American Tragedy:
The Hubris of King George

Hubris destroys. Complete hubris destroys completely.

The Greeks learned this the hard way and left a large body of history, drama, and philosophy for any future societies that might want to avoid the high price they paid to learn the lesson.

Two questions:
1. Who, do you think, in the present American government goes home of an evening to pore over ancient Greek writings in hopes of gaining wisdom?

2. Humility being the opposite of hubris, who, do you think, in the present American government show the least sign of humility?

Any rational observer will answer both questions the same way: Nobody.

Partisan opponents of the present American government may take comfort from that answer.

I don’t.

Why?

Because it scares the sh-t out of me.

When you have a ruling class beholden only to their delusional version of reality, you have a ruling class that governs from a position of complete hubris: Things are the way we say they are. Period.

Yes, there are dangerous people loose in the world, gaining access to dangerous weapons and eager to use them in the most destructive ways possible. They suffer from their own version of hubris.

The far greater danger now is a supposedly democratic government which cloaks itself in the symbols and rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity but whose actions completely belie those symbols and rhetoric.

A ruling class in the grip of complete hubris is incapable of compromise: There is no middle ground because they have Truth on their side and everybody else is simply wrong.

Where then is the danger?

The danger comes from the simple fact that no person, no group has that kind of grasp of truth, much less Truth.

E pluribus unum. From the many, one. From many voices, one rich, mixed voice.

Pardon my Latin, but this American government rules on the motto: E unum unum. From one, one.

Their "truth" is the only truth. It is the one true voice and, lo, it is therefore inerrant.

Theirs is the stance of utter, desolate delusion: complete, unbridled pride.

As the Greeks found out—and as they tried to tell all who might come after, a government built thus is fungible, fragile, and doomed.

The only question, and the great, great danger now, is how many of us are they going to take with them when they fall.

Stuff, as one of the rulers said, happens. And stuff keeps happening to these people, and they keep responding out of perfect, delusional pride: 9-11, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, the tsunami, a soaring national debt, Katrina.

To put it another way:: Hubris blinds, and complete hubris blinds completely.

When things get this bad—the truly blind leading the mostly blind, the Greeks knew there was no way out: All fall down.

Only in the make-believe world of drama does a god at the end descend from the stage machinery and sets things right.