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The late Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote: “In moral life, the enemy is the fat, uncompromising ego.”
One can extract the phrase “moral” there and the sentence – from Murdoch's philosophical work Sovereignty of goodness (1970) — It will work as well. Not only in our inner moral life can the ego be so destructive, but in civil and political life as well. When the ego is bruised, it can be especially dangerous.
I've thought about this a lot since I heard a clip of it Excellent interview With the late foreign correspondent Dame Anne Leslie on the BBC Hard talk program. She was talking about what “turns powerful people into evil.” (The entire episode, which was originally recorded in 2008 and released again after Leslie's death in 2023, is pretty much worth 23 minutes of your time.)
“We don't fully understand the role that humiliation plays in creating a monster,” Leslie told broadcaster Steven Sackur, arguing that the Arab world (where many tyrants were still ruling at that point) was humiliated because of the feeling that it was one. It is no longer the major global “intellectual and military power.” She also cited Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated when he was twice rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna because his paintings were “unsatisfactory.”
“I know it sounds very cheap psychobabble, but you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “They always have an element of humiliation that (leads them to feel): ‘I'm going to get them.'”
Personally, I don't mind a bit of old-fashioned psychobabble, and besides, I don't find what Leslie was getting there at all “cheap”, rather profound. Humiliation – a bit like a sister's most trivial affection, embarrassment – It is the unpleasant feeling that comes from feeling that your social status or self-image has been damaged. But unlike embarrassment, there is usually a perpetrator of some kind, prompting the person who has been insulted to seek some sort of retaliation (even if this is not directly aimed at the perpetrator).
I wouldn't go so far as to call him a monster – in fact I think it's often unwise to do so Classifying people as heroes or villains – But I notice that, in a slightly circular way, the “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to be turning more inward. Far-right territory The more he gets shot (and the more people make him do it). He left his social media platform). He may be the richest man in the world, and he may be best friends with the next president of the United States, but I have a distinct sense that Musk is a man with a problem: his fragile ego.
He's not the only one. Many of us – especially in this The age of the “regulated” Internet. Spending too much time worrying about ourselves and how we relate to others, and too little wondering how those same people feel. But the funny thing is, if we can let go of our fat, relentless ego and focus on what's going on in the world around us, we'll end up feeling a lot better.
For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this abandonment of ego is to spend time admiring nature and works of art (an idea of the emerging field of “Neuroaesthetics“He would certainly confirm that.” She wrote about looking out her window “in an anxious and upset state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings” and then seeing a kestrel, which changed her entire mindset
“Appreciating beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest spiritual exercise available,” Murdoch wrote. “It is also an entirely appropriate introduction to (not just an analogy for) the good life, because it examines selfishness in order to see reality.”
“Seeing reality” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of living a good life in these somewhat troubling times, but Murdoch is really describing here something we often refer to these days as “Vigilance“: Being in the moment. And it is this, indeed—the process of “selflessness,” as Murdoch described it—that can take us away from our ego-driven fears and toward something entirely different and wonderful: love. “The capacity to love, that is, to see,” Murdoch wrote. It lies in liberating the soul from imagination.
Musk isn't the only relentless fat person set to feature prominently over the next 12 months. But that doesn't mean we need to follow the same approach. It's become a little unfashionable to talk about love outside of a romantic context, just as we should be talking about it virtue and honor. But ego is about fear. At the risk of veering back into psychobabble territory, the only thing that can overcome fear is love.
