Don't try to abolish the ego // Eat biscuits // Work out your kinks // Know your history.
(I warn you, it's long, and it gets a bit weird).
Here's how I find it useful to imagine the Ego. Think of the ego as a relationship, or a method of negotiation, between two concepts:
1. What is sometimes called the 'id', which I think of as my spontaneous desires, my needs. Say, a desire for biscuits, or sex.
2. What is sometimes called the 'superego', which I think of as a mapping of the rules of the outside world. Everyone else's expressed desires, my society's rules and how it seems to behave. We learn about the world through living. Sometimes the world helps me meet my needs, and sometimes it hinders me. I've learned, through all these experiences, that there are certain rules I need to follow for the world to give me what I want. In other words I've made a model or image or psychic understanding of my parents, my peer group, my community, the media, the law etc.
So then I understand 'Ego' as the relationship or discussion between these two concepts. I have a desire, and I imagine what the super ego model thinks of the desire. Then I try and test various methods to convince the 'world' as I map it to let me have what I want. That creates the stream of arguments that I hear in my head discussing a subject: the turning things over through the lens of the principles I've discovered existing in the wider world.
I've probably also learned that those rules are different at different times, in front of different authority figures and in different situations. Sometimes I can break the rule, if I can give the right argument to the right authority figure for why the rule doesn't apply to me.
Say a desire comes up in me, for chocolate, or sex. I might know that society disapproves of my biscuit eating habit. I might know that the person I want to have sex with is in a monogamous relationship with someone else. My 'egoic' mind will rationalise the situation in order that I can get what I want. I think about a time that Dominic Cummings ate lots of biscuits and I try to argue that I also should get to. I convince myself that if Dominic Cumming's partner doesn't know that we're shagging, then I am not hurting anyone. This is the ego. The rationalisation that you present to your Superego in order that the Id is 'justified' in getting what it wants.
But wait, there's more.
What do you desire and how do you know? It's easy to fetishise - to project the meeting of one need into a different (indirect) solution. Often in my life I have gone looking for chocolate, or sex, when the thing I was really looking for was intimacy, connection, touch, companionship, or something else. It's hard to know what you want sometimes, and life has taught me that going straight for the thing I want often doesn't work, and plenty of things I have to get them indirectly. Eating a biscuit makes me feel less lonely. Having sex with people makes me feel less lonely. Shouting at Dominic Cummings on the TV makes me feel less lonely.
Until the biscuits are gone. Until my bed's empty. Until Dominic Cummings sets a press release and says he never said he loves me.
And in the same vain - how do I know that my superego maps onto reality? How do I know what others think? And do I agree? Maybe I can convince my superegoic constructs that I should be allowed to lick melted chocolate off of Dominic Cummings' nipple during lockdown, but what if I feel guilt that it's actually not the right thing to do? Maybe I do think it's the right thing to do, but I know that others will disapprove, and then I'll feel shame. Do I really want my face on the front of the tabloids, with my chocolate-Tory-nipple-licking kink exposed for the world to see? Do I want that embarassment? Why am I going on about all this?
Above the Temple to Apollo in Delphi it says "Know thyself". I think it's important advice, because the only way you can be in control of your life, and harness your desires and live in the world, and change society, is to know yourself. It's much better and more effective than any attempts to "abolish the ego". You can't abolish the ego because it's constantly produced, because it's a relationship. And why would you want to anyway?
Usually people talk about the ego as a metaphor for putting your needs in front of everyone else's. But first of all, everyone does this to some extent or other, and it's necessary for survival. And second of all, we don't like it when people are self-sacrificing either. We call them holier-than-thou, goody-two-shoes, a people pleaser, a martyr. We don't like their motives because they don't seem real, and so we don't know if they're lying. We don't trust these people because we don't know if they're saying something because it's true for them or if they're telling us what they think we want to hear - like Dominic Cummings. We don't want a mirror, we want genuine human connection. We don't want heroes on pedestals, like Dominic Cummings, we want humans that we can relate to. So never pretend to abolish your ego. You'll fail, and you'll look a Dominic Cummings while doing it.
None the less, let's say you do want to abolish your ego. You can, sort of, do it. The way to do it is to get to know yourself. Here's why.
If your ego is a rationalising agent, an expression of the devil's advocate in all of us, pleading with our superegoic god/parents that we should be allowed one more nibble of Dominic Cummings sweet sweet chocolate love, then the only way to understand what the ego is up to is to clearly understand the following:
What do we want?
Do we want it?
Why do we want it?
What do we think others think of this?
Do we care what others think? etc.
Knowing ourselves means knowing our personal and social history. If we know the context we grew up in, the way we were raised, our life experiences, then our desires and fetishes make more sense.
I desire chocolate because in the second millenium AD the church and aristocracy and some enterprising psychopathic merchants of Europe realised that the peasant and working classes could be prevented from rebelling by using divide-and-rule to break up communities and a constant supply of sugar and religious mind control to distract them from this fact. All it would cost would be the genocide and enslavement of three continents, ripping people from the land and the destruction of communal society, the total subjugation of women, and a thousand years of totalitarian religious hypnosis in order that you might believe that there is such a thing as sin, and it's the only thing that still feels good after you realise how much slaughter was necessary for you to have an eclair.
And so, when my caregivers and teachers were too stressed to give me love as a child because they still had to partake in the bloodsoaked treadmill of wage slavery under late capitalism, they fed me sugar to soothe me and got me hooked. Additionally, I crave sex as an answer to my alienation because our moral mores both prohibit and hold it up as the ultimate act of love. I feel guilty and lonely and sinful, so of course then I need redemption, so now I project a superior who is able to absolve me from my sins. And I shall know them by their higher status in society and the fact that the rules don't apply to them. Hence, why I want to suck melted chocolate from Cummings' nipples. And so does everyone else.*
If I learn my history, I learn why I desire the things I do. If I learn my social history I understand why I map society as I do, I understand my fetishes now, so I understand why I make the decisions I make in my life, This explains my id and my superego conception, and their relationship. Now here comes the magic.
Once I have it clearly laid out in front of me I can now, for the first time, make a choice. Once I know what need and what solution have gone together, I can think: is chocolate giving me what I need? Is sex actually the answer to my loneliness? Do I agree with the construct of this authority figure? Do I, in short, believe in the society which so conditioned me? Is his grace, the Chocolate Second Cumming, really going to save me from myself?
If the answer to any of these is no, then I can decide to change, and I can work out how I need to change.** Now knowing my own history, I can say: It is the inherent nature of this competitive market society, with all its monstrous history, which both alienates me and makes me crave false solutions to this alienation. It creates the fear of snakes and then sells me the snake oil.
I can now consciously reject this society and its superego. I can choose to begin to build my superego on a different model. In a cooperative society, I have company, I don't terrorise the world to bring me chocolate, and Cummings is not my superior.*** I neither have need for, crave the solution of, nor gain satisfaction from his sugar-sweetened erogenous zones.
In short, by learning my history, I resolve the conflict between my id and superego, and they can start to work together.**
Know thyself. Do so by realising your position in history and society. Do so by being kind to yourself so that you can lay your own motivations bare to yourself. Then, realise that your fetishes come from the fucked up society you were raised in and the compromises you had to make to navigate the false situations you were born into which this society created.
Know thyself, so you can free yourself from guilt and sin.
Know thyself, become a revolutionary, be kind to yourself, execute the ruling classes.
Then we can build a society where we will live cooperatively and not competitively, have real human connection and sparingly eat occasional biscuits on the rubble of Capitalism and Dominic Cummings' career.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2W7P3wGBI8
**actually knowing yourself and then integrating the changes you wish to make may be more difficult than presented in this essay.
***His position as superior is why everyone is getting so worked up about Cummings' hypocrisy. As a leader he's meant to be absolving our sins, and yet here he is, found in the metaphorical hotel room of cocaine and nazi dominatrixes. It's a fun 'gotcha!' but it's meaningless if you don't actually consider him a superior. I care about his systemic murder, not his joyriding.
(I warn you, it's long, and it gets a bit weird).
Here's how I find it useful to imagine the Ego. Think of the ego as a relationship, or a method of negotiation, between two concepts:
1. What is sometimes called the 'id', which I think of as my spontaneous desires, my needs. Say, a desire for biscuits, or sex.
2. What is sometimes called the 'superego', which I think of as a mapping of the rules of the outside world. Everyone else's expressed desires, my society's rules and how it seems to behave. We learn about the world through living. Sometimes the world helps me meet my needs, and sometimes it hinders me. I've learned, through all these experiences, that there are certain rules I need to follow for the world to give me what I want. In other words I've made a model or image or psychic understanding of my parents, my peer group, my community, the media, the law etc.
So then I understand 'Ego' as the relationship or discussion between these two concepts. I have a desire, and I imagine what the super ego model thinks of the desire. Then I try and test various methods to convince the 'world' as I map it to let me have what I want. That creates the stream of arguments that I hear in my head discussing a subject: the turning things over through the lens of the principles I've discovered existing in the wider world.
I've probably also learned that those rules are different at different times, in front of different authority figures and in different situations. Sometimes I can break the rule, if I can give the right argument to the right authority figure for why the rule doesn't apply to me.
Say a desire comes up in me, for chocolate, or sex. I might know that society disapproves of my biscuit eating habit. I might know that the person I want to have sex with is in a monogamous relationship with someone else. My 'egoic' mind will rationalise the situation in order that I can get what I want. I think about a time that Dominic Cummings ate lots of biscuits and I try to argue that I also should get to. I convince myself that if Dominic Cumming's partner doesn't know that we're shagging, then I am not hurting anyone. This is the ego. The rationalisation that you present to your Superego in order that the Id is 'justified' in getting what it wants.
But wait, there's more.
What do you desire and how do you know? It's easy to fetishise - to project the meeting of one need into a different (indirect) solution. Often in my life I have gone looking for chocolate, or sex, when the thing I was really looking for was intimacy, connection, touch, companionship, or something else. It's hard to know what you want sometimes, and life has taught me that going straight for the thing I want often doesn't work, and plenty of things I have to get them indirectly. Eating a biscuit makes me feel less lonely. Having sex with people makes me feel less lonely. Shouting at Dominic Cummings on the TV makes me feel less lonely.
Until the biscuits are gone. Until my bed's empty. Until Dominic Cummings sets a press release and says he never said he loves me.
And in the same vain - how do I know that my superego maps onto reality? How do I know what others think? And do I agree? Maybe I can convince my superegoic constructs that I should be allowed to lick melted chocolate off of Dominic Cummings' nipple during lockdown, but what if I feel guilt that it's actually not the right thing to do? Maybe I do think it's the right thing to do, but I know that others will disapprove, and then I'll feel shame. Do I really want my face on the front of the tabloids, with my chocolate-Tory-nipple-licking kink exposed for the world to see? Do I want that embarassment? Why am I going on about all this?
Above the Temple to Apollo in Delphi it says "Know thyself". I think it's important advice, because the only way you can be in control of your life, and harness your desires and live in the world, and change society, is to know yourself. It's much better and more effective than any attempts to "abolish the ego". You can't abolish the ego because it's constantly produced, because it's a relationship. And why would you want to anyway?
Usually people talk about the ego as a metaphor for putting your needs in front of everyone else's. But first of all, everyone does this to some extent or other, and it's necessary for survival. And second of all, we don't like it when people are self-sacrificing either. We call them holier-than-thou, goody-two-shoes, a people pleaser, a martyr. We don't like their motives because they don't seem real, and so we don't know if they're lying. We don't trust these people because we don't know if they're saying something because it's true for them or if they're telling us what they think we want to hear - like Dominic Cummings. We don't want a mirror, we want genuine human connection. We don't want heroes on pedestals, like Dominic Cummings, we want humans that we can relate to. So never pretend to abolish your ego. You'll fail, and you'll look a Dominic Cummings while doing it.
