discipline, and compensation.
Criminality can be understood as one extreme expression of this recursive structure. The model does not reduce crime to psychology, nor does it deny material causes such as poverty, racism, class domination, exclusion, institutional abandonment, or social humiliation. Rather, it shows how these conditions converge with threatened selfhood and moral erosion. Late liberal societies teach individuals to desire success, possession, recognition, visibility, status, and control, while denying many of them stable access to the social, economic, and moral conditions that would make dignity possible. When this contradiction is experienced as humiliation or dispossession, violence may become a distorted form of self-restoration. Crime can appear as a way to force recognition, reclaim agency, reverse shame, or assert power in a world experienced as degrading. In this sense, the globalized self-esteem paradigm did not abolish criminality. By inflating fragile egos, weakening moral restraints, intensifying competition, and embedding wounded subjects in violent ecosystems, it may have helped reproduce some of the conditions under which criminal aggression becomes psychologically and socially available.
The paradox is therefore not local but global. A movement that promised empowerment helped produce fragility. A movement that promised healing helped weaken moral solidarity. A movement that promised to reduce violence helped normalize a culture of threatened selves. Within systems driven by unsustainable production and consumption, this violence becomes recursive: wounded subjects circulate through wounded institutions, while the economy extracts profit from both the wound and the attempted cure. The result is not simply a society of individuals with fragile self-esteem. It is a global order in which psychic fragility, moral erosion, ecological destruction, democratic instability, social hostility, criminal aggression, self-violence, and economic extraction reinforce one another. The cult of self-esteem thus becomes part of a broader architecture of systemic violence: it produces violent subjects, violent ecosystems, and markets that depend on the endless reproduction of injury.
Contemporary cybercapitalism radicalizes this paradox: a system that presents itself through the ideology of freedom, autonomy, choice, and self-expression increasingly produces subjects addicted to digital environments designed to capture attention, destabilize self-worth, and monetize reactivity. The violence generated by threatened selfhood becomes one of the most profitable resources of the digital economy precisely because it produces engagement. The subject who feels unseen, humiliated, envied, attacked, excluded, or morally outraged returns to the screen in search of recognition, repair, escape, or retaliation. Platforms then convert this psychic instability into data, visibility, advertising value, and behavioral prediction. In this sense, the fight-flight-freeze response is no longer only a biological reaction to danger; it becomes a screen-mediated economic mechanism. Fight appears as outrage, conflict, denunciation, trolling, and symbolic aggression; flight appears as endless scrolling, distraction, fantasy, and withdrawal from embodied life; freeze appears as anxious paralysis before the feed, where the subject remains overstimulated, immobilized, and unable to disconnect. Whether the subject attacks, escapes, or freezes, the system profits. Thus, the liberal promise of autonomy conceals a cybercapitalist infrastructure of dependency: a world in which violence is not an accident of digital life but one of its most profitable operating conditions.
[WORK IN PROGRESS]
