HUBRIS: An Invitation to The (Devil) Dance.
What is old is new again some day. Thus, we read all the very-old-seeming antics of two-dimensional characters in the bible, with their strange, pointless ways and words and downfalls. I remember discussing this thing called, "hubris," in religion classes, for which God was always punishing people. I never could tell the difference between hubris and pride, or hubris and vanity. It was just this odd word, away from which apparently modern man hath evolved. Gone the way of Baal, the cubit, giants, burning bushes that talk, asps that talk, the peril of having stones pelt you for god-knows what, living for 800 years, arcs, and producing offspring simply by "knowing" people.
But, I have come to see that hubris, if it's been away, has made a come-back in recent years, aka, the end of days. Along with psychopathic zombies driven to covet every damn thing they see, and along with spectres of true evil showing themselves in every possible direction, hubris has shewn itself to be a true and distinct quality of human behaviour - or misbehaviour - apart from pride, vanity and some old beer from Wisconsin. And it looks less like stubbourn, obstinate emotional investment in one's clan and bling - it looks less like self-absorption and pointless, wasted investment in making a show of oneself in popular, elite societies. It looks more like a daffy, clueless compulsion to be right, politically correct, and snarky.
Hubris is the ambrosia of cancel-culture and its trolls. It is the false certainty paraded about by self-deluded "fact-checkers," ephemeral meme-consuming ideologues, professional know-it-alls, and habitual cynics who contradict for its own sake, for the glee of it, and for the sensation of power that it brings. Like the addiction of playing a video game and assuming one is actually winning at something relevant or meaningful.
Hubris stands where common sense walks away. It plays and plays, all night and day, where real games, science, and even biology itself, come to solid conclusions, and move along to something new. Hubris remains in the batting cage playing a game that never ends, batting out this fake factoid and false face incessantly, to no end, like bits being spewed into hyperspace with no purpose or story, other than maybe filling up the universe with background radiation which eventually kills things with cancer or something.
Hubris is the assumption that the petty discourse one prattles out in private, and amongst self-important, delusional friends, is equivalent and even superior to, if not reality itself, the wider discourse of society, including the conclusions of scientific authorities. Snarky snark substitutes for what is truly transpiring, as if a plastic flower in fake soil is somehow more alive than some true flower in nature, simply because it looks more coulourful. More pithy. More gotcha. "Everybody's clever, nowadays..."
Which, it turns out, can be very dangerous, in net effect. And, now, see this...
During the time of the Parliamentary protest here in New Zealand, when the country was split asunder by governmental decree into two camps, the jabbed and the unjabbed, I chanced to meet a friend at the beach. I knew her to be a wonderful musician and, I thought, an intelligent person, and we exchanged pleasantries. Taking her question about my well-being at face value - “How are you doing?” - I replied, “Terribly. I’m not allowed to go to a cafe or restaurant, can’t get a haircut, can’t get into the gym I’ve paid my subscription to, and I never would have believed New Zealand could have become this apartheid dystopia.”
She brushed me off and muttered something about how the jab would keep everyone safe, and so I engaged a bit more deeply.
“Since when is a healthy person a threat? And why do we need this thing anyway, when there is treatment?”
“Oh, you mean that horse pill?” she replied with a cheerful sneer.
“Ivermectin is much more than a so-called horse pill, it has been helping a lot of people ….”
She interrupted. “I’d like to see some double-blinded randomized controlled trials.”
She, mind you, wonderful musician though she may be, is not exactly a doctor. And I, though not a musician, did indeed study and practice medicine. I broke off the conversation because I realized she had swallowed the government’s fear-soaked pablum lock, stock and barrel. She demanded of a medication with promising empirical results in treating Covid and preventing hospitalisation what she failed to demand of an experimental, hastily developed so-called vaccine for which informed consent was, essentially, taboo. She is one of the Sleepwalkers - wilfully ignorant rather than malevolent, but destructive nonetheless.
I didn’t have the time or inclination to tell the Sleepwalker about a healthcare practitioner friend of mine who reluctantly took the jab to keep his job, developed severe myocarditis, applied for an exemption with the help of his rightly concerned cardiologist - and was turned down by the Director General of Health at the time, one Ashley Bloomfield, a physician ‘on paper’. My friend was given the “choice” to receive a second injection, or stop practicing, by the physician Bloomfield who, when presented with the opportunity to make the easiest and most helpful decision a doctor could make, instead elected to err on the side of Mengele and Fauci.
