Hubris takes them all down: This is why every president makes the same dumb mistakes

[KoKo]

3. Hubris! An Interesting Read. (Does Greed Follow Hubris or is Greed Fulfilled the Cause of Hubris?)

Last edited Tue Jan 19, 2016, 01:00 PM - Edit history (1)

hubris
[hyoo-bris, hoo-]
noun
1.
excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hubris
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Possibly the most discouraging result of this syndrome, however, is in foreign policy, as the irrational panic over ISIS has made painfully clear. More than a decade of war in the Middle East had discredited the authors of the Iraq invasion, disillusioned the public, and made further foreign adventurism thoroughly unpopular. The American people and their representatives in Congress were growing increasingly suspicious of the post-9/11 surveillance regime. Yet all that was required was for a terrorist group to bait us deliberately, just as Osama bin Laden had baited us years before, into reacting militarily as a tactic to aid their own jihadist recruiting. It is probable that Iraq and Syria will consume the rest of Barack Obama’s presidency, consign his cherished domestic agenda to the back burner, and create a long-term burden that Obama will hand down to his successor.

The Deep State Has Unleashed Irrational Cultural Forces

Another problem the Deep State faces, although it is not yet an imminent threat, is the contradiction between the means of its survival and the cultural forces it has either unleashed or played a part in amplifying. At bottom, the military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street are what Max Weber would have described as components of the process of modernization and rationalization of life: systematizing, quantifying, and bureaucratizing the spheres that they control. They are all dependent on the progress of science and technology, whether for the next generation of smart weapon, the virtual-reality glasses that Silicon Valley needs to obtain even more commercial data from the consumer, or the next financial algorithm (and the computers that can use it) in order to extract rents from a stream of investment capital. They are all creatures of science and technology, as well as the scientific method of rational inquiry that underlies them.