None the less, let's say you do want to abolish your ego. You can, sort of, do it. The way to do it is to get to know yourself. Here's why.
If your ego is a rationalising agent, an expression of the devil's advocate in all of us, pleading with our superegoic god/parents that we should be allowed one more nibble of Dominic Cummings sweet sweet chocolate love, then the only way to understand what the ego is up to is to clearly understand the following:
What do we want?
Do we want it?
Why do we want it?
What do we think others think of this?
Do we care what others think? etc.
Knowing ourselves means knowing our personal and social history. If we know the context we grew up in, the way we were raised, our life experiences, then our desires and fetishes make more sense.
I desire chocolate because in the second millenium AD the church and aristocracy and some enterprising psychopathic merchants of Europe realised that the peasant and working classes could be prevented from rebelling by using divide-and-rule to break up communities and a constant supply of sugar and religious mind control to distract them from this fact. All it would cost would be the genocide and enslavement of three continents, ripping people from the land and the destruction of communal society, the total subjugation of women, and a thousand years of totalitarian religious hypnosis in order that you might believe that there is such a thing as sin, and it's the only thing that still feels good after you realise how much slaughter was necessary for you to have an eclair.
And so, when my caregivers and teachers were too stressed to give me love as a child because they still had to partake in the bloodsoaked treadmill of wage slavery under late capitalism, they fed me sugar to soothe me and got me hooked. Additionally, I crave sex as an answer to my alienation because our moral mores both prohibit and hold it up as the ultimate act of love. I feel guilty and lonely and sinful, so of course then I need redemption, so now I project a superior who is able to absolve me from my sins. And I shall know them by their higher status in society and the fact that the rules don't apply to them. Hence, why I want to suck melted chocolate from Cummings' nipples. And so does everyone else.*
If I learn my history, I learn why I desire the things I do. If I learn my social history I understand why I map society as I do, I understand my fetishes now, so I understand why I make the decisions I make in my life, This explains my id and my superego conception, and their relationship. Now here comes the magic.
Once I have it clearly laid out in front of me I can now, for the first time, make a choice. Once I know what need and what solution have gone together, I can think: is chocolate giving me what I need? Is sex actually the answer to my loneliness? Do I agree with the construct of this authority figure? Do I, in short, believe in the society which so conditioned me? Is his grace, the Chocolate Second Cumming, really going to save me from myself?
If the answer to any of these is no, then I can decide to change, and I can work out how I need to change.** Now knowing my own history, I can say: It is the inherent nature of this competitive market society, with all its monstrous history, which both alienates me and makes me crave false solutions to this alienation. It creates the fear of snakes and then sells me the snake oil.
I can now consciously reject this society and its superego. I can choose to begin to build my superego on a different model. In a cooperative society, I have company, I don't terrorise the world to bring me chocolate, and Cummings is not my superior.*** I neither have need for, crave the solution of, nor gain satisfaction from his sugar-sweetened erogenous zones.
In short, by learning my history, I resolve the conflict between my id and superego, and they can start to work together.**
Know thyself. Do so by realising your position in history and society. Do so by being kind to yourself so that you can lay your own motivations bare to yourself. Then, realise that your fetishes come from the fucked up society you were raised in and the compromises you had to make to navigate the false situations you were born into which this society created.
Know thyself, so you can free yourself from guilt and sin.
Know thyself, become a revolutionary, be kind to yourself, execute the ruling classes.
Then we can build a society where we will live cooperatively and not competitively, have real human connection and sparingly eat occasional biscuits on the rubble of Capitalism and Dominic Cummings' career.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2W7P3wGBI8
**actually knowing yourself and then integrating the changes you wish to make may be more difficult than presented in this essay.
***His position as superior is why everyone is getting so worked up about Cummings' hypocrisy. As a leader he's meant to be absolving our sins, and yet here he is, found in the metaphorical hotel room of cocaine and nazi dominatrixes. It's a fun 'gotcha!' but it's meaningless if you don't actually consider him a superior. I care about his systemic murder, not his joyriding.
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