That, my friends, is your biggest mistake. Ego is not your enemy. It's just a thing that exists. Good or bad depends on how we handle it. It's like fire- use it carefully and it becomes the very reason why we advanced from the stone age. Be careless with it, and it burns everything you ever loved. Ego is like friction- it is a necessary evil. It protects us time and again, but we only notice it when it starts hurting us. Whose fault is it, then? The answer, my friends, is that the fault is ours.
Ego is a part of our mental and interpersonal environment. It is a device that ensures the overall success of our entire social existence. It's like an organ of the machinery. That's why we never notice it, not until something goes wrong.
There are many who consider ego to be a swollen pride mixed with overconfidence and arrogance. But ego is just a harder term for self-respect. Ego is the amount of respect you have for yourself as compared to others. There is nothing evil or wrong about the existence of ego. We make it wrong when we confuse it with pride and arrogance and mix these chemicals which were meant to remain in separate flasks. Result, kaboom! Our world goes up in flames and we blame poor old ego (generally it's others who do the blaming while we are caught up in our vanity).
Mostly, we never mention the word ego until we want to attribute a negative point on someone. Self-confidence is the term that we assume fit for all humble beings. When it swells up to monstrous magnitudes, it becomes ego. That's why I referred to ego as a fallen angel in the title. Angels were supposed to be wise and brave and benevolent. They were meant to fight evil and spread peace in the world. So, when one of them switched sides and turned evil himself, the very idea of angels became hazy. Why would people believe in them as heroes and follow them? That's why the turned angel was stripped of his title and rechristened Satan, the devil.
That's how we dealt with pride and self-confidence. We couldn't justify these qualities as good if they existed in bad people as well, so we fashioned a new term for their darker counterpart. Ego.
And that's the mistake we make. By assuming that ego is any different from the good qualities that we possess, by naming humility and arrogance as opposite tendencies, we block our own route of improvement. Satan couldn't flip his switch again, but we can. Only if we know that ego is not an enemy. Our way of interpreting it is.
We are a society of people who give up on people before they can get in a position to hurt us. Giving up is our prime talent. And I can't say that it's a very steep measure to give up on a person with a swollen pride. 'Arrogant' and 'asshole' are synonyms in our society.
The problem is, we didn't bring the present scenario. We just landed right in the middle of it. And although we claim of being modern and smart and different, we do the same mistakes and pay the same price. Love, friendship, affection, people, we give up on all of them one by one because we get hurt and humiliated trying to preserve them in our lives. And a person's arrogance is an outstanding excuse to abandon him/her.
I wouldn't say that you should try and give people a chance. Social-work is not our agenda. I'd just ask you a simple question. What if the arrogant person under observation turns out to be you? It's not impossible, you know. You could be the most humble person on the planet and yet there will be times when your pride becomes overconfidence and overconfidence becomes ego.
What would you do? Would you just say- "I don't give a shit to the world"? Probably you would. But that's a mask that everyone wears these days. We are humans. We try to show ourselves as strong and independent, but we all need people at our side in the end. So, if your entire neighborhood boycotts you one fine day, would you not expect your best friend or your mother to understand your problems? We can't see the truth of a situation until it happens to us.
And that abandonment is the first stage of a person's downfall, in the moral sense. Going back to the analogy, there was an angel who once turned evil and was cast away. No doubt he deserved it. But what next? Satan was abandoned, by God, by the very entity who is at everybody's side no matter how good or evil they become. He had no friends or allies. So he moved on. He found company in similar people, abandoned souls, and became their leader.
That's what we do to an egoist when we leave him/her alone. We abandon them, so they find people of their own kind and mix until they reach a point of no return. I don't have any ideas about how God should have dealt with Satan, I don't even know his story properly. But I do know that our society makes a mistake when it tries to keep criminals in the company of criminals and cripples in the company of cripples. We, the so called normal people are normal only because we get to meet and know people not like us. Don't they show in the movies that an evil man is forced into the company of a wonderful woman and changes for the better?
My point is, Satan deserved punishment, still does. But if he had gotten a chance to stay with the other angels, he wouldn't have fallen so far. Only, I can't extend that theory to cover every murderer and sociopath in our society. I don't because I have no idea how to practically implement this theory. But when we talk about a person who we leave alone for his/her ego, we can give them a better option. We can give them a better chance. As a person, we must learn to live with the ego within us and in others as well.
Don't fight ego, embrace it. No matter how hard you try, you can't get rid of it. So it's better to turn it into an ally, understand it, and guide it properly. If you want to be good, you'll have to turn your ego to your side. You'll have to realize that you can't live properly if you let your ego grow either too weak or too strong. Be like a diamond- everybody may wonder and gasp at your vibrancy and your dazzling charm. But if somebody tries to defeat you and to gobble you up, you're the hardest substance known to man. Everybody knows that the beautiful diamond will rip them inside out if swallowed.
That's how I see ego. A fallen angel who can be turned again. Whether you succeed or not is up to you, but ego will stay either way. But your perspective about ego might be different, maybe better too. I will be waiting for different ideas. Until next time!
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