Ego

What is ego?

Most fundamentally, ego is the reification of a convenient sense of self - or, to put it more directly, the belief that what we define as "ourselves" is anything more than a useful fiction.

Ego is dangerous because it is a part of our psychology which seeks to establish the fiction of an "individual self" as a concrete reality, and to affirm that sense of a separate self by any means necessary. Ego is easily exploited by those who seek to control and enslave us for their own purposes. The competitive nature of free-market capitalism, for example, is used as a method of compelling us to participate in a lifelong "rat race," in which individual status and material success are the egotistical goals to be pursued.

Of course, in reality, there is no separation beyond that which we invent in our own minds, for purposes of convenience. All is ultimately one, and we are figments of our own imagination. However, this sort of mystical revelation, although intuitively accurate, often turns out to be of little practical use in navigating the complexities of our daily lives.

More practically, ego can be defined as the self-serving conviction that one is one some sense deeply superior to others. It is on this somewhat more pragmatic definition of ego that most of the evils of modern society are predicated. Social status and material "success" both serve primarily to reassure us that we are undeniably better than those who lack such culturally-approved acknowledgments. Money, formal education, job status, and other foundations of society function primarily as motivations to keep producing and keep consuming, because the alternative is to be seen as somehow inferior.

I will be expanding on these themes extensively in my future writing, whether here or elsewhere. Stay tuned if you're interested in examining how we are manipulated by appeals to ego and other common psychological ploys.