During this Corona War virtually everything has become topsy-turvy. Doctors are no longer allowed to be real doctors, untested inoculations are accepted unthinkingly, musicians become experts in Medicine and victims of the jab are consigned to silence and submission.
Dr. Emanuel Garcia - In essay, Corona Sleepwalkers Swallow Whatever the Authorities Tell Them
See how certain is the sleepwalking woman. Convinced that her hip, insider perspective somehow trumps the relevance of actual science, or even public discourse. Instead, like so many of her compatriots, she has gobbled up the official propaganda, which has been crafted as if it were the snark leisurely bandied about by she and her casual friends, in the comfort of silliness and mutual admiration. State, corporate and political propaganda steps in to empower her private, personal conclusions or certainties, and convert them, along with those of most others in society, into a shared delusion. Under the rubric of hubris.
This is an important convolution, or inversion, sociologically and, of course, politically. For one thing, it is related to a phenomenon I have discussed, which I call value distention, or something like that. (I don;t really have sufficient tags on this, but I might work on that ASAP). In this process, private values become more and more powerful, but more and more dissonant and abstract.
Increasing stress is coupled to increasing and unrealistic abstraction. And, soon, values held privately can sometimes erupt into violent public events, (like riots), when they transofrm into public values. State propagandists are experts both at enticing private stress through personal alienation, (e.g., lockdowns), and at blowing up private egoism and antipathies to the point where they convert into public events and a coherent sort of public philosophy, as that found in mobbism, or fascism. The template of a delusive public ideology, i.e., propaganda, is ready-made, and just waiting for just such a coherence of individuals into a wider social, mass psychosis.
And, so, value-distention, as well as the conversion of errant private into public values, along with the propaganda conducting them, can be directly related what we have covered here, and others, (like Hannah Arendt and Jordan Peterson), have covered beyond the walls of this journal, in the socio-psychological dynamic called mass-psychopathology, or mass conversion psychosis, or whatever the term is. Which really can easilly be understood as a festering of private narcissistic and limbic assumptions and drives, then turned outwards publicly and in conjunction with anti-rational propaganda.
So, buddies in their conclaves, spouting their snarky jokes, as a private way of feeling more powerful, in an ever-more dissonant world, (even though their snark may be way out of touch with science or fact or reality or nature or what shall be coming down the road in the future, can come to assume that all of society is of this same stuff. And so, they decide to act that way, in society. Making snarky jokes, or pushing private stereotypes and hatreds, or weaving irrational mythologies and explanations, (or run-on sentences), they feel they are hooking up with reality in the wider society.
But what is really happening is that countless private groups are now helping to manufacture a shared but false ideology, usually with the state propaganda being its strong, common denominator. You see, the state so exploits the darker, more animal nature of man, as is commonly protected within more private groups, and their dynamics of groupism. (See my tags for more on groupism etc).
In a dissonant or less rationally utilizable local world, it's easier just to be this way. Abandoning personal vigilance and ethics and enquiry, in favour of a socially glorification of the primal self-assertion response. In favour of the maintenance and advancement of narcissistic assumptions and expectations of entitlement. Ego over righteousness. This is what was meant by hubris, in the days of the bible. In the days of apocalypse.
Recently, I had fast, fleeting thoughts of certain habits in my siblings and their past, with which I have been familiar, and which remind me of the ways of hubris - how it develops from roots of playful, sibling competition, which is essentially based on awkwardness and ignorance and anxiety and insistence on continuing or expanding privileges.
These are where the roots of hubris are usually fed, sort-of incestuously, in-group, cloned, as narcissism is cloned, i.e., projected and reproduced, within families and subsequent generations. Where childish, snappy but stupid snark is given greater weight that mature, adult knowledge, because smaller brains are not ready for that yet.
And many smaller brains like to remain not ready for that for the rest of their lives. As their developing higher brains are employed mainly to rationalise the fears and desires of their animal brain-stems. And then, as these children go out into the world, they assume strangers they meet are ultimately similar to the siblings with whom they once bandied and competed. That is, they project the dysfunction onto new relationships, trying to turn those relationships into the old ways, they assume are the true ways.
I call these others, in society, sibling proxies. But, there are also parent proxies, of course. And abuser proxies, and pastor proxies, and best-pal proxies, and so on. To some degree, most do project so, moulding the new people with who they grow, "more familiar," into stock characters they knew, and "loved", in the past. In the same way, the same thing is done with concepts and values, and expectations of what should or should not be real.
