If Modernity is a Mad World, modern living is “Hanging Out in Hubris” like the emperor’s derrière in The Emperor’s New Clothes, and hubris is human error, then what is the error of the modern era? Answer to that requires digging around in the waste of Modernity to find what actually constitutes hubris.
The following are key words and terms from Wikipedia entry on hubris —
• pride, excessive or in the extreme
• lacking humility
• unreal, loss of contact with reality
• overconfident pride
• dangerous overconfidence
• blind from pride
• overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments, or capabilities
• arrogance, presumption, pretension
• victory (domination), craved, demanded instead of reconciliation
• transgression against a god, or the sacred
• theft of public or sacred property
• outrage
• violation of natural order
• victimization, abuse
• shaming and humiliation of victims
• pleasure, gratification in shaming and humiliation, in victimization
• violence in shaming, humiliation, victimization
• foolish, acting in ways that belie common sense
In Aeschylus's play The Persians, King Xerxes throws chains to bind the Hellespont sea as punishment for daring to destroy his fleet.
Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge.
As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: naive men think that
by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.
— Aristotle
Hubris is expressed in Modernity as pretentious, arrogant pride and violent ill-treatment of others for pleasure and self-gratification, by which perpetrators foolishly ass-ume that they make themselves even more superior to their victims than they already deludedly think themselves to be. Such delusional superiority manifested itself historically in elitist English “White Man's Burden”, an attitude that drove imperial English colonialism and persists in some elites in the United Kingdom, the Anglosphere, and globally elsewhere today. That attitude of Subhuman Derogation is the tactic by which Racism primarily functions (and historical slavery as well). Unreal “thinking” of perpetrators delusionally “reasons” that by degrading individual humans or human groups to the level of subhuman, those humans can then madly be exempted from humane treatment, subjected to shame, humiliation and violence, and the perpetrator craving for victory over others thereby satisfied.
Fear of shame and humiliation is a basic mechanism of social pressure for social control. Few people want to be outcasts, thought of as “stupid” or “unfit”, or be the target of violence. Some may be driven to claim they know something (or know more) even when they don’t, so as to avoid being judged stupid or intellectually inferior. Such fear and shame are graphically represented in The Emperor’s New Clothes, where subjects go along to get along with unreal madness, something for which Nazi Germany became infamous. In 1967 Palo Alto CA, history teacher Ron Jones conducted a social experiment to teach his students that what happened in Nazi Germany could happen anywhere to anybody, even to them. Under his tutelage, students created their own political movement which they named “The Third Wave”, which true to form, escalated into the same old abusive totalitarianism as evidenced in Nazi Germany.
The Emperor’s New Clothes fable can also be viewed as an idiom for logical fallacies, as example of pluralistic ignorance — “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes”. An example of that is what’s come to be known as pressure of “political correctness”. Scientific circles are also exemplary, where scientists, physicians, students, and others involved live in fear of losing prestige or funding if they dare say what scientific evidence actually reveals in contradiction to reigning dogmas, or to ruling political party Propaganda.
In Ancient Greece, hubris was committed when a mortal claimed to be better than a god in a particular skill or attribute. Because Greek lacks a word for immorality, hubris was used by some ancient Greek poets to describe wrongful action against the divine order (gods), i.e. immorality, or sin. Hamartia in Greek conveys error, fatal flaw, downfall, failure, or guilt, but not immorality. When Hellenic culture became Christianized, the word hamartia was chosen to connote sin as error, instead of hubris with its connotations of immorality. Hamartia literally means “missing the mark” like the bullseye of a target. Sin (immorality) was translated as hamartia in Christianized New Hellenism because in Hellenic Eastern (not Latin Western) Christianity, sin is not only a transgression or breaking of Divine Law, but human error, failure to reach a proscribed, desired goal (the mark, bullseye). The goal for which humanity is created is Divinely designed destiny of comm-union with God, Love of God. Hubris in western culture rooted in Christianity, then, becomes nothing less than immorality or “sin”, dysfunctional error, imperfection of separation from perfect comm-union with God, failure to attain to that for which humanity was created — Love of God.
Love not the world neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world.
And the world passeth away and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
— 1 John 2:15-17
The hubris of Modernity is humanity’s delusional, erroneous attempt to be better at being god than God Himself, to be a god unto self, on humanity’s own terms apart from God, its Creator. Such hubris is error that is in violation of the natural order, the Divine Cosmos — that not only occurs morally in abortion and sexual deviancy in violation of procreation, fidelity, and Christian marriage (which is an icon of human comm-union with God, not mere moralism), but especially in human exploitation of all creation as resource for diabolical (not divine) human creativity. Modern human creation and use of technology as has historically occurred is the equivalent of the Ancient Greek claim to be better than the Divine, which by definition is hubris.
