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What is "self-defeating"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
self-defeating
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Attempts to stir up nationalistic feeling at such times are bound to be self-defeating.
▪ It's time to end the self-defeating cycle of overeating and dieting.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As this diagram suggests, a self-defeating organiza-tional behavior pattern is more than a single misguided strategy or reaction.
▪ Flagrant disregard for the evidence freely available in libraries at home and abroad was self-defeating.
▪ In self-defeating organizations, poor performance comes to resemble this sort of eternally perpetuating cycle.
▪ Members of a self-defeating organiza-tion are, as a result of prior negative experiences, inclined to believe the worst.
▪ So there you have it: narrowly self-interested behaviour is ultimately self-defeating.
▪ The equal opportunities strategy is, the writers claim, likely to be self-defeating.
▪ They learn to then shift from negative, self-defeating internal dialogue towards positive, more realistic, and confidence-building self-speech.
▪ Why do the retraining efforts of self-defeating organizations tend to create at least as many difficulties as they resolve?
Wiktionary
self-defeating

a. Something, such as a plan or action, which contains elements that will cause it to fail.

WordNet
self-defeating

adj. acting to defeat its own purpose; "it is self-defeating...to ignore the progress of events"

Wikipedia
Self-defeating

Self-defeating may refer to:

  • Self-defeating personality disorder
  • Self-defeating prophecy
  • Self-refuting idea

Usage examples of "self-defeating".

All of them self-defeating, all worthy of love, all yearners for culture, kindness, and the spirit, the four Prozorovs are quite enough to break the heart of any playgoer.

He rebels and erupts in a serious of self-defeating and self-destructive behaviours, which lead to the disintegration of his life.

German A-4 rockets and the monstrous American bombers, Mott wondered at the curious and self-defeating decision made by Adolf Hitler.

Baghdad eroded the old sanctions regime, would ultimately be self-defeating.

They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, antisurvival.

In consequence of all this it was difficult even for Eierkopf as official Clockwatcher to get permission to move or modify any part of the works, the more so as his critics (some sincerely concerned, some merely venting their anti-Bonifacism) charged that his method was self-defeating.

Raising the general science literacy of the American public is probably a self-defeating effort when it comes to monster projects like the SSC.

Hence the fanaticisms and intoxications--religious, political, and sexual, the Nazis, the Klan, Hell's Angels, the Circus Maximus, the dreary fascination of the TV screen, witch-burnings, Mickey Spillane and James Bond, pachinko parlors, alcoholic stupors, revivals, tabloid newspapers, and juvenile gangs--all of which, as things stand, are the necessary safety-valves and palliatives for human beings whose very existence is defined in self-contradictory and self-defeating terms.

Apparently, it had never occurred to the demon-jester that, as a long-term policy, shattering the military capabilities of the people who were supposed to enforce one's terms upon their fellows was a self-defeating proposition.