It's the little things, where people act like they are right or superior, based on irrelevant information, claims or assumptions. You talk to these people, and they already know the answers - because you gave them to them. But, they assume the credit, the onus of control, the importance.
Although, it can be a good thing to say, "I know," when chiming in on another's story, meaning to show sympathy or agreement. But, some people use this assertion too much, as a way of taking the truth away for themselves, and hoping this will derail or shut up the person talking, who should be saying, "may I kiss your ass please?"
False sympathy, meant to assert authoritative dominance. Reinforce the old sibling hierarchy. Alternately, if you show that you have been unaware of something - you are learning new knowledge - the so-called snark sibling type often retorts with, "Ooooooo - idn't you knooooowww that? Even?"
Meaning, say you haven't yet seen a platypus in real life, but they have, then you must be of lower intelligence, and they will grind you into the ground with their heal. But, you've seen an emu in real life and they haven't - so what? What difference does it make? It only makes a difference when the object is not to share, but to compete - to try to stop the Other at any point possible. Right?
This is where the whole politically correct censorship mentality begins, pretty much. It begins with inadequate juveniles wanting the whole cake for themselves, sort of thing.
After they hear what you say, they say they knew you were going to say that. Wow! Retroactive psychics! Such power!
And, as I've said before, these sorts of narcissists will project a Machiavellian, mean world view onto everyone they meet - kind of because they process time and reality with the premise that the other is where the problem begins, which is backwards and anti-progressive. And they so give little opportunity, especially for weak-willed or unimaginative people, to see outside of this mean world they create around them.
But, the reality is that at least half of nature is actually pretty nice and fun, otherwise everything would be dead. People start with the premise that everything is dead, and end up creating a world of death around them. Stop, stop, stop - take, take, take - kill, eat, be eaten. You start with this original sin, and you end up with a psychopathic planet, unless checks and balances and rights are set up and insured. Where people have the right to say, "I didn't know that," or, "this is what I do know," without being sent to the gas chamber. Or vaccine cubicle.
And another one: You are talking to one of these people, and they are standing there, just waiting for the chance to disprove you, on anything, when all you are doing is, say, telling them what you did today. The more innocuous your story, the more vicious their drive to feed on you. maybe because it is so hard for them to find where it is you are supposedly hiding your secret guns and strategies of attack. Ha.
Many of them are so consumed by this stragedy, which is paralleled by a deep awkwardness on how to converse more genuinely, creatively or sincerely, that they audibly huff and puff, hem and haw, tisk and sigh, at ever turn of every word you say. Like you are some great offensive fool to them, just eating their day, when they are neither listening nor understanding what you are saying, as opposed to being the great, authoritative intellects you should be bowing down to.
And they go through these woeful contortions of their paltry spirits - so provincially and tactlessly - even though it may have been they who first started off the conversation. Even though it may have been they who have been taking up your time, or energy, or life.
You try to have civil (public) conversation and they act like you have a personal (private) problem.
What self-respecting person, in their right mind, would let these sorts of vampires into their lives in the first place? Only an idiot would. And so, these people are surrounded by useful idiots, aren't they? Depressive, lonely flying monkeys. Who feed into the blather and blarney, believing the lies, and laughing on cue. How witty of you! How snarky you are! Aren't we so beautiful?! And special?!
Pfffffffffffffffffft!
Really? It's hip to be ignorant? Acting like it is certain others who are ignorant? MAGA? Ant-vaxxers? Naturalists? True scientists? People who ask questions? "NAZIs"?
So, just like these stupid flying monkeys, many people in the West, these days, have forgotten their boundaries, their strengths, their Common Sense - they have forgotten how hard it is to claim and maintain true freedoms. Instead, they are washed away into first a groupist, cultish world of self-delusions, and then into a wider society, imagining itself powerful, when it is the powers that be who are rising to pounce on them - with far more skill and technology - and take away the real freedoms, the reality supporting their autonomy, to which they have become blind, all for the momentary buzz called hubris.
Listen. If you think privately that you are the best one, the smartest, the most deserving - and then you evolve a group which supports this sort of ideology, which maybe be pitted against other groups for contrast and definition and moralisation - and THEN all the snarky in-crowd colloquial wisdom inverts outwards into a full society, itself partaking in, believing in such delusional mythology?
When everyone, all together, is the best and smartest and coolest and snarkiest and most powerful?
Where did the morality go which once held groups back - once held individuals back from imposing their rudeness on the world, so to keep the world from turning mean? Where did that morality go? It's gone.
