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In “The Moral Life,” wrote Anglo-Irish author and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “the enemy is unchanging fat.”
One can extract the word “moral” there – and the sentence – from Murdoch’s philosophical work. The sovereignty of good (1970) – It works as well. Ego can be destructive not only in our inner moral life, but also in our civic and political life. And it can be especially dangerous when the ego is hurt.
I’ve thought a lot about this since I heard a certain episode. Very good interview With the late foreign journalist Dame Anne Leslie at the BBC HARDtalk program. She talks about what “turns powerful people into evil.” (The entire episode, originally recorded in 2008 and re-released in 2023 upon Leslie’s death, is worth about 23 minutes of your time.)
Leslie told interviewer Stephen Saqour, “We never understood the role that humiliation plays in creating a monster,” arguing that the Arab world (while many dictators were ruling at the time) was humiliated by this feeling. It will not be a great global “intellectual and military power.” She also cited Adolf Hitler, who was rejected twice from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, citing his paintings as “unsatisfactory”.
“I know it sounds like cheap psychedelic stuff, but you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “They always have an element of shame (that makes them feel) ‘I’ll get them.'”
Personally, I don’t care a bit for the old psychobabble, and I also don’t find what Leslie has to offer there to be “cheap” but profound. Shame – rather like a sister-passion, Shameful – It is an unpleasant feeling that comes from the feeling that your social status or self-image has been affected. But unlike shaming, some kind of perpetrator is usually involved, often leading the humiliated person to take some kind of revenge (even if this is not directly against the perpetrator).
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster – in fact, for the most part, I think it’s unwise to do so Classify people as heroes or villains – but in a slightly roundabout way, the once “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to be getting more inward. Far right state The more it comes under fire (and the more people it drives) 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 understand that Musk is a man with a problem: a fragile ego.
He is not the only one. Many of us – especially in this The “collected” age of the Internet – I spend too much time worrying about ourselves and how we relate to other people, and too little thinking about how other people feel about themselves. The funny thing is, if we let go of our fat, persistent egos and focused on the world around us, we could end up feeling better about ourselves.
For Murdoch, the best way to let go of this ego was to spend time appreciating nature and works of art (the “Neuroesthetics” of course they confirm) she writes that when she looked out of her window “in a state of mind full of anxiety and resentment, I forgot my surroundings” and then she saw a kestrel, which completely changed her whole thinking.
“Appreciation of art or natural beauty is not just the simplest spiritual exercise,” Murdoch writes. “Also, it is a completely adequate introduction to the good life (and not just an example), because the desire to see the real is to prove selfishness.”
“Seeing the real” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of living well in these troubled times, but Murdoch is what we often refer to here these days as “Mentality”: Being on time. And it is this process—the process of “self-discovery,” as Murdoch describes it—that can take us away from our ego-driven fears and into something completely different and wonderful: love. “The liberation of the soul from illusion lies in the capacity to love,” Murdoch writes.
Musk isn’t just a fat, persistent ego that’s set to stand out over the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow. It’s become a bit unfashionable to talk about love outside of a romantic context, just as it is to talk about love. Virtue And Honor. But ego is about fear. And, at the risk of veering into psychobabble territory again, the one thing that conquers fear is love.
