Hubris

This word hubris has been around but I have notice that it is being used so much in the last couple years.  It comes from the Greek, " means extreme haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one's own competence or capabilities, especially for people in positions of power. "  That last part probably is the most important, people of power.

The quick and easy example is BP and the way they reassure the world of their competence to handle oil gusher and the clean up of the Gulf of Mexico. The long term damage is that no oil company is now believable along with the lose of this water, the sea life, the adjoining land and the livelihood of millions of people along the coastline.

Out of touch with reality may explain it.

The Republican Party for a decade has said the science about global climate change was inconclusive.  This was also the position of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and many leading think tanks funded by the international corporations.  Haughtiness and arrogance, joke making at the expensive of Gore and the leading scientists.  A couple degrees of temperature  doesn't matter to the planet.  Guess it is the same with the human body, except we call it a fever.

Addicted to consuming may explain it. 

Pentagon and the Intelligence communities of our government has hubris. Officially there are 16 Intelligent agencies.  But since September 11 World Center attack, the United States has built 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work.  That equals 3  Pentagons and 22 U. S. Capitol buildings, 17 million square feet of space. Yet, our government choice to ignore other government around the world that warned about the attack.   There is so much information gathering in one hundred cities in the U.S. plus sites around the world that the value is meaningless. Who is in charge?  Who benefits? 

The other hubris that is showing in recent years is Christianity. Start with the oldest form, the Catholic Church.  Those old men are more worried about saving the institution that the principles of piety and the sense of Jesus's message.  They are destroying the church  from within, "what you do to the less of them you do to me", what are these old men thinking?  The American Christian communities  has rocked with so much  money, mega churches, greed, political corruption that it would take a book to start documenting their recent hubris. 

The economy is showing all of us on all levels of society that our life style is over. We can have hubris or humility, we can be part of a mob or act individually, to survive we have to change.  The earth will not support this arrogance.