From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 41

And quite a case in point of our being unbalanced is the “button of self−importance”: when our purpose shifts from doing a good job to feeling important.
A “button” is a point of effect in our behaviour: something or someone does A – action, consequently we do B – re−action; it’s as if we had a button: every time A presses that button we carry out B; no matter how many times our button is pressed, one, ten or a billion, each and every time the effect is the same: we carry out B and nothing but B. A byword for hypnosis. If there’s any awareness at all in the button of self−importance, that’d be “misunderstanding cause”; if there were any thinking in it worth the name, that’d be the idea that the way to be cause is inserting an alteration along the line regardless; but awareness and thought are hardly the case when it comes to self−importance.
At a passing glimpse it’d seem just a matter of “New broom? Let your voice be heard!”, when the new in−charge revolutionises everything because his purpose is merely throwing his weight around, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg; in actual fact this button spans even two opposite directions: egocentricity and self−abnegation.
For the egocentric, showing one’s existence has top priority and the way to achieve it is inserting something personal, so that the inserted item is different and thus noticeable is definitely more important than it makes sense at all and thus it’s needed and helpful instead of arbitrary and harmful. Symmetrically, for the self−denying, removing self as a factor from the scene and the equation has top priority and the way to achieve it is indeed denying self, so that doing so at any cost is more important than any damage caused by not standing up when required.
In both cases the importance of self went off the rails and out of proportion with the situation: the river is about to exceed the danger level and everyone is needed – at the double, please – to help pile up sandbags on the river bank; over here you can spot the egocentric stalling the action because someone else decided where to place the sandbags, while over there you can spot the self−denying stalling the action by refusing to decide how to place them.

From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus