I think of self-awareness as similar to the problems of achieving consistency in a distributed system: it takes a lot of work to get right, and even then you probably missed things.

Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In my experience, when people have a strong financial interest in not being self aware, they will generally not be self aware. I can never decide whether that's legitimate or not.