is a failure to communicate. If you don't understand how self-esteem and self-awareness can impact the motivations that drives human behavior, then any explanation I might offer for why that is the case isn't going to cut it.

The issue for historians is that such psychological, deeply-rooted, hidden motivations are typically difficult to get at unless we are fortunate enough to stumble onto documentation like diaries and so forth, and even then, unless the diarist is self-aware enough to understand him or her self and is brutally honest to boot, even then diaries cannot be taken at face value.

It can be damnably difficult if not impossible to empathically inhabit the mind of someone else, much less someone who's been dead for 150 years. We typically can get a pretty good handle on what and when, but when it comes to why we often are left with speculation and surmise, some of it credible, some of it less so.

So yes, to answer your rather strange question, it is not only important, but vitally so, critically so, if the current Cochise County Attorney likes himself. Whether it is a moot point if that same attorney is alcoholic--depends. Alcoholics come in all shapes and sizes and some of them are perfectly functional, utterly professional while on the job, in which case, yes, moot.