Let us abandon our ‘fat, relentless egos’ in 2025
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“In the moral life,” wrote the late Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “the enemy is the fat, ruthless ego.”
The words “moral” could have been lifted there, and the sentence from Murdoch’s philosophical work The sovereignty of good (1970) – would work just as well. Ego can be so destructive not only in our inner moral life, but also in our civil and political life. And when the ego is bruised, it can be especially dangerous.
I’ve thought about this a lot since I heard a piece great interview! with the late foreign correspondent Dame Anne Leslie on the BBC HARD talk: the program. He was talking about what “makes powerful people worse”. (The full episode, originally recorded in 2008 and re-released after Leslie’s death in 2023, is well worth the 23 minutes of your time.)
“We never understand the role that humiliation plays in the creation of a monster,” Leslie told interviewer Stephen Sakuri, arguing that the Arab world (where many dictators still ruled at the time) was humiliated by the feeling that it was not a great world “intellectual and military power.” He also cited Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by being rejected twice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, because his paintings were “inadequate”.
“I know it sounds like an awfully cheap psychological thing, but you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “They always have an element of humiliation that [leads them to feel]”I’ll take them.”
Personally, I don’t mind the old psych, and what’s more, I don’t find what Leslie was getting at all “cheap”, but rather profound. shame — is the unpleasant feeling that comes from feeling that your social status or self-image has been damaged. But, unlike embarrassment, there’s usually some sort of perpetrator involved, often leading the humiliated person to seek some form of revenge. it is not directed directly at the perpetrator).
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster, I really think he’s reckless for the most part categorize people as heroes or villains — but I notice that in a slightly roundabout way, the once “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to be receding further far right area the more he comes under fire (and the more it drives people to leave his social media platform) He may be the richest man in the world, he may be best friends with the next president of the United States, but I clearly recognize that Musk is a man with a problem, a fragile ego.
He is not the only one. Most of us, especially in this matter “coordinated” internet era – spend too much time worrying about ourselves and how we come across to other people, and too little wondering how those other people feel. ruthless ego and focus on what is happening in the world around us, we would feel much better about ourselves.
For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this abandonment of the ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (the idea that the emerging realm “neuroaesthetics(no doubt they’ll confirm.) He wrote of looking out his window “in an anxious and angry state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings,” and then seeing a deer that changed his entire mindset.
“Appreciating beauty in art or nature is not only the most easily accessible spiritual exercise,” Murdoch wrote.
“Seeing the real” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of living the good life in these rather worrisome times, but Murdoch is indeed describing here something we often refer to these days as “mindset“: being present in the moment. And, indeed, it is the process of “disinterestedness,” as Murdoch describes it, that can lead us away from our ego-driven fears and into something entirely different: love , that is, to see that liberation of the soul from fantasy,” Murdoch wrote.
Musk isn’t the only fat, merciless ego to emerge over the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow suit. It’s become a little unfashionable to talk about love outside of a romantic context, just the way it should be virtue and: honor. But the self is about fear. And, at the risk of veering into psychotic territory again, the only thing that can overcome fear is love.
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