Let’s abandon our “fat, implacable ego” in 2025

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“In the moral life,” wrote the Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “the enemy is the implacable fat ego.”

I could remove the words “the moral” here and the sentence – from Murdoch’s philosophical work. The sovereignty of good (1970) — work well too. 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 burned, it can be particularly dangerous.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I heard a segment an excellent interview with the late foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie on the BBC HARDtalk program She was talking about what “turns the powerful bad.” (The entire episode, originally recorded in 2008 and re-released after Leslie’s death in 2023, is well worth the 23 minutes of your time.)

“We never fully understood the role that humiliation plays in the creation of a monster,” Leslie told interviewer Stephen Sackur, arguing that the Arab world (where many dictators still ruled at that point) had been humiliated by the sense that it was no longer the great global “intellectual and military power”. He also mentions Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by being rejected, twice, by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna because his paintings were “unsatisfactory”.

“I know that sounds awfully cheap psychobabble, but 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 take it.’

Personally, I don’t mind the old psychobabble one bit, and besides, I don’t find what Leslie was getting at “cheap” at all, but rather profound. Humiliation – rather like its more frivolous sisterly emotion, shame – is the unpleasant feeling that comes from the feeling that your social status or self-image has been damaged. But unlike shame, some kind of perpetrator is usually involved, often leading the person who has been humiliated to seek some kind of revenge (even if it is not directed directly at the author).

I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster—in fact, for the most part, I think that’s unwise. categorize people as heroes or villains – but I noticed that, in a slightly circular fashion, the once “politically moderate” Elon Musk seems to be getting more and more muddled. far right territory the more it comes under fire (and the more it pushes people to leave his social platform). He could be the richest man in the world, he could be best friends with the next president of the United States, but I have the distinct feeling that Musk is a man with a problem: a fragile ego.

He is not alone. Many of us – especially in this one it was “curated” internet. – spend too much time worrying about ourselves and how it suits other people, and too little wondering how those others feel. The funny thing, though, is that if we could let go of our fat, relentless egos and focus on what’s going on in the world around us, we’d end up feeling a lot better about ourselves.

For Murdoch, the best way to achieve this abandonment of the ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (an idea that the emerging field of “neuroesthetics“I would certainly corroborate). She wrote of looking out of her window “in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings” and then seeing a glacier, which completely changed her mind.

“The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise,” Murdoch wrote. “It is also a completely adequate entry (and not just an analogy) of the good life, since it is the verification of egoism in the interest of seeing the real.”

“Seeing the real” may not be what first comes to mind when you think of living a good life in these rather worrying times, but Murdoch is really describing here something that often refers to these days “awareness”: being present in the moment. And it’s really this—the process of “unselfing,” as Murdoch described it—that can move us away from our ego-driven fears and toward something completely different and wonderful: love. “It is in the ability to love, that is, to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists,” wrote Murdoch.

Musk’s isn’t the only fat, unrelenting ego that’s set to be prominent in the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we need to follow them. It has become somewhat fashionable to talk about love outside of the romantic context, as it should be talked about. virtue and honor. But the ego is fear. And, at the risk of going back into psychobabble territory, the only thing that can overcome fear is love.

jemima.kelly@ft.com