Now, if that morality is gone, what is to prevent the vastly more powerful elites from swooping down on you all and eating you up like the dead meat that you allowed yourselves to become?
Hubris is a lie, behind which hides the Spectre of Death itself.
An dare, a tempting, an invitation to the dance of the macabre.
You get what you pay into.
But, I have come to see that hubris, if it's been away, has made a come-back in recent years, aka, the end of days. Along with psychopathic zombies driven to covet every damn thing they see, and along with spectres of true evil showing themselves in every possible direction, hubris has shewn itself to be a true and distinct quality of human behaviour - or misbehaviour - apart from pride, vanity and some old beer from Wisconsin. And it looks less like stubbourn, obstinate emotional investment in one's clan and bling - it looks less like self-absorption and pointless, wasted investment in making a show of oneself in popular, elite societies. It looks more like a daffy, clueless compulsion to be right, politically correct, and snarky.
Hubris is the ambrosia of cancel-culture and its trolls. It is the false certainty paraded about by self-deluded "fact-checkers," ephemeral meme-consuming ideologues, professional know-it-alls, and habitual cynics who contradict for its own sake, for the glee of it, and for the sensation of power that it brings. Like the addiction of playing a video game and assuming one is actually winning at something relevant or meaningful.
Hubris stands where common sense walks away. It plays and plays, all night and day, where real games, science, and even biology itself, come to solid conclusions, and move along to something new. Hubris remains in the batting cage playing a game that never ends, batting out this fake factoid and false face incessantly, to no end, like bits being spewed into hyperspace with no purpose or story, other than maybe filling up the universe with background radiation which eventually kills things with cancer or something.
Hubris is the assumption that the petty discourse one prattles out in private, and amongst self-important, delusional friends, is equivalent and even superior to, if not reality itself, the wider discourse of society, including the conclusions of scientific authorities. Snarky snark substitutes for what is truly transpiring, as if a plastic flower in fake soil is somehow more alive than some true flower in nature, simply because it looks more coulourful. More pithy. More gotcha. "Everybody's clever, nowadays..."
Which, it turns out, can be very dangerous, in net effect. And, now, see this...
During the time of the Parliamentary protest here in New Zealand, when the country was split asunder by governmental decree into two camps, the jabbed and the unjabbed, I chanced to meet a friend at the beach. I knew her to be a wonderful musician and, I thought, an intelligent person, and we exchanged pleasantries. Taking her question about my well-being at face value - “How are you doing?” - I replied, “Terribly. I’m not allowed to go to a cafe or restaurant, can’t get a haircut, can’t get into the gym I’ve paid my subscription to, and I never would have believed New Zealand could have become this apartheid dystopia.”
She brushed me off and muttered something about how the jab would keep everyone safe, and so I engaged a bit more deeply.
“Since when is a healthy person a threat? And why do we need this thing anyway, when there is treatment?”
“Oh, you mean that horse pill?” she replied with a cheerful sneer.
“Ivermectin is much more than a so-called horse pill, it has been helping a lot of people ….”
She interrupted. “I’d like to see some double-blinded randomized controlled trials.”
She, mind you, wonderful musician though she may be, is not exactly a doctor. And I, though not a musician, did indeed study and practice medicine. I broke off the conversation because I realized she had swallowed the government’s fear-soaked pablum lock, stock and barrel. She demanded of a medication with promising empirical results in treating Covid and preventing hospitalisation what she failed to demand of an experimental, hastily developed so-called vaccine for which informed consent was, essentially, taboo. She is one of the Sleepwalkers - wilfully ignorant rather than malevolent, but destructive nonetheless.
I didn’t have the time or inclination to tell the Sleepwalker about a healthcare practitioner friend of mine who reluctantly took the jab to keep his job, developed severe myocarditis, applied for an exemption with the help of his rightly concerned cardiologist - and was turned down by the Director General of Health at the time, one Ashley Bloomfield, a physician ‘on paper’. My friend was given the “choice” to receive a second injection, or stop practicing, by the physician Bloomfield who, when presented with the opportunity to make the easiest and most helpful decision a doctor could make, instead elected to err on the side of Mengele and Fauci.
During this Corona War virtually everything has become topsy-turvy. Doctors are no longer allowed to be real doctors, untested inoculations are accepted unthinkingly, musicians become experts in Medicine and victims of the jab are consigned to silence and submission.
