That it was people with a grandiose view of themselves who strike out. In other words, Baumeister and his colleague Brad J. Bushman discovered what depressed people had known all along. If you tell a person with low self-esteem “You suck,” they say “You’re right,” and roll back under the covers. It’s the esteem-bloated person, who has enough belief in himself to classify such an insult as untrue, who bothers striking back. “Aggressors often think very highly of themselves,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “as evidenced by nationalistic imperialism, ‘master race’ ideologies, aristocratic dueling,
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