There are gauges inside the airplane that tell pilots all sorts of things, from the temperature outside the airplane to the barometric pressure and even the direction that the wind is blowing.   The one that everyone knows about is the amount of fuel in the tanks, and then there’s the one that tells you where the north pole can be found in case you want to visit Santa Claus.   One of my favorites is the one that tells you if you happen to be flying upside down, in case you can’t tell from the rapid expansion of your head.

Now, of course, there are also gauges pilots can buy to measure their own physiological states. Pulse oximeters are quite handy and can alert us to when we should supplement our oxygen supply.  My Garmin watch has one, if I can remember which way to swipe it.  But sadly, there’s no gauge invented yet that measures pilot hubris, and that may be the most important one of all.    We are left to our own devices, as it were, and it is the very thing we need to measure that defeats our ability to measure it.   If we had the humility to measure hubris, we wouldn’t need to.

Hubris is typically the culprit that lurks behind bad decisions.    It terrifies me when I see it in the budding psychotherapists I supervise, and it scares me when I am sitting in the right seat of an airplane and someone else is at the controls.    I suspect it is also the reason that pipes burst after a cocky plumber “fixes” them, a short occurs just after the electrician leaves, or a race car driver spins out of control.    Sure, there’s a risk/benefit ratio in every aspect of life, including staying at home and hoping that your vitamin D levels don’t plunge into oblivion.

Hubris is one of those many great Greek words that worked its way into the language because a simple word such as pride didn’t capture the essence of its self-defeating nature.   The Greeks did depth well, maybe because the weather was just so sunny they had to find meaning inside of themselves.   Maybe we had to steal words such as nostalgia, euphoria and crisis from the Greeks because the weather was just so miserable in England those Brits were too busy trying to keep themselves warm and dry that they didn’t have the time to introspect.

It matters because it’s clear from reading those accident reports I reference here often that the bulk of them are caused by pilot hubris.    Most accidents occur after a chain of untoward events, and upon analysis most of them could have been prevented if the pilot made a different, more cautious, decision somewhere earlier in the chain.  Now, please don’t read this thinking that I am denying the role of Fate, or just plain old dumb luck.    Certainly, bad things happen to good people, and sometimes the correct, cautious decision leads to disaster as well.  

In my own meager attempts at introspection, I have come to see hubris as a mask for a lack of self-confidence.    As a child I had neither, and as an adolescent to be self-confident would have required I had a sense of self to be confident with, and as is true of so many adolescents, I could not find a self if someone handed one to me, as my father would have said, on a silver platter.  As a young adult I suffered from bouts of hubris that occasionally got me into trouble, but self-confidence has mostly eluded me even to this day, at the ripe old age of 70.   

Self-confidence comes as a result of mastering a skillset, and mastery emanates from recognizing one’s mistakes and correcting them.    It is the vigilant but not crippling attention to error that makes us accomplished at whatever it is that we do, and hubris interferes with that focus.    Hubris, if I remember correctly, is what caused Icarus to fly too close to the sun, burning his youthful wings.   Self-confidence makes a close alliance with fear, whereas hubris forbids it.   

One of the six primary flight instruments is called the attitude indicator, and when the sky gets misty, pilots depend on it to let them know which end is up.   Unfortunately, it’s only able to indicate the attitude of the airplane, and so far, no one has come up with a gauge that can indicate the pilot’s.  If hubris was the sort of thing we could read from a gauge just as we measure the amount of fuel in our tanks, we should glance over at it from time to time, and hopefully each time we take a peak it would be on empty.