Hubris, the drunk that doesn't have the decency to give you a hangover.

Imagine if every time a politician lied or bullshitted their body treated them like they just had a double shot of Jack Daniels. Then I'd watch the election debates.

“Hubris is a kind of intoxication. A kind of madness that overtakes those in power and clouds their judgment.”

— Paraphrased from ancient Greek thought

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

— Bill Gates

“Hubris, the false presumption that one is somehow exempt from the rules, is always punished. The higher the ego climbs, the harder the fall.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

— Lord Acton

“Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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We all know that hubris—that mix of arrogance, conceit, vanity, and irrational confidence—is like a drug or a double shot of cheap tequila on an empty stomach.

It should make the arrogant, self-deluded, irrationally confident wretch a drunk half-wit babbling nonsense, but it doesn’t happen; God didn’t put that design in; He should have.

Those drunk on their own hubris have endless confidence. And the real danger is that their confidence is contagious. We believe them. We believe in their certainty, and the message is a bit of an afterthought.

But—not to pick on God here—imagine if He’d designed us to react to our hubris the way we do to a triple shot of Jack Daniels on an empty stomach: gagging, belching, and every so often letting loose with a solid blast of projectile vomit.