The History of Arrogance

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Humility is not about belittling oneself, but rather about retaining the ability to doubt oneself. The humble leader does not fear the advisor who disagrees with him, and the humble scholar does not treat his theory as dogma. The humble institution reviews its mistakes before they turn into a disaster. This is the key to the book by Finnish author Aari Tornin, "The History of Hubris: Do You Know Who You Are Talking To?", which begins with a seemingly simple observation.

The person who reached the moon and decoded the human genome has not necessarily become more humble than his ancestors who hunted mammoths. Our tools have evolved, but the old ego still resides within us, ready to turn self-confidence into arrogance, success into blindness, and power into an illusion of infallibility. The book was published in Arabic by Dar Al-Arabi for Publishing and Distribution in 2023, spanning 256 pages, translated by Samar Munir. It is not so much an academic psychological study as it is a cultural journey infused with irony throughout history. Tornin combines myth, politics, war, science, art, and economics in search of the moment when a person tells themselves: I do not make mistakes, and I do not need to hear anyone. The author divides his journey into six axes: how success goes to one's head, the inflation of the ego, the illusion that a person or civilization is the center of the world, the claim by certain classes that they are the "best people," then the hubris created by monopolies, and finally the art of humility. This structure reveals that hubris is not merely an individual moral flaw, but can transform into a way of governance and a culture within institutions. Tornin invokes the concept of "hubris" from the Greeks, the moment when the hero forgets his limits and imagines himself equal to the gods, leading to "Nemesis," the goddess of revenge, who brings him back to his true size.

This ancient drama repeats itself in different costumes, in Alexander the Great, who could no longer tolerate comparison or criticism, in Napoleon, who imagined himself the master of the world before being defeated by distance and winter, and in Japan, which suffered from what the author calls the "disease of victory," pushing it to excessive expansion followed by disaster. The most dangerous of the arrogant are not those who openly say: "Do you know who I am?" but those who do not utter it because they believe everyone should know the answer. The book leaves us with a painful question: how many times have we rejected the truth, not because it was wrong, but because it came from someone we believed was inferior to us?