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“In the moral life,” the late Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote, “the enemy is endless wealth.”
One can extract the words “morality” from there and the sentence – in Murdoch's philosophical work. The sovereignty of good (1970) – it can work just fine. It is not only in our inner moral life that the ego can be so destructive, but in social and political life. And when self-esteem is crushed, it can be very dangerous.
I've thought about this a lot since hearing this episode excellent interview and the late foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie at the BBC's HARDtalk the process. He was talking about something that “turns powerful people evil”. (That entire episode, which was recorded in 2008 and re-released after Leslie's death in 2023, is well worth 23 minutes of your time.)
“We never really understand the role that humiliation plays in creating a monster,” Leslie told interviewer Stephen Sackur, arguing that the Arab world (where many dictators still ruled at the time) was embarrassed by the feeling that it was real. it is no longer the world's largest “mind and military powerhouse”. He also mentioned Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by being rejected, twice, from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna because his paintings were “unsatisfactory”.
I know it sounds like cheap psychobabble but you look at all the monsters in modern history, Leslie said. They always have a sense of humiliation (which leads them to feel): 'I'm going to get them.'”
Personally, I don't care one bit for the old psychobabble, and besides I don't get what Leslie was getting there for “cheap” at all but it's serious. Humiliation – can be similar to my sister's negative feelings, shame – is an unpleasant feeling that comes from the sense that your social status or self-image has been harmed. But unlike shame, it usually involves some kind of wrongdoer, often leading the humiliated to seek some form of revenge (even if this is not aimed directly at the wrongdoer).
I wouldn't go so far as to call him a monster – in fact I mostly think it's unwise to do so classify people as heroes or villains – but I note that, in a slightly roundabout way, former “political moderate” Elon Musk seems to be looking down. extreme right field the more he comes under fire (and the more he drives people to go leave his social media). He may be the richest man in the world, he may be best friends with the next president of the US, but I get a different sense that Musk is a man with a problem: a weak ego.
He is not alone. Most of us – especially in this the age of the “reduced” internet. – we spend too much time worrying about how we come across to other people, and too little wondering how other people feel. The funny thing, though, is that if we were able to shed our fat, insatiable egos and focus on what's going on in the world around us, we could feel a lot better about ourselves.
For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this relinquishment of the ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (a view of the emerging section “neuroaesthetics” will certainly confirm). He wrote of looking out of his window “in an anxious and angry state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings” and then seeing a kestrel, which completely changed his way of thinking.
Murdoch wrote: “Appreciating beauty in art or nature is not the simplest spiritual exercise there is. “It is also a sufficient entry (and not a mere simile) of the good life, for it is looking at the ego for the purpose of seeing the true.”
“Real vision” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of living the good life in these anxious times, but Murdoch really describes what we often refer to these days as “understanding”: to be present in the moment. And it is really this – the process of “self-consciousness”, as Murdoch describes it – that can move us away from our ego-driven fear and into something different and wonderful: love. Murdoch wrote: “It is in the power of will, that is, of seeing, that the liberation of the soul is in the dream.”
Musk's isn't the only fat, unstoppable ego set to be on display in the next 12 months. But that doesn't mean we have to follow suit. It has become strange to talk about love without the context of love, just as it should be said dignity and honor. But ego is about fear. And, at the risk of regressing into the land of psychobabble, the only thing that can conquer fear is love.