Illustrating the Global Ego
From www.verywellmind.com
In a previous post, I suggested that one of the most fundamental misunderstandings we humans labor under is that an ego is a part of ourselves. In psychoanalysis, the ego is the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.
Instead, I think it’s more helpful to think of the ego as a construct, a conceptual entity each of us created in order to get along in life.
It’s essentially a story about ourselves as individuals.
Virtually all of us believe that what we see out in the world is seven-plus billion beings interacting with one another. That leads to great complexity in analyzing all apparent interactions if we desire to make sense of what we see out there. However, we could choose to look at the human drama in the following way: for each of us, the so-called human drama is a play starring one’s own ego, with all the rest of the egos we encounter as supporting actors. And none of those egos represent even a part of who we really are.
Immersed in the global Ego
Picture each newborn human being emerging into a global field of Ego, as if we are newborn fish emerging into the ocean. We immediately begin to look at life through the Ego-field into which we have emerged, and we allow it to shape our world view, the one we’ll carry with us and with which we’ll act consistently throughout our lives.
That world view has as its foundation the assumption that we are separate beings, separate from one another and from Being, that which we really are. As we become acculturated into that view, we are taught limitation, scarcity, and inevitability, all of which rely on the foundation of separation. And so we each become a unique component of the global Ego.
That’s a fundamentally different story. Looking at the world from that perspective allows us to lighten the load of the seriousness with which we ordinarily regard our lives. It relieves us of the idea that the ego is a part of us that we need to moderate, change, or rid ourselves of altogether. It also relieves us of blame, regret, shame, and so on. All of those belong to the Ego and not to us as Being.
I recently came upon two editorials in the New York Times in their March 18, 2022 edition. Both of these pieces refer to the behavior of the global Ego.
More and more, powerful people “turn into gangsters. When men rise to power and have that kind of autocratic power, they become autocrats and they become mobsters, and they become even more thuggish than they were when they rose to power because they become more paranoid.” - David Brooks
… “democracy tends to hide its strengths until it needs them, and dictatorships tend to advertise their strengths until they’re exposed as actual weaknesses.” - Bret Stephens
Both of those quotes describe the way the Ego controls our behavior and acts to hide that control from us, thus ensuring its continued influence and very survival. Autocrats, who accumulate power in a zero-sum context, must protect it from loss. Dictators, who believe in the reality of the power they wield over others, must resist any challenge to their strength lest their power be revealed to be illusory. These imperatives act to distract us from the real problem: we are acting in the interests of something that’s only concerned with its own survival.
We have been hoodwinked into believing that we are members of a species that makes rational decisions based on self interest, and that self interest, when aggregated, results in the best economic interest for all. That’s the definition of “self-interest” in economics.
It doesn’t look to me as if decisions being made on the world stage these days are actually resulting in the best economic interest for all. For a small handful of people, maybe, but not for all. Why is that? I believe it’s because we humans are NOT actually making rational decisions based on self-interest. We’re actually making them based on the interest of the global Ego, and those two entities couldn’t be further apart.
