IJSP Number 6, 2024

87 seems that there is more involved here than meets the eye because, as Jordan Peterson indicates: “If you are a miserable and disorganized fool, producing chaos wherever you go, it is tremendously painful to recognise yourself–and to see the enormity of the job ahead of you. It is very difficult to replace delusional identification with the persona with clear-headed apprehension of the real (and insufficient) individual personality. This clearer vision or conception is something attained at no small cost (and this says nothing about the cost of transforming that conception into action). [5] Maybe, some help to understand or to solve this problem, we may extract from that interesting concept of ‘plastic strokes’, or counterfeit strokes as conceived by the Transactional Analysis. And when we say “plastic strokes” we also mean it quite literally, because we are living in a civilization of plastic, surrounded (smothered) by cheap plastic that comes in all shapes and colours and has displaced most of the natural materials humans were accustomed to for millennia. In addition, plastic is so versatile, it can be moulded in any form or shape, and can be easily imprinted with whatever is needed to attract our attention, to grab our mind and, ultimately, to sell a product. Plastic, as such, is the perfect modern tool our society has invented to promote its crocked values and to sell its commercial paradigm to millions and millions of people. Plastic is, in fact, the perfect metaphor for a society that has dislodged itself from the natural and plunged, head first, into the artificiality and the virtuality of the new millennium. The equation of self-importance, although very captivating, is a fake, an artificial creation of someone who is not capable or not able to access the rather more practical approach of another equation (a completely different existential paradigm), namely that of self-esteem. Given its artificiality, self-importance has to be put in place, maintained, and constantly re-erected in order to hide what it actually is. But what is it hiding? Is it maybe the artificiality of itself, in order for nobody to see the falsity of the ‘face-lift’, or the falseness of the construct? Need those efforts to be probably doubled because one must hide its artificiality from oneself, in the first place? Or, the efforts and the great amount of psychic energy involved in maintaining such an artificiality are even greater because of the fear to be discovered and consequently exposed as a fake? Maybe all these aspects and probably even more is involved in the so complicated problematic of self- importance. No matter how much or how many of these complications and subliminal computations are involved, one thing is sure: self-importance, as a life- position – an existential option as it is –, does not allow very much freedom to the individual, because, as Carl Rogers mentions, speaking about the individual: “He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is . Often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying