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Trump, Violence, and 'Hubris Syndrome'
People who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with people in general, isolating the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions.
Nov 21, 2025
What is power?
I dedicate this question, which is at the core of the book with which I am struggling, to Donald Trump.
When we think of power, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that they are part of a larger whole.
Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Some years ago, Jerry Useem wrote an article in The Atlantic titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses the concept he calls “hubris syndrome.”
Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. This inability, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.
Citing the research of neuroscientist Sukhvinder Obhi, Useem writes: “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 [psychologist Dacher] 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.”
Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “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, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.” (Remind you of anyone, Donald?)
The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.
The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”
Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.
No one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”
The fragments of the world! This makes me think immediately of the world’s, or at least the state’s, social outcasts, for whom there are also many other names: from bums and losers to criminals and gangbangers. They are expelled into the category of Other, joining all our various enemies: terrorists, commies, savages, whatever. They are out to get us. We must be ready to defend ourselves against them, and here on the home front be ever in control of them. This requires the massing of counterviolence and stern directives.
We all know how well this has worked over the centuries. Violence has won! Our geopolitics are organized around the inevitability of violence: the good kind (ours) vs. the bad kind (theirs). Military spending and its domestic equivalents utterly blitz more constructive forms of social spending and even more troubling, we define ourselves, at least at the state and national levels, primarily by our enemies. The worse they are, the better we are. It’s called projection. It eliminates the need for self-reflection: What matters is the skill to strike back, not look within, change, and grow.
It’s so easy to sink at this point into the quicksand of cynicism. We’re stuck. Nothing’s going to change. Read the following quote and you might believe this even more intensely. In February 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Yalta Conference with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and two months before he died, said these words to Congress:
The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.
He was talking, of course, about the agreement the three powers had just reached on the creation of the United Nations: “the beginning of a permanent structure of peace.”
Yes, the cynicism ignites. Six months after Roosevelt’s words, the United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. World War II ended but the Cold War—and the nuclear arms race—began. The UN has hardly created peace over the last 80 years. Collective hubris syndrome still dominates global politics.
But if you listen deeply, you can hear the heart of peace still beating beneath the rubble. Step one: Do not give up.
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After 'Years of Neglected Oversight,' House Votes to Repeal Authorization Used by Presidents to Wage 'Forever Wars'
One foreign policy expert said these congressional authorizations "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
Sep 11, 2025
Almost exactly 24 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to finally repeal a pair of more than two-decade-old congressional authorizations that have allowed presidents to carry out military attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a 261-167 vote, with 49 Republicans joining all Democrats, the House passed an amendment to the next military spending bill to rescind the Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in the leadup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War and 2003 War in Iraq.
The decision is a small act of resistance in Congress after what the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein described in Foreign Policy magazine as "years of neglected oversight" by Congress over the "steady expansion of presidential war-making authority."
As Weinstein explains, these AUMFs, originally meant to give presidents narrow authority to target terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and use military force against Saddam Hussein, "have been stretched far beyond their original purposes" by presidents to justify the use of unilateral military force across the Middle East.
President George W. Bush used the 2002 authorization, which empowered him to use military force against Iraq, to launch a full invasion and military occupation of the country. Bush would stretch its purview throughout the remainder of his term to apply the AUMF to any threat that could be seen as stemming from Iraq.
After Congress refused to pass a new authorization for the fight against ISIS—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—President Barack Obama used the ones passed during the War on Terror to expand US military operations in Syria. They also served as the basis of his use of drone assassinations in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his term.
During his first term, President Donald Trump used those authorizations as the legal justification to intensify the drone war and to launch attacks against Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria. He then used it to carry out the reckless assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq.
And even while calling for the repeal of the initial 2001 and 2002 authorizations, former President Joe Biden used them to continue many of the operations started by Trump.
"These AUMFs," Weinstein said, "have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action."
The amendment to repeal the authorizations was introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
Meeks described the authorizations as "long obsolete," saying they "risk abuse by administrations of either party."
Roy described the repeal of the amendment as something "strongly opposed by the, I'll call it, defense hawk community." But, he said, "the AUMF was passed in '02 to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and that guy's been dead... and we're now still running under an '02 AUMF. That's insane. We should repeal that."
"For decades, presidents abused these AUMFs to send Americans to fight in forever wars in the Middle East," said Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) shortly before voting for the amendment. "Congress must take back its war powers authority and vote to repeal these AUMFs."
Although this House vote theoretically curbs Trump's war-making authority, it comes attached to a bill that authorizes $893 billion worth of new war spending, which 17 Democrats joined all but four Republicans Republicans in supporting Wednesday.
The vote will also have no bearing on the question of President Donald Trump's increasing use of military force without Congressional approval to launch unilateral strikes—including last week's bombing of a vessel that the administration has claimed, without clear evidence, was trafficking drugs from Venezuela and strikes conducted in June against Iran, without citing any congressional authorization.
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran and public policy advocate at Public Citizen, said, "the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs" are "good to remove," but pointed out that it's "mostly the 2001 AUMF that is exploited for forever wars."
"Not to mention, McCoy added, "we have reached a point where AUMFs almost seem irrelevant, because Congress has shown no willingness whatsoever to punish the president for just launching military actions without one, against Iran, and now apparently against Venezuela."
