Arro­gance is seduc­tive. It doesn’t require ques­tion­ing, deal­ing with self- doubt or chang­ing one’s ways. Along with its cohort irra­tional­i­ty, it is a trait we recog­nise as dan­ger­ous, yet seem increas­ing­ly tol­er­ant towards, even when it is demon­stra­bly counter-productive.

Although the part­ner­ship is not what she had in mind, the poet Edna St Vin­cent Mal­lay summed it up in a one-line reflec­tion on being ill: “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after anoth­er; it’s one damn thing over and over.”
Politi­cians and oth­er would-be lead­ers tell lies with such fre­quen­cy and flu­en­cy, they become a blur. Eschew­ing rea­soned debate in favour of stunts and sopho­moric jibes has become an accept­ed polit­i­cal per­sona. Social media-lev­el speech­es and replies to ques­tions have replaced elo­quence to the point where they’re treat­ed as rhetoric. 
That’s illog­i­cal on many lev­els. Nev­er­the­less, it’s so nor­mal even pro­fes­sion­al pun­dits would be hard-pressed to find pithy or inci­sive polit­i­cal quotes more recent than those of Churchill, John and Bob­by Kennedy, Mar­tin Luther King, Ghan­di or Nel­son Mandela.
Tru­ly great polit­i­cal lead­ers, able to speak para­graph-length sense that inspires ordi­nary peo­ple, are so few and far between as to be the excep­tion that proves the rule. 
The top two on my list are both dead, and both from Africa: Man­dela and Botswana’s first pres­i­dent, Sir Seretse Khama.

      THE AMORPHOUS AND THE EGREGIOUS

Press­ing issues of the day are reduced to unstruc­tured mass sta­tus. Cli­mate change doubters are lumped in the same bas­ket as Covid vac­cine-refuseniks and any­one else who claims to be “stand­ing on my rights”, even if those “rights” irra­tional­ly fly in the face of sci­ence and the greater good. 
Defy­ing and deny­ing the rights and well-being of oth­ers is self­ish to the point of unbri­dled arro­gance. Yet it hap­pens even – maybe that’s espe­cial­ly – at  cor­po­rate lev­els. Exxon Mobil is first among equals in that hierarchy. 
Accord­ing to a new Har­vard study: “Cli­mate pro­jec­tions report­ed by Exxon­Mo­bil sci­en­tists between 1977 and 2003 were accu­rate and skill­ful in pre­dict­ing sub­se­quent glob­al warm­ing and con­tra­dict­ed the company’s pub­lic claims.” (Empha­sis mine)
They’ve since jumped on the “Go Green” band­wag­on, but…“An  analy­sis from Lon­don-based ener­gy and cli­mate think-tank Influ­enceMap found that the amount of cli­mate-pos­i­tive mes­sag­ing used by five major oil and gas com­pa­nies – BP, Chevron, Exxon­Mo­bil, Shell, and Total­En­er­gies – is incon­sis­tent with their spend­ing on low-car­bon activities.”
Today, of course, we react with shock, hor­ror and right­eous indig­na­tion at such reck­less dis­re­gard for truth, trans­paren­cy and con­cern for the plan­et. But chances are the fos­sil fuel behe­moths could have told us the truth as soon as they knew it and we’d have paid scant atten­tion as long as “prices at the pump” stayed low. After all, peo­ple were dumb enough to let Detroit sell them crim­i­nal­ly uneco­nom­ic “gas guz­zlers” until Euro­pean and Japan­ese cars with bet­ter mileage edged into the market.
Despite the fact that we know, or ought to, that the worst of those ensconced in cor­po­rate tow­ers and wrapped in polit­i­cal cocoons look upon us as tools at best and ‘the great unwashed’ at worst, the most egre­gious offend­ers get off light­ly when exposed. Grudg­ing apolo­gies that nev­er rise above a ver­sion of that most trite of such offers, “My Bad”, are accept­ed.

                     THE EASY WAY

We humans have a propen­si­ty to believe and cling to what­ev­er makes us com­fort­able. What we can­not or choose not to under­stand, we explain away or accept by allot­ting respon­si­bil­i­ty to a “greater being”.
The mul­ti­ple ways in which we choose to do so all come down to the same basic tenet: no mat­ter how venal we may be, if we repent, we’ll end up in “a bet­ter place”.
Chris­tian­i­ty excels in that by mak­ing it a mat­ter of tim­ing. Accord­ing to the Bible (Mark 1:14–15) “…the king­dom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”  Evan­gel­i­cals sim­pli­fy that down to “accept Jesus as your per­son­al Sav­iour”. There’s no dead­line men­tioned, which seems to imply that right up until the moment before what­ev­er you believe is the next stage arrives, you can do more or less what you like with­in the cod­i­fied laws of soci­ety with­out fear of retribution.
And if that’s not arro­gance, I don’t know what is.
We, and those who would take us all for the fools we often seem to be, could ben­e­fit from heed­ing a piece of wis­dom offered by renowned polit­i­cal thinker Robert Kaplan (FULL DISCLOSURE: a per­son­al friend for near­ly 40 years), in his lat­est book, ‘The Trag­ic Mind”:
“…the pan­de­mo­ni­um of life with its num­ber­less human inter­ac­tions insures that at some point we will be crushed by some­thing or oth­er. This is why arro­gance is a form of idiocy.”
There’s a lot of it going around.

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