From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 39

That individuals have a good and a dark side may be considered an approximation of the fact that they have a range of possible behaviours and they can be manipulated within that range. Thus selfishness is potentially possible just as honesty, but it is far more systematically cultivated and exploited, and it easily reaches a point of spontaneous combustion, where selfishness produces isolation, that in turn produces selfishness, that in turn produces isolation, that… do I need to say more?
And selfishness is a synonym of short−sightedness because one easily results in the other: when one doesn’t give a damn about others it’s easy to concentrate only on the pieces of the puzzle in one’s immediate vicinity and only to exploit them, and to mind about puzzles only as much to enable one to steal and scam. You can already see that in a smaller, “innocent” scale, when a life, a casualty a thousand miles away is infinitely less valuable than one next door: out of sight out of mind, isn’t it?

Hard to escape short−sightedness in scope when one is short−sighted in ethics.

Short−sighted as to awareness:
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, is anyone there? When we ask ourselves who we are, where are we going, and why, whose answer do we get? Our own, or that of some odd machinery we’ve relinquished ourselves to? Are we even capable to drag ourselves in front of a mirror and ask ourselves these questions? Had we, inadvertently or not, slipped into an armour made of personalities other than our own, would we be able to realise it? Botched, quickie, random scraps of personalities not our own, accidentally thrown together in the least conscious way and for the least conscious reasons, which are not remotely, not the least, not at all “us”, no matter how much we're convinced they are.

From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus