The Digital New Jerusalem

Too often I am confronted with arrogant geeks, arrested guys with money and no sense of their own limits. But they were meant by disposition to be cogs. 

Their interior story goes like this: I am good at something like math or the scientific method and it applies to everything so I am good at everything. 

Since they must actively repress the awareness of their inadequacy in a defense against self-knowledge the arrogance ramps-up, usually aided by money.

They get a little money and they don't think they're lucky they think they're demigods, and they get affirmation of this in fantasy worlds and video games. 

Math, for example, is a world of purity and they want to inhabit such a world. This puts them oddly in line with old, puritanical, utopian traditions. 

It's a digital New Jerusalem, a land of abstract, binary perfection. But they have advanced past their level of competence and into uncertainty. 

Bill Gates is a billionaire and he can't choose a shirt. The insecurity and constant need for reassurance causes many of them to fall for bogus, heroic nonsense. 

They see themselves as superior beings in the world-views of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, half-baked pseudo-philosophies of personal success.

They think they're winners but they're still just punks, pencil pushers and prospective bank managers running amok and drunk on self-importance.