In the wake of Trump's strikes against Iran, Democrats introduced resolutions in the House and Senate aimed at requiring him to obtain Congressional approval, though Republicans and some Democratic war hawks ultimately stymied them.
However, Dylan Williams, the vice president of the Center for International Policy, argued that the repeal of the AUMF was nevertheless "a major development in the effort to finally rein in decades of unchecked use of military force by presidents of both parties."
The vote, Williams said, required lawmakers "to show where they stand on restraining US military adventurism."
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Why Does the Pentagon Seem to Be Spending More for Less?
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
Sep 04, 2025
As US Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning toward a possible government shutdown.
While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.
To justify this historic largesse, both Trump and Congress give the same reason: peace through strength. Harkening back to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military spending spree, today its invocation often boils down to one simple idea: Give the Pentagon more money. But, since Reagan’s famed buildup actually cost much less, it's worth asking if the problem really is a lack of funds
Four decades ago, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It was a remarkable acquisition project coming in a full 16 months early and more than $80 million under budget. Today, the latest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. And even after adjusting for inflation, the Ford class carriers are also much more expensive than the Nimitz class they are replacing, and costs may keep going up. And those costs come before even asking if the ships are actually matched to the military’s current needs, let alone for the decades ahead they’ll be in use.
Sadly, this cost explosion and questionable alignment with modern warfare are far from unique to carriers. A quick Google search for the F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, Sentinel ICBM, or any number of other recent boondoggles tells the same story. Today, nearly every Pentagon acquisition program is a mess, coming in late, over budget, and significantly more expensive than the weapons and platforms being replaced.
This collapse into dysfunction of the Pentagon’s procurement system cannot be ascribed to a lack of funding. Despite a genuine drop in spending following the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon is now nearly two and a half decades into an unprecedented era of massive budgets. More money hasn’t solved this problem, and there’s zero reason to think even more will do anything but make it worse.
Before going further, it’s worth examining two of the most common justifications for why costs have skyrocketed: technology and personnel.
There’s a decent chance you’re reading this on a smartphone like the iPhone, a remarkable encapsulation of just how dramatically technology has increased in power and decreased in costs over the past 40 years. In 1985, the CRAY-2 was the world’s most powerful super computer. It cost between $35-50 million (adjusted for inflation) and weighed nearly 3 tons. Instead, that iPhone in your hand weighs a few ounces, costs around $1,000, and is thousands of times more powerful. Oh, and it also makes phone calls, plays music, takes photos and videos, lets you surf the internet, and much more.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?”
Put another way, you have far more computing power in your pocket than the entire US military did four decades ago, and you didn’t even need a multi-billion-dollar spending spree to get it. Yet somehow, every time someone tries to explain why the Pentagon needs a trillion dollars today, the inevitable answer is the role of advanced technology in today’s military. Is technology more ubiquitous and more complex? Unquestionably. It is also outrageously more powerful and cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Reagan’s military wasn’t sailing tall ships and using an abacus. They bought most of those supercomputers and utilized some of the most sophisticated technology of the time.
Yet somehow, while the rest of us have cheap supercomputers in our pocket, the Pentagon’s spending more than ever.
Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t just buy things; it is the largest employer in the United States, and, so the justification for more money goes, those people cost more today than they used to. Let’s start with acknowledging two facts: Military personnel have seen real and meaningful increases in their pay and benefits over the past 40 years; and also their compensation, particularly among the lower ranks, remains woefully low and should be raised further.
But what’s also true is that the size of the armed forces under Trump is significantly smaller than those under Reagan. In 1985, there were 2.15 million active-duty personnel with another 1.1 million civilians supporting them. Today, those numbers are more than one-third smaller. So, while one can justify some budget pressure by the increasing costs per person due to better pay and benefits, any honest math would have to also account for significant cost savings of a smaller workforce both in and out of uniform. Today, we’re simply paying more for a far smaller military and civilian workforce than 40 years ago. Since in Washington, “more” is never enough, we’re left to wonder what happened to the savings of a smaller workforce utilizing ever cheaper technology?
It’s worth adding into the equation what the military is actually doing. There is no doubt that a wartime military costs more than one at peace. At the center of today’s calls for a larger budget is thus, the so-called “return of great power competition,” with the US-China rivalry at its core. Add in a resurgent and aggressive Russia, ongoing crises in the Middle East, and other challenges like North Korea, and the Pentagon’s boosters say the threat environment is simply far more complex and involved than 40 years ago.
Accepting that logic, however, requires one to dramatically downplay the complexity of the Cold War, which of course was only “cold” if you leave out conflicts like Afghanistan, Central America, and the Iraq-Iran War. There was also US support for brutal dictators like Mobutu, Pinochet, and Suharto and their armed forces. Today’s threat environment is no doubt complex, but Reagan hardly oversaw a time of cheap, global peace.
Trump’s trillion-dollar budget is also coming in far larger than those of the recent past when the US was actively fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with as many as 200,000 uniformed personnel deployed in theater simultaneously. While the US undoubtedly maintains a not-insignificant operational tempo across the Middle East and North Africa today, it is a far cry from those peak war years.
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?” How will more money fix a completely broken acquisition process? What happened to savings from cheaper technology and a smaller military? And why exactly are the military’s missions of the future so much more expensive than the past? Ultimately, if we want our nation to experience either peace or strength, it's going to take answering those, and other, questions, not just an ever larger fortune for the Pentagon.
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