If my mind’s modest,
I walk the great way.
Arrogance
is all I fear.
The great way is low and plain
but people like shortcuts over the mountains.
Arrogance doesn’t show up in the Roman Catholic list of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it should. Arrogance gives rise to all sorts of things that the Tao te Ching warns against, especially hasty action and risky action. It gives birth to attitudes of superiority toward others and hubris toward Nature. Rather than gratefulness that a low and plain way lies open, the arrogant head for the mountain shortcut that may end up being a Donner Pass for them and those who follow them.
American neoliberal culture is built on arrogance. The expert can never be questioned. The whole system is TINA. Progress is inevitable and always beneficial. Eternal exponential growth is not only possible, it’s necessary. No wonder we find ourselves looking into the abyss from several different mountains passes we’ve decided to traverse, or more accurately, that our elites have decided to traverse, dragging us along with them.
The chapter concludes:
People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes,
carrying weapons,
drinking a lot and eating a lot,
having a lot of things, a lot of money:
shameless thieves.
Surely their way
is not the way.
(Compare Amos 6:1-7)
Emil Brunner commented that capitalism was irresponsibility organized into a system, and when we think about corporate veils, mandatory arbitration and government-ordained liability shields, we can see how our society and its members have been victimized by this irresponsibility. But arrogance has its role as well. In a society as unequal as our society is, it takes a lot of arrogance to live as our elites live in the midst of so much homelessness, despair and precariousness. “I deserve it,” they say to themselves. “I earned it by merit,” they tell themselves. At bottom, they feel they’re in a different category from the rest of us.
In a comment to this chapter, Ursula Le Guin writes:
So much for capitalism.
And so much for arrogance.