Dr. Emanuel Garcia - In essay, Corona Sleepwalkers Swallow Whatever the Authorities Tell Them
See how certain is the sleepwalking woman. Convinced that her hip, insider perspective somehow trumps the relevance of actual science, or even public discourse. Instead, like so many of her compatriots, she has gobbled up the official propaganda, which has been crafted as if it were the snark leisurely bandied about by she and her casual friends, in the comfort of silliness and mutual admiration. State, corporate and political propaganda steps in to empower her private, personal conclusions or certainties, and convert them, along with those of most others in society, into a shared delusion. Under the rubric of hubris.
This is an important convolution, or inversion, sociologically and, of course, politically. For one thing, it is related to a phenomenon I have discussed, which I call value distention, or something like that. (I don;t really have sufficient tags on this, but I might work on that ASAP). In this process, private values become more and more powerful, but more and more dissonant and abstract.
Increasing stress is coupled to increasing and unrealistic abstraction. And, soon, values held privately can sometimes erupt into violent public events, (like riots), when they transofrm into public values. State propagandists are experts both at enticing private stress through personal alienation, (e.g., lockdowns), and at blowing up private egoism and antipathies to the point where they convert into public events and a coherent sort of public philosophy, as that found in mobbism, or fascism. The template of a delusive public ideology, i.e., propaganda, is ready-made, and just waiting for just such a coherence of individuals into a wider social, mass psychosis.
And, so, value-distention, as well as the conversion of errant private into public values, along with the propaganda conducting them, can be directly related what we have covered here, and others, (like Hannah Arendt and Jordan Peterson), have covered beyond the walls of this journal, in the socio-psychological dynamic called mass-psychopathology, or mass conversion psychosis, or whatever the term is. Which really can easilly be understood as a festering of private narcissistic and limbic assumptions and drives, then turned outwards publicly and in conjunction with anti-rational propaganda.
So, buddies in their conclaves, spouting their snarky jokes, as a private way of feeling more powerful, in an ever-more dissonant world, (even though their snark may be way out of touch with science or fact or reality or nature or what shall be coming down the road in the future, can come to assume that all of society is of this same stuff. And so, they decide to act that way, in society. Making snarky jokes, or pushing private stereotypes and hatreds, or weaving irrational mythologies and explanations, (or run-on sentences), they feel they are hooking up with reality in the wider society.
But what is really happening is that countless private groups are now helping to manufacture a shared but false ideology, usually with the state propaganda being its strong, common denominator. You see, the state so exploits the darker, more animal nature of man, as is commonly protected within more private groups, and their dynamics of groupism. (See my tags for more on groupism etc).
In a dissonant or less rationally utilizable local world, it's easier just to be this way. Abandoning personal vigilance and ethics and enquiry, in favour of a socially glorification of the primal self-assertion response. In favour of the maintenance and advancement of narcissistic assumptions and expectations of entitlement. Ego over righteousness. This is what was meant by hubris, in the days of the bible. In the days of apocalypse.
Recently, I had fast, fleeting thoughts of certain habits in my siblings and their past, with which I have been familiar, and which remind me of the ways of hubris - how it develops from roots of playful, sibling competition, which is essentially based on awkwardness and ignorance and anxiety and insistence on continuing or expanding privileges.
These are where the roots of hubris are usually fed, sort-of incestuously, in-group, cloned, as narcissism is cloned, i.e., projected and reproduced, within families and subsequent generations. Where childish, snappy but stupid snark is given greater weight that mature, adult knowledge, because smaller brains are not ready for that yet.
And many smaller brains like to remain not ready for that for the rest of their lives. As their developing higher brains are employed mainly to rationalise the fears and desires of their animal brain-stems. And then, as these children go out into the world, they assume strangers they meet are ultimately similar to the siblings with whom they once bandied and competed. That is, they project the dysfunction onto new relationships, trying to turn those relationships into the old ways, they assume are the true ways.
I call these others, in society, sibling proxies. But, there are also parent proxies, of course. And abuser proxies, and pastor proxies, and best-pal proxies, and so on. To some degree, most do project so, moulding the new people with who they grow, "more familiar," into stock characters they knew, and "loved", in the past. In the same way, the same thing is done with concepts and values, and expectations of what should or should not be real.
It's the little things, where people act like they are right or superior, based on irrelevant information, claims or assumptions. You talk to these people, and they already know the answers - because you gave them to them. But, they assume the credit, the onus of control, the importance.
Although, it can be a good thing to say, "I know," when chiming in on another's story, meaning to show sympathy or agreement. But, some people use this assertion too much, as a way of taking the truth away for themselves, and hoping this will derail or shut up the person talking, who should be saying, "may I kiss your ass please?"
