An old friend managed to drop this Atlantic article by Jerry Useem from 2017 in my path recently, and I found it fascinating. It’s all about Hubris Syndrome:
“Hubris syndrome,” as [Lord David Owen] and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.
It’s fascinating how the mind can allow itself to be molded by the reactions and assertions of those humans with which it interacts. My Arts Editor used to work for Wells Fargo during the reign of CEO John Stumpf, and Useem’s description of a Congressional hearing to which Stumpf was invited is more than interesting:
When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.
Sure. The environment was not congratulatory, he was not being told he was a success – in fact, the implication was that he was a failure. And, it appears, he had no experience with being a failure – helicopter parents, take note! Totally lost at sea comes to mind.
But it’s not just attitude – it’s physical:
Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.
And it’s arguable that by losing those capabilities, one is losing survival characteristics in many situations. It suggests, unsurprisingly, that survival characteristics are context-dependent, much like morality. But I hadn’t guessed that a brain changed physically, and perhaps irreversibly, due to the environment – and let’s call it the toxic environment – of constant positive reinforcement.
It makes me wonder about parents who experienced failure as children and decided their kids shouldn’t go through such trauma, because it was just so awful. Not having any of my own, of course, I can’t really say anything important on the matter. But the phrase helicopter parents, so sorry to repeat myself, doesn’t exist without examples of the phenomenon being present.
[H/T TF, I think]
