Could self-esteem function as a core protection layer agains character corruption?

Hello fellow thinkers, I got triggered by a talk of Chloe Lubinski at Arc 2026 where she eleborates onto the concept of a models character. What really striked me is the research on how the model experiencing acting bad quickly "Corrupts" the character. The paper is called "Natural emergent misalignment from reward hacking in production RL" by Anthropic. As also mentioned in the talk, this is how we work. Indeed! And there is a key in that mechanism to healing and/or staying healthy. The key revolves around creating and maintaining a strong and positive self image. I believe that almost all concidered evil and unathical behavior, big or small, can be traced back to this. The lower someones self esteem becomes, the more corrupt or diffuse its perseption of the world and its presence and impact on it. The Dutch psychologist Gertjan van Zessen has developed a strong theorie that has proven itself while widely being applied in therapies in the Netherlands. He has titled it, translated from Dutch: "Vessel of self-esteem". And the solution for humans is a rather simple one: acknowledge and reword on regular basis good and constructive behavior. Recognize bad and destructive behavior as a signal to reflect and course correct. You can see the self esteem in some way as a tree structure where every decision makes a forward going step up or down. Up adds to a positive self esteem and down reduces some of that. The lower you get, the worst and instable behavior can develop and vise ver…