False sympathy, meant to assert authoritative dominance. Reinforce the old sibling hierarchy. Alternately, if you show that you have been unaware of something - you are learning new knowledge - the so-called snark sibling type often retorts with, "Ooooooo - idn't you knooooowww that? Even?"
Meaning, say you haven't yet seen a platypus in real life, but they have, then you must be of lower intelligence, and they will grind you into the ground with their heal. But, you've seen an emu in real life and they haven't - so what? What difference does it make? It only makes a difference when the object is not to share, but to compete - to try to stop the Other at any point possible. Right?
This is where the whole politically correct censorship mentality begins, pretty much. It begins with inadequate juveniles wanting the whole cake for themselves, sort of thing.
After they hear what you say, they say they knew you were going to say that. Wow! Retroactive psychics! Such power!
And, as I've said before, these sorts of narcissists will project a Machiavellian, mean world view onto everyone they meet - kind of because they process time and reality with the premise that the other is where the problem begins, which is backwards and anti-progressive. And they so give little opportunity, especially for weak-willed or unimaginative people, to see outside of this mean world they create around them.
But, the reality is that at least half of nature is actually pretty nice and fun, otherwise everything would be dead. People start with the premise that everything is dead, and end up creating a world of death around them. Stop, stop, stop - take, take, take - kill, eat, be eaten. You start with this original sin, and you end up with a psychopathic planet, unless checks and balances and rights are set up and insured. Where people have the right to say, "I didn't know that," or, "this is what I do know," without being sent to the gas chamber. Or vaccine cubicle.
And another one: You are talking to one of these people, and they are standing there, just waiting for the chance to disprove you, on anything, when all you are doing is, say, telling them what you did today. The more innocuous your story, the more vicious their drive to feed on you. maybe because it is so hard for them to find where it is you are supposedly hiding your secret guns and strategies of attack. Ha.
Many of them are so consumed by this stragedy, which is paralleled by a deep awkwardness on how to converse more genuinely, creatively or sincerely, that they audibly huff and puff, hem and haw, tisk and sigh, at ever turn of every word you say. Like you are some great offensive fool to them, just eating their day, when they are neither listening nor understanding what you are saying, as opposed to being the great, authoritative intellects you should be bowing down to.
And they go through these woeful contortions of their paltry spirits - so provincially and tactlessly - even though it may have been they who first started off the conversation. Even though it may have been they who have been taking up your time, or energy, or life.
You try to have civil (public) conversation and they act like you have a personal (private) problem.
What self-respecting person, in their right mind, would let these sorts of vampires into their lives in the first place? Only an idiot would. And so, these people are surrounded by useful idiots, aren't they? Depressive, lonely flying monkeys. Who feed into the blather and blarney, believing the lies, and laughing on cue. How witty of you! How snarky you are! Aren't we so beautiful?! And special?!
Pfffffffffffffffffft!
Really? It's hip to be ignorant? Acting like it is certain others who are ignorant? MAGA? Ant-vaxxers? Naturalists? True scientists? People who ask questions? "NAZIs"?
So, just like these stupid flying monkeys, many people in the West, these days, have forgotten their boundaries, their strengths, their Common Sense - they have forgotten how hard it is to claim and maintain true freedoms. Instead, they are washed away into first a groupist, cultish world of self-delusions, and then into a wider society, imagining itself powerful, when it is the powers that be who are rising to pounce on them - with far more skill and technology - and take away the real freedoms, the reality supporting their autonomy, to which they have become blind, all for the momentary buzz called hubris.
Listen. If you think privately that you are the best one, the smartest, the most deserving - and then you evolve a group which supports this sort of ideology, which maybe be pitted against other groups for contrast and definition and moralisation - and THEN all the snarky in-crowd colloquial wisdom inverts outwards into a full society, itself partaking in, believing in such delusional mythology?
When everyone, all together, is the best and smartest and coolest and snarkiest and most powerful?
Where did the morality go which once held groups back - once held individuals back from imposing their rudeness on the world, so to keep the world from turning mean? Where did that morality go? It's gone.
Now, if that morality is gone, what is to prevent the vastly more powerful elites from swooping down on you all and eating you up like the dead meat that you allowed yourselves to become?
Hubris is a lie, behind which hides the Spectre of Death itself.
An dare, a tempting, an invitation to the dance of the macabre.
You get what you pay into.