Paul Edwards
HUBRIS
‘Outrageous behavior and extreme arrogance’ define this ancient Greek word. In classic tragedies it applied to heroes who acted as if they were the equals of gods, exhibiting excess of pride, refusal to recognize limits, and willful rejection of good counsel. Hubris doomed one who indulged it and the gods destroyed him.
Times change. We have no god but money in The Empire, and there is a good argument that what Greeks interpreted as the will of the gods was, in fact, just the way their world worked.
There are modern expressions that relate directly to that idea, from the Hippie mantra that “what goes around, comes around”, to Newton’s Third Law of Motion which states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. One way to put it is that no human act is isolated; everything has consequences.
That is certainly the reason that, from individual people to great governments, the general rule is to think through what you want to do, and imagine how it will be received by your own intimate circle, your society, or, for a state, perhaps the whole world.
This universally honored practice has not made individuals or nations compatible with, or even tolerable to, each other. People fight and divorce, and states wage wars, due to their inability or refusal to compromise and adjust their demands.
It is arguable, though, that it has prevented humanity’s reduction by murder—as Hobbes thought it might be, if not restrained by authority—and obliteration of societies by irrational aggression.
The idea of vengeance of “the gods” against overreaching, arrogant heroes grew out of early society’s experience with absolute rulers who brooked no limit to their personal power.
No doubt laying the downfall of such men to an act of the gods made it seem justified to his subjects rather than describing the brutal ways it really happened, because the idea of divine oversight was once common to states around the world.
In Imperial China an Emperor’s rule was founded on possessing “The Mandate of Heaven” which he had, if he governed justly. His downfall came when he failed to do so and lost its favor.
Only very recently, since the Enlightenment and analysis of the institution of rule by Locke, Hobbes, and others, was equal participation of humanity in a specific contract postulated.
The most notorious modern dictators have all shown contempt for the rights of those they ruled. They used wealth, force, and theatrics to keep them in thrall and their hubris went unpunished. The power of their absolutism allowed many of the worst of them—Pinochet, Franco, Mobutu—to survive and die in bed.
Clearly, then, hubris has not guaranteed downfall. We have long abandoned the fantasy that an omnipotent god enforces justice.
The great question now is whether a man elected to our highest office can, with raw hubris, make himself dictator in our system. If it is not prevented, in the worst case scenario, this depraved psychopath could conceivably cause our nation’s destruction.
The awful vulnerability of democratic government is inherent in it. Universal suffrage is both its crown jewel and the key factor that has so frequently destroyed it. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that universal suffrage permits both the educated, enlightened, and humane element, and the least evolved, most prejudiced and vindictive citizenry to vote. The great majority is ethically defective and mentally inadequate and voting reflects it.
The second—more disastrous—is that money subverts the government for its own ends. Secretly or openly, legally or not, it can buy the government it wants. It always has, and always will.
America’s last election was a battle between Big Money with its stupid, brutal, furious puppets… and not the humane, educated, enlightened element, but rather a demoralized, alienated remnant of it, hustled, as ever, by the devious party they naively trusted.
It was dirty Big Money manipulating its enormous mass of vapid, angry dupes, pitted against a false, deceitful, hollowed-out, and value-free party that had shamelessly whored itself to Big Money.
Americans, deluded, with no sense of who they, and their vicious government, really are, retain pathetic fealty to a political con that has played them for generations, and kept them so ignorant of their nation’s moral crimes and acquisitive cruelties that they have wasted and lost the greatest opportunity Mankind ever had to rise to genuine greatness and bring the whole world with them.
The reeking corpse of our Republic is on obscene public display. The great question now is whether Trump can exert his hubris to seize the dead thing and run it in his raw lust for absolute power.
It has been said that a people always gets the government it deserves. Americans are the awful proof of that pronouncement.
