Hybris: the very current delusion of omnipotence

A mixture of pride and arrogance. The narcissism contemporary that crosses the ancient tendency of powerful people to slip into the quicksand of a waste of human intelligence called delusions of omnipotence. The ancient Greeks, long before the Romans and then the Christians, considered thehybris as the greatest sin of men. Something the gods could not forgive.

Much more than pride

The hybris Over the centuries, it has never lost its relevance. Indeed, it is difficult, almost impossible, to understand some of the behaviors of men who always seem lucid, ruthless, and rational in their superbia, without resorting to the category ofhubris. Let's take the case of Vladimir Putin. He unleashed a criminal and murderous war, unfortunately also fought with weaponry sold by us Italians, incredibly adding a series of errors of underestimation and overestimation. He underestimated the heroic dignity of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated Europe's compact and, for once, concrete response. He also failed to take into account the impact of sanctions on a global scale, a weapon as powerful as missiles, except they don't kill anyone. And it overestimated its strength, the consensus that has always accompanied its endless cycle of power, the dense network of relationships with leaders, nations, and economic powers that has always allowed Russia to do as it pleases (see the annexation of Crimea).

He who sins of hybris

The sin of hybris Putin's behavior has led many observers to question his health. Has he gone mad? Has he lost control of his instincts? But behind psychiatry and geopolitics, behind all political and military analyses, there is thehybris, poison entered Putin's blood, after almost thirty uninterrupted years at the top of a power devoid of any checks and balances (two words without which democracy does not exist, even if formally one goes to vote) and exactly in the dimension condemned by the Greeks. A sin, unforgivable, committed by men blinded by their own ego, proud and arrogant to the point of blindness. Incapable, even for a moment, of using the temperance.

The relevance of hubris

The hybris In the modern age, it has not lost any of the characteristics of the Greek era. It is striking, as in the case of Putin, that men and women have lost their sense of limits and they consider themselves immune from any risk in their infinite arrogance.hybris today afflicts those who do not know how to look at life with passion, energy, ambitions, but also with simplicity. And with the utmost respect for simple people. And in fact while simplicity and sobriety they are associated with a natural elegance, a strong sense of aesthetics, arrogance of hybris it is vulgar, devoid of aesthetics as well as ethics. The hubris today is what we have unleashed against Nature and its laws, ignoring an appeal made already at the end of the nineteenth century by the philosopher Nietzsche which denounced our "violence towards nature with the help of machines". What has led to the climate emergency and to a world that is preaching the sustainability, struggling, in reality, to take the path of a new development model.

Hybris from the Greeks to us

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, whoever committed the sin of hybris he is punished because, with his arrogance, he considers himself similar to God. A sin more than mortal. But even without going that far, each of us, in our daily lives, can be seduced by the sirens of thehubris. Icarus, punished by the gods for trying to fly too high, closely resembles the all-powerful masters of technology who today consider themselves the new masters of the world. And so many Ancient Greek figures, punished for their military and political arrogance, recall the fate that will sooner or later befall Putin as well.

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