For years we have heard about Americans’ low self-esteem. We’ve been told that many people don’t feel good about themselves – not about the way they look, about the work they do, or about how socially popular they are.

But research shows that most of us tend to think too much of ourselves and our abilities – rather than too little.

I don’t mean to make light of the importance of building self-confidence among children and young adults. And no one should doubt that a solid sense of our individual value is important to our mental health.

That said, it’s intriguing and funny to read about studies that show solid majorities of people think they are above average.

Science has even tagged this tendency: the superiority illusion.

It explains why University of London researchers found that 98 percent of us think we are among the nicest 50 percent of people.

It also explains why more than 90 percent of us think we’re among the most skilled drivers on the road, and why the majority of us think we’re smarter than average. The superiority illusion also is why most of us think we work harder and contribute more at work than almost all our co-workers.

Numerous studies indicate that our tendency to inflate our own abilities and talents is not just an American trait. In many instances, however, illusory superiority appears to be more pronounced among Americans than in other cultures.

It may also partially explain the political and cultural rifts evident in the U.S.

Democrats and Republicans strategists employ rhetoric to exploit our desire to perceive ourselves as better than our opponents.

Little time or effort is spent explaining ideas or arguing the benefits of a particular proposal.

Instead, political marketing is used to persuade the public that one side is smarter, nicer, more ethical and harder working than the other side.

That’s why political commercials and fliers don’t outline proposals or plans, but feature scary pictures of Nancy Pelosi or Donald Trump.

Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, the message is virtually the same: “Our side fights for good, hard-working, right-thinking people like you, while ‘they’ are out to destroy your way of life.”

By appealing to our vanity, the political marketers reinforce our illusions of superiority.

The true indicator of superiority, however, may be our willingness to examine our beliefs about ourselves and our parties.

Rather than automatically assume the worst about others, perhaps we would be served better by considering the possibility – however unlikely – that at least half of the people in the world are just as nice, just as smart and just as hard-working as we are.

Regardless of their political beliefs.

In our personal lives and exchanges, this is something we likely can admit is possible. Most of us have had co-workers, family members or friends who didn’t share our political views, but who we admired for their intelligence, their work ethic, or their compassion and generosity.

It’s true that an increasing number of Americans are choosing to isolate themselves from people who are different. They choose lives that shelter them from ideas and people who would challenge their value system. They choose their neighborhoods, churches, schools, friends, media and their working relationships based on whether people are like them.

It’s likely that illusions of superiority both feed this desire to be sheltered from challenges, and help the illusion grow stronger because challenges to the inflated sense of self disappear.

But it is an illusion. Much of our knowledge is attained when we expose ourselves to what is new and unfamiliar. That’s true both personally, professionally and as a society.

Only if we think that we may not be the smartest, nicest, hardest working people in America will we be willing to consider that other people – even those who don’t share our belief system – have something to teach us.

That doesn’t mean everyone’s ideas and proposals are equally intelligent or sound. It does mean we should stop assuming that our own are far superior merely because they are ours.

The biggest, heaviest issues facing lawmakers this year have yet to be resolved.

Now on spring break, lawmakers will return to Topeka in May to try to figure out how to fund public schools, how to makes state taxes both fair and sufficient to pay the bills, and how to help ensure Kansans have access to decent health care.

Although legislators worked in earnest to address some of these issues, Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed their bills. If nothing else, the past three months have made clear that legislators are attempting to govern not in concert with the governor, but despite him.

With the House, Senate and administration all ruled by Republicans, this ought not be the case. But the record shows that responsible leadership and reasonable compromise will need to come from the ranks of the Legislature on such issues as school finance, tax reform and Medicaid expansion.

That became evident when the governor began the year by proposing a budget that was structurally unbalanced.

The Legislature responded by passing tax reform, which would have raised taxes pretty much across the board and helped the state address chronic budget gaps. Brownback vetoed the measure, calling it a “punitive tax increase on working Kansans.”

He told a conservative business group that the tax measure approved by legislators was “an assault on the pocketbooks of the middle class.”

