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In 2012, Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, coined the term "looking glass merit" to describe the unconscious tendency that humans have to define merit in a way that is self-validating.

He was seen, in the words of the art historian Charles Ford, as “classicism’s ‘other’: the self-made, self-validating, craft-based painter for profit.”

But they didn’t exist within an insular, self-validating community whose values and assumptions were often at odds with those of the rest of society.

But even under today’s grotesquely swollen presidency, presidential impatience is not a self-validating source of extra-constitutional power.

He worries the hostility toward Beijing that’s widespread among the American foreign policy establishment is “overblown” and could become a “self-validating narrative,” deepening a climate of tensions that some analysts already cast as the 21st century Cold War.