If they'd been talking about a certain other place that I know, I would've wanted to shout "Exactly!", and would've implicitly believed that's what they saw.
There's a type who exhibits a combination of arrogance and self-interested fixation. There's no malice, and they aren't sociopaths, and they don't think of themselves as jerks. But they have a sense of superiority and entitlement, and can be aggressively, er, norms-bending, to get what they want.
Some environments seem to either attract them, or to nurture them. It's something unclear to me about the individual environment, not the external kind of organization (e.g., one high-prestige organization has a lot of it, but another high-prestige organization of the same kind doesn't).
I could attribute it to "culture", because I don't have any more specific theory, and play by ear how to try to filter or nurture it out of a collective. But I suspect there's a critical mass of that type gaining positions of influence in the organization, at which point the culture becomes irreversible, since there's too much arrogance to see it as a problem. At that point, I'd guess the rest of the people should be looking at their options for leaving, and also try not to think or behave like that type themselves.