Arrogance Ends All Empires, Political Parties, and Social Structures

Humility is difficult – and it’s becoming more and more difficult to find in everyday America. History is easy – and yet it’s becoming more and more “un-studied” insofar as a being a guide how people, countries, and politics operate.

Why does it matter? Because that which kills humility, arrogance, has time and time again proven to be the root cause of the fall of just about every major civilization. From individual industrial dominance to global empires – arrogance ends all empires.

Arrogance eats its owner and rarely leaves anything behind for the worms. What’s stifling to the mind is that we all know this fact. It’s been taught to every child in every culture in every medium from the Bible to kindergarten to high school locker rooms or, ironically, business schools – yet we always fail. Humans ALWAYS fall prey to arrogance and eventually the empire, symbolically or otherwise, falls… but then the cycle happens all over again with new players, new towns, new countries, new industries.

Whether the symptom of their arrogance-induced fall from power is sex, money, drugs, lack of curiosity, clumsiness, elaborate conspiracy theories, overreach, greed – or more generally, simply being blind to reality beyond their own “I am a god of my own domain” glasses – they always fall. ALWAYS. From mythical gods, to shirtless FBI agents or congressmen, to Mitt Romney: arrogance brings them all down because it  veils their vision. It changes reality to what they want to see and not how the world really is. Eventually blindness to that Achilles heel is what leads to the falling of their own personal empire.

Transactions.

As the world has evolved after the industrial revolution, community and country has been overrun by economy and money. “The economy” is the primary interest of governments. It has to be. Money is what humanity has decided is how we engage in all transactions. As such, we’ve seen corporations grow more wealthy, and therefore more powerful than governments. Most giant companies have more power over governments and countries than vice versa. They are their own empires, and it’s easy to see the resulting arrogance: from Wall Street tycoons engaging in ponzi schemes, to billion-dollar bet based on “the potential profit,” to 47% political donor dinners, to companies having “a right” to resources of “liberated countries” before its own people have the same opportunity – dominate the transactions and stand atop the social hierarchy.

Am I saying that even the US empire will fall? Yes, it most certainly will. No empire lasts forever, and it will fall due to its own arrogance, not because of some outside group that can be blamed. That’s how it always happens. It’s not pessimistic or paranoid, it’s just how history, time, and people work. No one and no country can stay on top forever when the key motivation is to dominate the transactions. It’s like accepting our own mortality: it’s hard to do, but spiritually liberating and makes us better people when we finally do… kinder, softer, less prone to prioritize possessions over people.

Wall Street arrogance caused its collapse… but the government wouldn’t let it. As an “empire”, one that sadly is spiteful to the same government that saved it, it was supposed to fall – it did fall – and yet its arrogance is just as blinding as it’s always been. They are too important, too powerful, and too “better” than everyone else to possibly destroy itself. Thousands of powerful, ruling men have thought the exact same thing over thousands of years – they either proven wrong or died before society got the chance to do so face to face.

That the world we’ve created is based entirely on transactions puts a wrench in how to solve this problem. Everything is a transaction. From the day we’re born and hospital bills are paid to the day we die and the Neptune Society finally gets to collect its final fees, the human world is entirely based on transactions. That sucks.

Transactions result in the constant struggle to be the person who walks away feeling as though they “got the better deal” in that interaction. That same struggle, to get the better part of the transaction, happens hundreds if not thousands of times every day to every person. The more we feel we “win” an exchange, the more confidence we acquire.

As confidence builds up and compacts, arrogance is the hardened result. We use and need confidence to achieve difficult tasks, but arrogance uses us and erodes compassion, empathy, and spirit. Overwhelming greed to “win all transactions” is the only product arrogance leaves in its wake.

Arrogance doesn’t erode. It doesn’t extinguish as it burns like confidence can. Even after someone “falls”– arrogance, especially political and transactional arrogance, doesn’t really go away. It’s still there – skewing the way “the fallen” view the world in a way that tends to make them feel like something was stolen from them. They feel in their souls that they still deserve to be kings of their domain, but were somehow robbed of that right, unfairly and against all laws of how they see the universe from their transactional point of view. Most blame others, some make videos ranting to secede from the union – but they NEVER blame their own arrogance as the cause of the loss. That’s probably why – as proven literally countless times in history – arrogance will take down all kinds of empires for as long as the sun allows people live on this planet.