Here's an excellent TED talk. If you've never visited TED, it's a website with lots of videos of interesting symposium style monologues. Great speakers and interesting ideas.
I saw this one via the Ace of Spades HQ blog which is one of my favorite blogs (warning: if Ace were a movie I would rate it a PG-13) Anyway lots of good and sometimes funny commentary there.
This video is about the so-called "God Complex". The Wikipedia definition for God complex is as follows:
"A god complex is an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility. A person with a god complex may refuse to admit the possibility of error or failure, even in the face of complex or intractable problems or difficult or impossible tasks, or may regard personal opinions as unquestionably correct] The individual may disregard the rules of society and require special consideration or privileges"
Our culture is rife with the kind of thinking outlined here. In my opinion, it's a dangerous trend that especially describes our science and politics. As an engineer, I learned a long time ago that you have to be very careful about making absolute statements. Even when we know that "the science is settled" there are still times when we miss some small detail which changes the entire calculus of a situation. Life is lived as a series of probabilities. For many things the probabilities are so high that we can live as if they are certainties. But in this day and time too many of what we are told are certainties are less probable than their advocates proclaim. Examples of this in modern culture include global warming, economics, social science, education and even health care.
If you're old enough to vote I especially urge you to watch this video and keep it in mind as we journey through the current political cycle:
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