"a sort of convulsive self-importance"

I found this photo on dreamstime. The quote we'll get to. They aren't related. Necessarily. The following is from a review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families: Building a Beautiful Family Culture in a Turbulent World. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing...

Stephen Covey's books must be read as a description of a capitalism that has no place to go. His ideal reader is not the person who creates wealth, it is the middle-level bureaucrat working in a large-scale organization trying to get through the day. Into this world of purposeless activity, Covey introduces structure. For people powerless to influence the destiny of the organizations for which they work, he offers the illusion of efficacy. In a world in which competition is sublimated into furious struggles over seating arrangements around tables, as if any change from yesterday to today must be divined for meaning, he tells his readers that win-lose is over. Mormonism's great contribution to the work of Stephen Covey has been to provide the unwritten and perhaps unconscious assumptions for a secular version of what life means in organizations in which most people spend most of the time spinning their wheels. And now, we are told, the family has become another one of those organizations.

Bourgeois ideology rarely treated success in capitalism as a precondition for success in other realms of life. Hard-nosed and realistic when it came to the world of business, the bourgeoisie turned romantic and sentimental when it came to the world of the family. Feminists of a certain sort have criticized this division into separate spheres, as if, for women to achieve equality, the rules of the professions and the practices of the family have to be the same; and they have just been joined by Stephen Covey, whose self-announced objective is to further not loving families, not self-respecting families, not nourishing families, not decent families, not autonomous families, but effective families. This amounts to a managerialist redefinition of the family. By treating the family as just another form of organization, no different in any significant way from the firm, Covey conveys, in his breezily chilling manner, the sense of an Iron Cage far more impregnable than anything that the more tragic and pessimistic Weber could have imagined.

from: Capitalism, Mormonism, and the doctrines of Stephen Covey: White Magic in America by Alan Wolfe
source: The New Republic, 23 February 1998
via: HighBeam™ Research

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (p. 123)

note: Richard Baxter (1615-1691)
was a Puritan divine who wrote on ethics

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved.' (p. 124)