On Egoism
It occurred to me at some critical point in my life that I had something of an ego. I was competitive, prone to comparing myself to others, and extremely intolerant of failure. When I asked myself where this came from, my first thought was that I wasn’t good enough for my own standards. But when thoughts became contemplation, it dawned on me that I didn’t create my standards out of thin air — they were a response to the world I participated in, an alienating space that pushed ideas and tried to change me. I suddenly became two selves.
Since one is usually conditioned by family and then by school, their concept of self is never completely stable. It belongs to a complex web of other influences, where one is constantly ragdolling between themselves and others. The person, while still a child, becomes aware of competition, approval, good/bad behavior, and reward/punishment. This necessarily develops a person in the direction of being self-conscious, i.e. egoistic. It is not right, then, to say that egoism and selfishness are the same. What I see to be egoism is merely an awareness of self, which is not bad, but taken to obsessive degrees, this awareness might consume a person with pain. It fills a person with useless thoughts and overbearing emotions.
This sort of egoism is a feeling of being so self-aware that it’s uncomfortable, and not everyone has a good understanding of what that feels like. The root of this behavior seems to come from a person’s reaction to their environment, particularly in shielding themselves from it. There are two possible extremes — one can be obsessed with their positive traits (superiority complex) or one can be obsessed with their negative traits (inferiority complex), and one can have some of both. Because it is specifically a psychological defense, calling these behaviors irrational doesn’t help much. However, both extremes are dangerous, and there is a need to address how we can rectify them. One should be in the middle.
I speak of people whose thoughts, emotions, and actions are tied to their ego (concept of self), so much so that they can’t live without it. These people need help, and not clinical or therapeutic help, but spiritual. They need guidance from those who are already on the road to self-mastery, but they simultaneously need the willingness to listen to those people. And they also need to be given compassion — overthinkers, anxious people, and socially performative people will all greatly benefit from being genuinely understood. A methodology of spiritual self-help is realistic, and can be attained through new activities, new friendships, new thoughts. It is completely possible for the open-hearted.
The most important thing for an egoistic person to do is to consult their ego personally, to confront their thoughts and consider the various arguments and counterarguments proposed. If one is rational, they will eventually solve all their problems mentally, but then there is also the emotional work, the work on one’s self-perception, the work on how to conduct oneself in the world, and so on and so on. It is a difficult path for anyone, not just the person suffering from this calamity of ego. Any acknowledgement of ‘I’ that is added onto a value judgment, such as “I am good at X” and “I am bad at Y”, inherently implants a particular system of belief in us. So, perhaps that is our first responsibility.
Once a person is stripped of ego, all they have is their actual self.
Thank you.
