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“In the moral life,” the late Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote, “the enemy is the fat relentless ego.”
One could take out the words “the moral” there and the sentence — from Murdoch’s philosophical work The Sovereignty of Good (1970) — would work just as well. It is not only in our inner moral lives that the ego can be so destructive, but in civic and political life too. And when an ego is bruised, it can be particularly dangerous.
I have thought about this a lot ever since hearing a segment of an excellent interview with the late foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie on the BBC’s HARDtalk programme. She was speaking about what it is that “turns powerful people bad”. (The whole episode, originally recorded in 2008 and released again upon Leslie’s death in 2023, is very much worth the 23 minutes of your time.)
“We never quite understand the role that humiliation plays in the making of a monster,” Leslie told the interviewer Stephen Sackur, arguing that the Arab world (where many dictators were still governing at that point) had been humiliated by the feeling that it was no longer the great global “intellectual and military powerhouse”. She also cited Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by having been rejected, twice, from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna because his paintings were “unsatisfactory”.
“I know it sounds an awfully cheap psychobabble thing but you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “They always have an element of humiliation which [leads them to feel]: ‘I’ll get ’em.’”
Personally, I don’t mind a bit of the old psychobabble, and furthermore I don’t find what Leslie was getting at there “cheap” at all but rather profound. Humiliation — rather like its more frivolous sister-emotion, embarrassment — is the unpleasant feeling that comes from the sense that your social status or self-image has been harmed. But unlike embarrassment, some kind of a perpetrator is usually involved, often leading the person who has been humiliated to seek some kind of revenge (even if this is not targeted at the perpetrator directly).
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster — indeed for the most part I think it unwise to categorise people as heroes or villains — but I do notice that, in a slightly circular fashion, the once “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to lurch further into extreme rightwing territory the more he comes under fire (and the more that drives people to leave his social media platform). He might be the richest man in the world, he might be best buddies with the next US president, but I get the distinct sense that Musk is a man with a problem: a fragile ego.
He is not the only one. A lot of us — particularly in this “curated” internet age — spend far too much time worrying about ourselves and how we are coming across to other people, and far too little wondering how those other people are themselves feeling. The funny thing, though, is that if we were able to abandon our fat, relentless egos and focus on what is going on in the world around us, we would end up feeling far better ourselves.
For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this abandoning of ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (an idea the emerging field of “neuroaesthetics” would surely corroborate). She wrote of looking out of her window “in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings” and then seeing a kestrel, which completely altered her entire mindset
“The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise,” Murdoch wrote. “It is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just an analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real.”
“Seeing the real” might not be what first springs to mind when one thinks about living a good life in these rather worrying times, but Murdoch is really describing here something we often refer to these days as “mindfulness”: being present in the moment. And it is indeed this — the process of “unselfing”, as Murdoch described it — that can take us away from our ego-driven fears and towards something altogether different and wonderful: love. “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists,” wrote Murdoch.
Musk’s is not the only fat, relentless ego that is set to feature prominently over the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we need follow suit. It has become slightly unfashionable to talk about love outside of the romantic context, just as it has to talk about virtue and honour. But ego is about fear. And, at the risk of veering off again into psychobabble territory, the one thing that can overpower fear is love.
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