Less than two months later, he told those same legislators he would support a tax hike on low and middle-income Kansans – if it came in the form of a flat tax. As proposed, the tax would have raised the tax rate for individual taxpayers with low and middle incomes. He also insisted that lawmakers raise taxes on tobacco and alcohol as part of their plan.

Although the flat tax is a favorite among many conservatives, the Kansas proposal was seriously flawed. It was killed in the Senate in a lopsided vote.

Brownback’s guidance on the state’s Medicaid program has been similarly inept.

The governor in early 2016 made clear his opposition to expanding the health care program to cover more Kansans. Instead, he announced a special “working group” that would develop recommendations to improve rural health care and ensure the viability of small hospitals.

Nothing much came of that effort, so the Legislature decided to follow the path of most other states – including a number led by conservative Republicans – and approve an expansion of Medicaid.

The governor vetoed the measure. He trashed the Legislature’s effort, without offering any viable means of improving rural health care or aiding small hospitals.

School finance issues remain in the negotiation stage, as lawmakers work on a plan that will answer Supreme Court rulings that found the state’s funding for education both inadequate and inequitable. Many governors would be at the forefront of such negotiations, but little has been heard from Brownback.

Legislators and Kansans can only hope the governor shows willingness to compromise, even if he’s not willing to champion public education in the state.

To a regrettably huge degree, funding for schools depends on tax reform.

The state’s tax structure currently doesn’t raise enough revenue to pay the state’s bills. Only through added debt, cuts to Medicaid, cuts to education, and swiping funds intended for highway improvements has the state managed to scrape up enough money to cover expenses.

Kansas needs tax policies that emphasize fairness and that generate sufficient funds to pay for programs and services. That will mean higher taxes – for all of us or for some of us.

But state lawmakers also make sure added dollars are spent wisely. On the education front, that can be done by reducing state funding for new school construction, curtailing the diversion of funds to private schools, and more consolidation – based not on districts’ size but focused on those districts in which per-pupil costs are substantially above state averages.

There’s a lot to do and not much time. As legislators go back to work, compromise and cooperation should be viewed by lawmakers and the public not as signs of weakness but as vital tools for good government.

New Hampshire residents want some answers.

Stung by President Donald Trump’s claims that their state was the site of a massive, voter-fraud conspiracy, some local officials have asked the governor to conduct an official investigation.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu might be assumed to support such a probe; before the election, he flamed a similar rumor himself, claiming Republicans were at a disadvantage because Democrats bused in voters. He has since backed off that accusation.

For the past two months, Sununu has repeatedly said there was no evidence of widespread illegal voting in his state, a view shared by local and state election officials.

Still, Trump alleges he lost New Hampshire only because thousands of illegal voters were bused in from Massachusetts on election day to cast ballots for Hillary Clinton.

The same dynamic is at work with Trump’s tale that, nationally, up to 5 million people voted illegally in the general election, robbing him of a win in the popular vote.

No first-person accounts, no voting records, no video and no real data support the claim. Academics, reporters and political operatives have searched without success for such evidence.

But as history shows, facts can’t kill a conspiracy theory.

Just consider how durable some recent favorites have proven: The CIA assassinated President John Kennedy; the moon landings were a fake; Barack Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii; the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to kill off gays and blacks; George Bush was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

These days, such lies spread as wide and fast as social media will allow, contaminating our national discourse like a highly contagious virus.

Except Kate Starbird thinks they may be worse than a virus.

A University of Washington assistant professor, Starbird studies rumors and fake news that spread through social media.

She told Danny Westneat, a columnist for the Seattle Times, this about her research:

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources.’ But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird had been researching the use of social media in how first responders and the public react to mass shootings. But she kept coming across the same phenomenon:  conspiracy theories that appeared almost immediately after the tragedy.

In her interview with Westneat, Starbird said she found a common denominator among those who share conspiracy theories and fake news – anti-globalism.

“To be antiglobalist often included being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union,” Starbird told The Times.

That description seems to fit our president.

And although the residents of New Hampshire have a right to be angry that Trump would impugn the integrity of their state, they cannot be surprised.

Throughout the campaign, Trump supported and promoted conspiracies and rumors. And what worked on the campaign trail became White House strategy.