This is evident when comparing Orthodoxy (Hellenic Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy) to Modernity. See Human Technological Usurption of Divine Attributes, where modern technology is compared to Divine Attributes as understood in Eastern Orthodox Christianity:
1) Omnibenevolent (all good)
2) Omnipotent (all powerful)
3) Omnipresent (all present) — “Everywhere Present and Filling All Things”
4) Omniscient (all knowing)
5) Holy, One, interconnectivity of everything with God
Human aping of the Divine in dis-connection apart from connection, comm-union with God, by way of artifice (artificial) technology consists, in same order above, as:
1) Proliferation of “goods” for convenience and luxury — material not spiritual “good” (The American Way, “The Highest Standard of Living in the World”)
2) Technology, advanced weaponry (atomic bombs, nuclear warheads) — creative destruction
3) High speed transportation and communication — faster is “better”, more instantaneous, almost everywhere present, but still failing to hit the mark
4) High speed internet (proliferation of 'information') — pretentious, falling short of actual knowledge, much less Divine Wisdom
5) Internet of Things — Borg like interconnection of technology (not Interconnection of the Created Cosmos) that gives false illusion of being one, of wholeness, that is only a pretense, a precursor of totalitarian control
Modern hubris is the legacy of Imperialism of emperors and their arrogant, superior attitudes that stretches back aeons into ancient history. More recently, that attitude was expressed by Colonialism of Western European monarchal powers, by which Modernity eventually came of age and continues to grow today, beyond all control. Dr. Albert E. Burke, an American pioneer of educational television in the early years of the 1950s-’60s, tried to educate Americans about the failings of modern society, of western civilization, but was driven off the air, apparently by The System of Organized Crime that the US was then becoming.
Without exploitation of people and theft of their lands, of their public (communal) property through the sham of western “private property” rights (see Enclosure Movement), there would most likely be no western Industrialism, Capitalism or Consumerism as we know it today — no fossil fuel based transportation, plumbing, flush toilets, electricity, cell phones, internet, or Artificial Intelligence. It is unfathomable to modern humans that there could be life without such, yet humans have lived and not just survived, but thrived, for thousands upon thousands of years without modern luxury and convenience. Even most humans today still live without all that, or nearly so, without many to most of the technological trappings of Modernity.
Consumerism is the way of life of modern society that dysfunctionally values hedonistic self-gratification of human desire above all, directing love (utmost desire) toward the material realm to exclusion of the spiritual, toward Love of Money (Love of Mammon) instead of toward Love of God for which humanity is created. Modernity is the manifestation of the age-old error of hubris, that when stripped to its core, is buck naked perpetrator pleasure and gratification derived from violent humiliation and shaming of victims.
Most consumers fail to realize the means by which consumer products they purchase are produced — 1) through abuse of human labor in poorer countries, and theft of natural resources in those countries at pennies on the dollar of actual worth, 2) through abuse by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in aiding exploitation of those countries under the guise of lending “aid” for “development”, 3) through complicity of the CIA, other intelligence and western governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs, that are often political intelligence fronts) and other organizations in the overthrow of legitimate foreign governments representative of their people, in order to establish puppet regimes favorable to western exploitation, and 3) etc., etc., on and on and on…
Such turning of a blind eye to the reality of Modernity is no different than what socially occurred in Nazi Germany. As the modern project creeps closer and closer to the abyss of dysfunctional failing destruction, more and more people are beginning to wise up to the American western ruse and its lying Propaganda. Holes are appearing in the bluff of modern power that render it unconvincing, allowing the western mode of operation to become increasingly apparent as sin, immorality, as dysfunctional hubris.
The error of the modern era is the modern west’s betrayal of the West’s own spiritual foundation, and consequent hypocritical presumption of superiority of western civilization, and technology. Modern error lies not exclusively in western development of quantitative bean counting, machine mentality, and technology, but in misplacement of qualitative love which leads to such hubris as all that, and to any error in human reason, especially Subhuman Derogation.
Human misplacement of love is the hubris of the modern era, Lookin’ for Love in all the wrong places of carnal (fleshly), worldly, material gratification, the modern error that results in dysfunctional Madness of Modern Life, unreality that leads to the “Hanging Out in Hubris” of Consumerism, the failing of humanity to become transfigured by the Love of God. Love of Money (Love of Mammon) is the modern disease, and Love of God (through lovingly serving others, keeping the Golden Rule) is the cure. For centuries, the cure has been shirked by the West, whereby humanity has ended up here today, ensconced in the delusion of material “progress”, a Material Girl living in a strictly material world that’s materially rich in abundance, but abundantly impoverished spiritually.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult; and left untried.
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World 1910
This post was unconsciouslly and surprisingly (when discovered) published on June (nine)’Teenth (Juneteenth, America’s “Second Independence Day” celebrating victory of the Second American Revolution). So, it is dedicated to the African-American struggle for freedom, and to the ongoing struggle of all humanity for freedom from modern hubris, which the Second American Revolution failed to end, and instead ushered in the modern hubris of Consumerism.