The cult of importance is an anachronistic ritual inherited from primitive survival

Evidence

Importance is represented by the dog out on a walk: at some unexplained spot he stands and sniffs, tense, unyielding, earnestly displeased – and then relieves himself, scrapes the ground with his feet and trots on his way in unconcern. In primitive times life and death may have depended on such things; after thousands of years of domestication they have become an unreal ritual. Who can help being reminded of them when observing a serious committee weighing the urgency of problems before turning over the carefully defined and timetabled tasks to the attentions of their colleagues? There is something of this anachronistic doggedness in all importance, and to use it as a criterion of thought is to impose on thought a spellbound fixity, and a loss of self-reflection. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 152

Categorization

• CANDY: The dog-sniffing-then-relieving image of a committee weighing urgency is a delightfully absurd, shateable miniature.
• XREF: Echoes Benjamin’s dialectical image and Freud’s reading of compulsive ritual; also the survival of archaic forms in modern domination.