As president, Trump has slapped together conspiracy stories to explain everything from pictures that showed his inauguration crowds were smaller than those in 2008 to how Democrats (in cahoots with the CIA, NSA, FBI, media, Obama and foreign nations) invented the story of Russians meddling in the U.S. election.

U.S. intelligence agents, members of Congress, state officials, foreign governments, newspapers, TV networks – all are part of one or more smear campaigns in Trump’s White House, where the goal is to tag everyone who can plausibly (or not) be made scapegoats for the administration’s failures and scandals.

Americans are told to believe right-wing TV personalities instead of the FBI director; We are advised that conspiracy websites are more credible than state and local election officials.

The White House’s campaign to replace facts with conspiracies doesn’t just deny the truth, it destroys the trust necessary for a democratic government.

If we don’t trust government officials, scientists or the media to tell us the truth, then we believe only what we want to believe. We trust only those who agree with us.

That makes us more cynical and hostile, and less willing to confront and address real challenges in the real world.

An odd thing is happening with mortality rates for white Americans: They are going up.

More specifically, white Americans who have a high school education or less are more likely to die at a younger age than in the past.

Researchers say the biggest reasons for the jump in mortality rates are drugs, alcohol and suicide.

In research presented in March, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, professors at Princeton, outlined some of their theories about the trend.

Tagging the phenomenon “deaths of despair,” they sought social and economic causes for Americans’ self-destructive behavior.

They were only partially successful in their hunt.

Deaton and Case seem to view those who abuse alcohol, overdose on drugs and commit suicide as victims of social forces beyond their control. Their tone is, indeed, despairing. They view white Americans with limited educations as a demographic with eroding family and social structures and uncertain economic situations.

The researchers also stress, however, that their research is only a start. It raises lots of questions and provides few answers.

Those questions deal with the root causes of family instability, the consequences of economic stagnation for the middle class, the erosion of traditional manufacturing jobs, and Americans’ work ethic.

Their efforts to determine the causes for the mortality trend mostly failed.

For example, their attempts to link a lack of economic opportunity to suicides and drug and alcohol-related deaths didn’t hold true for blacks or Hispanics. Or for white Europeans.

Despite facing even greater economic disadvantages, blacks and Hispanics have seen continued declines in mortality rates over the past few years. The same is mostly true for other countries, most of which have seen mortality rates continue to fall.

Only white Americans – men and women – with a high school education or less are driving the numbers in the United States.

Not since the early 1990s and the AIDS epidemic have mortality rates increased for adult Americans. And the rise was a relatively brief blip then.

The Princeton professors’ research on the current trend shows a huge increase in deaths due to opioid use, an epidemic that has clearly spread across the country and become a national health-care crisis.

But addressing that issue will not reverse the current mortality trend, the researchers said.

“If our overall account is correct, the epidemic will not be easily or quickly reversed by policy, nor can those in mid-life today be expected to do as well after age 65 as do the current elderly,” the report states. “This does not mean that nothing can be done. Controlling opioids is an obvious priority, as is trying to counter the negative effects of a poor labor market on marriage, perhaps through better safety nets for mothers with children.”

 

The researchers warned repeatedly in their presentation against attempting to identify a single cause or simple solutions. They noted the complexity of factors faced in dealing with most social trends – factors that can include marital stability, heavy drinking, drug abuse, participation in the labor force, economic hardship and social isolation.

But the education component seemed to be important across the board.

“From ages 25-29 to ages 55-59, men and women with less than a four-year college degree saw mortality rates rise between 1998 and 2015, while those with a BA or more education saw mortality rates drop, with larger decreases at higher ages,” the study states.

 

It’s against this backdrop that many officials in Kansas and Washington, D.C., have been working to undermine public education.

Even as the benefits of public schools and public universities – and access to both – become clearer, many officials are working to weaken the system by diverting funds to private institutions and reducing funds for public schools.

Such moves not only weaken the public-school system, but endanger the people who rely on public schools and universities.

Time and again, research has shown that education is one of the most dependable indicators of how well we all will do – economically, socially and physically.

If Kansas and the nation want to help Americans build long, productive and successful lives, support for public education is essential.