Stay informed with free updates
Simply register at Social issues myFT Digest – Delivered straight to your inbox.
“In the moral life,” wrote the late Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “the enemy is the fat, implacable ego.”
The words “the moral” and the phrase – could be taken from Murdoch’s philosophical work. The sovereignty of good (1970) — It would work just as well. It is not only in our inner moral life that the ego can be so destructive, but also in civic and political life. And when an ego is bruised, it can be particularly dangerous.
I’ve thought about this a lot since I heard a segment of an excellent interview with the late foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie on the BBC program talk tough program. She was talking about what “makes powerful people bad.” (The full episode, originally recorded in 2008 and released again following Leslie’s death in 2023, is worth 23 minutes of your time.)
“We never fully 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) had been humiliated by the feeling that it was It is no longer the great global “intellectual and military power.” He also cited Adolf Hitler, humiliated by having been twice rejected from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts because his paintings were “unsatisfactory.”
“I know it sounds like terribly cheap psychological talk, but if you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “They always have an element of humiliation that [leads them to feel]: ‘I’ll get them.’”
Personally, I don’t mind the old psychological talk one bit, and furthermore, I don’t find what Leslie meant there to be “cheap” at all, but rather profound. Humiliation, something like its more frivolous sister emotion, shame – is the unpleasant feeling that arises from the feeling that your social status or self-image has been damaged. But unlike shaming, some type of perpetrator is usually involved, which often leads the person who has been humiliated to seek some form of revenge (even if it is not directed directly at the perpetrator).
I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster; in fact, for the most part I think it is unwise to do so. categorize people as heroes or villains – but I do notice that, in a slightly circular way, the once “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to sink further into extreme right territory the more it is attacked (and the more that leads people to leave your social media platform). He may be the richest man in the world, he may be the best friend of the next president of the United States, but I have a clear feeling that Musk is a man with a problem: a fragile ego.
He is not the only one. Many of us, particularly in this Internet era “curated” – spending too much time worrying about ourselves and how others see us, and too little time wondering how those other people feel. The funny thing, though, is that if we could abandon our fat, relentless egos and focus on what’s going on in the world around us, we’d end up feeling a lot better.
For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this abandonment of ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (an idea that the emerging field of “neuroaesthetics”would surely corroborate it). She wrote about looking out the window “in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings” and then seeing a kestrel, which completely altered her way of thinking.
“The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not just the easiest spiritual exercise to find,” Murdoch wrote. “It is also a completely appropriate entrance (and not just an analogy) to the good life, since it is the control of selfishness for the sake of seeing the real.”
“Seeing the real” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about living a good life in these rather worrying times, but Murdoch is really describing here something we often refer to these days as “consciousness”: be present in the moment. And, in fact, it is this – the process of “selflessness,” as Murdoch described it – that can lead us away from our ego-driven fears and toward something completely different and wonderful: love. “It is in the capacity to love, that is, to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists,” Murdoch wrote.
Musk’s isn’t the only fat, relentless ego that will loom large over the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we should do the same. It has become a little old-fashioned to talk about love outside of the romantic context, as has talking about virtue and honor. But ego has to do with fear. And, at the risk of straying back into psychobabble territory, the only thing that can overcome fear is love.