Ego

Who are we? The thinking being behind a fragile and mortal body. When we speak of ego, however, we are not referring to any of this, there is no reference to our soul.

Ego is almost seen as a negative thing, a sense of superiority, that we have to limit to avoid having our ideas imposed on others.

In fact, this isn’t entirely wrong: the ego is in fact a part of us, the feeling that comes up when we perceive that we have been wronged or when someone challenged ourselves.

It’s for my pride

Because of ego, we feel superior to others, infallible, and when we make mistakes (everyone does), we tend to deny them and blame someone else, to not admit our responsibility.

An insidious demon that controls us, bringing illusory benefits, leading to chaos with the illusion that it can be easy to manage.

Back to the Future

Everyone has seen Back to the Future (1985), so I must bring it as an example here. In fact, Marty McFly’s ego is one of his main characteristics, shown several times throughout the films, leading him to get into trouble over and over again.

In fact, the protagonist can’t tolerate being called a coward, and he is ready to agree to do a car race in order not to be considered one, risking causing a serious accident.

With the experience gained during the adventure, however, he manages to contain this impulse, thus avoiding the famous accident (by pretending to be his future son). At the end of the 3 films we find a very different Marty compared to the one at the beginning of the story, showing remarkable character growth.

Of course, this allows us to continue our study of the topic.

Dangers of ego

When ego is involved, one of the biggest risks is to notice an increase in the problems you initially had, making them worse and bigger.

If we leave at the beginning of a conflict situation, no one would do anything to us, and there would be no long-term consequences. However, if in the same situation we respond to provocation and get drawn into the conflict, our actions, which could have been avoidable, cause us to fall into the trap and come out deeply wounded.

Our pride dragged us deeper and deeper into the trap, although we had at first a chance to get out of it safely. All because, in order to defend it, we took actions that made the context worse and worse and causing it to get out of our control.

"Control" is the most important keyword, as it is through it that we govern our lives, without which the consequences would be unpredictable, from all points of view:

• If we have no control over ourselves, maybe because we are under the influence of alcohol, we can perform actions that are dangerous to others, leading to unpleasant consequences
• If we have no control over the situation, we would be under the control of those who do, thus having to follow their rules and praying to get out of it as soon as possible

Karl Popper

According to philosopher Karl Popper, who lived in the UK last century, self-awareness is what distinguishes us from animals. We know that we exist, we perceive time passing, and we accumulate more and more knowledge throughout our lives.

In his conference on the "body-mind problem", he defines the existence of 3 distinct worlds in which each of us lives:

1. Physical world
2. Subjective world, composed of our personal thoughts and feelings
3. Objective knowledge

These worlds are actually closely linked to each other, and each is the consequence of the existence of the world before it. For example, objective knowledge couldn't exist without having tested our personal theories, which over time contributed to the accumulation of objective facts, which in turn helped us to improve our techniques that we can apply in the physical world.

Without ego, we wouldn’t have the will to question already widespread beliefs, and we wouldn’t have any kind of innovation in the world of objective knowledge. In this case it has been a good tool in the hands of scientists we now consider innovative, as they contradicted all knowledge that was considered correct in their era.

This brings us to another book of the philosopher Popper, called "The Myth of the Frame". In this book we have the application of the concept of ego to discussions between people.

What he advocates in fact goes to debunk the myth that everyone lives in their own bubble of interests and trying to discuss to reach a common point of view is impossible. Popper believes this idea is totally false and, indeed, argues that discussion between people with totally different ideas leads to new points of view initially unknown to both, and is therefore something to be encouraged, not a waste of time.

In other words, according to him, we shouldn’t allow our ego to forcefully affirm its point of view in discussions, suppressing that of the opponent, but on the contrary we should genuinely listen to the opinion of others and ask ourselves whether it shares any ideas with our own, trying to merge them into a single one, enriched by all the opinions.

In my opinion, many people today aren’t willing to open such a dialogue, also considering the fact that social networks have increased hate messages directed at other people, making them almost like a normal thing. Thinking about it now, if I got into an argument with a person on a certain topic, I would probably pretend to agree with him in order to end the argument as quickly as possible and never have to think about it again, doing the opposite of what the book advised me, but how many people in this situation would do something different?

Ego control

As we have seen, ego can help motivate us to do something and push us to improve, however, without control it can lead to bad situations. The ego must be controlled, and succeeding in doing so isn’t trivial at all, because when it appears it tends to take control of our actions.

Therefore, we must put aside our pride and realize that we actually have nothing special, behaving with complete freedom when we are with people whose opinion doesn’t matter to us, at the cost of being labeled “weird”. If no one knows us, there is no reputation to defend, and the next day the people who challenged us have already forgotten everything, because we aren't important to them.