Hybris: Two European Views

The nuclear disaster in Fukushima is just as hard to fathom as the sudden downfall of the French almost-presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Le Monde writes. Both events give clues to the inner workings of our society.

“Is there a relationship between these two unimaginable events?” Hervé Kempf asks in Le Monde. “Yes, because they work according to the same logic. A logic of ‘excessiveness’ or hybris, a concept from Greek antiquity. Hybris designated the pride that pushes humans to exceed their just boundaries and strive for things beyond what fate has meted out to them. This idea resounds strongly in today’s culture, which demonstrates an insatiable greed while the biosphere has absorbed about as much as it can take of the ill effects of human activity…. The Greeks associated hybris with its own punishment, nemesis or destruction; an excessive desire for power, money or sex brings disaster on the person who is but the plaything of such hybris.”

“The future will show whether Strauss-Kahn was the victim of foul intrigues, murdered symbolically at the height of his fame, or if he staged a spectacular self-destruction before the eyes of a speechless audience,” the Swiss paper Le Temps writes. “It is hard to imagine that he didn’t in some way yearn for this state of affairs – which represents the refusal of a pre-determined fate. Dominique Strauss-Kahn always had something brutish, massive and coarse about him – his thoughts were conditioned by his desire for pleasure. Add to that his sharp intelligence, the vastness of his knowledge and abilities, his intellectual sensitivity. He is the perfect embodiment of the tormented modern man, torn between the desire for quick pleasure and an excessive ambition to decide his own fate.”