Hubris and Survival
Hubris is defined by the dictionary as arrogance or insolence. It is considered to be the chief deadly sin when verbalized as pride. This is pride of the negative sort, that which is called snobbishness. Psychologists refer to it as inflation, by which they mean the personality is artificially inflated beyond its normal size. It is deadly because it leads the sufferer to conclude he is capable of more than he is so that, for instance, to take a simplistic example he might attempt a jump across a chasm he is incapable of performing and wind up a crumpled heap at the bottom.
More realistically, the arrogant will undertake wars, for example, like Viet Nam, which they are incapable of winning. We are inclined to react, "Well, serves him right!"
But, how to react when we are considering our species?
The only known antidote to hubris is suffering. This works because pain, particularly mental pain, leads us to question ourselves regarding how we have come to experience this pain, which is intense to the extent that we cannot evade the question. Arriving at no solution, humans commonly turn to God or Jesus or Buddha, which has the salutary effect of placing us in a state of smallness relative to these entities. Immediately things get better and another conversion has been achieved. We have been deflated. Our prospects for survival immediately become better because we view ourselves more accurately in comparison with our peers and within our environment. Unfortunately, this method requires failure and the resulting psychic pain to work.
I just heard a speaker on the radio refer to America as the greatest country in the world. We are inclined to label this patriotism and therefore good. But, it leads only too readily to chauvinism, the unwarranted belief in country, named after one Corporal Chauvin of Bonaparte's army.
The next point to be made is that luxury, by which I mean the comfortable life, with cars, televisions, and indoor plumbing, heat and cooling, the electrical man servant reduces suffering and therefore the antidote to hubris. This will have the effect of increasing the total number of humans suffering from this malady at any moment in time and therefore the survival chances for our species.
One could respond that, along with luxury we have gotten guns and therefore our survival chances are improved. This is a short term view. Look at the wars of this century and we quickly see that losing wars in no way damages our survival potential but actually improves it. I would say this is due to the salutary effect losing has on hubris. I point to Germany and Japan as cases in point. Actually the winners are more likely to suffer. I point to Russia, England and Cuba as cases in point. It isn't so clear that the U.S. has lost through winning, but it was a very big win and therefore may be a commensurately big penalty that is still working itself out. Or, you could say that WWII led to the flower children which has led to the current state of critical introspection and self doubt that characterizes our country in the late twentieth century.
This is not to say that losing is the answer. Nothing so simple characterizes life properly. Losing only has a salutary effect when resisted to the limit of one's capability.
Can we say that the classless society has improved life. No! It eliminates the suffering of the lower classes thereby allowing them to wax hubristic too. The results of this can readily be seen in crime and illegitimacy statistics.
Finally it is well to realize that hubris has led us to eliminate our predators (germs and viruses) which has led to overpopulation and that will certainly lead to the grandest sort of disaster imaginable. It has been recently pointed out that population growth is off marginally on a world wide basis and that therefore we can expect only 8 billions of people in the year 2020 instead of 10 billions. This can only produce a pleasant reaction in those that consider that the world can hold significantly more than already inhabit it. A foolish notion, since the news regarding fish stocks in the ocean should make it clear that the world is already drastically overpopulated with humans.