There is a word, hubris, of which the short definition is arrogance accompanied by folly. When you sit still with a cup of coffee one can see the result all around you and even some of it in your own life. When Karen and I travelled through Central Europe that had been behind the iron curtain a few years ago you could almost visualize the ghosts of empires that had lived and died within a short a short century and all of which thought they would last forever. Each of them had been held together by what I call Liberty Valence governance. “But the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood and when it came to shooting straight and fast, he was mighty good” was a phrase out of the song, but like the empires, Liberty ended up face down dead in the street.
As you strolled through the old palaces, in Vienna, Prague and Budapest you could almost see the Hapsburgs ruling family destroyed in WWI floating in the halls. Then in Munich you could almost picture Hitler’s supremist figure like Ali saying I am the greatest while in Berlin there were still bullet holes where he was making his last stand. In Prague, there was the building where Alexander Dubcek, the premier of Czechoslovakia, stood with tears in his eyes in 1968 as Russian tanks destroyed the democracy movement. Years later as an old man he stood in the same place with Vaclav Havel as democracy bloomed again as hundreds of thousands celebrated as the Soviets left. As they left, a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin had to scramble to get back home from East Germany as best he could.
Empires fall that seem like they would go on forever. When you peel back the layers, hubris often is the main cause.
