Print Our Ego, and Egocentric Lives
Written by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, 2011
The great questions about ego and our egocentric lives are:
- ‘What is the ego?’
- ‘Why are we humans so egocentric that our competitive selfishness and aggression has all but destroyed the world?’
- ‘Can our ego ever be satisfied at some fundamental level so that we humans no longer have to be egocentric and preoccupied trying to prove ourselves all the time—or feel the need to live another life through an alternative or alter ego?’
The truth is, all these questions relate to an even deeper question:
- ‘Will we humans ever find the reconciling, redeeming and thus rehabilitating understanding of our seemingly-imperfect, competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentric HUMAN CONDITION?’
The astonishing answer to that question of questions is:
- ‘Yes, biology is now at last able to provide the dreamed-of, reconciling, exonerating, egocentricity-subsiding and thus egocentrism-ending, HUMAN-RACE-TRANSFORMING biological explanation of the human condition!’
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’, so the question of ‘what is the ego?’ is really the question of ‘what is the conscious thinking self?’—in fact, ‘what is consciousness?’
Very briefly, nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals, but, once developed, their ability to store impressions—which is what we refer to as ‘memory’—gave rise to the potential to develop understanding of cause and effect. If you can remember past events, you can compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust your behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed, and such refinement occurred in the human brain, nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become CONSCIOUS of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness, which again is our conscious thinking self or ego, means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding.
What is so significant about this process is that once our nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for us to become conscious and able to effectively manage events, our conscious thinking self or ego was then in a position to wrest control from our gene-based learning system’s instincts, which, up until then, had been controlling our lives. Basically, once our self-adjusting, conscious thinking self or ego emerged it was capable of taking over the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations we had acquired through the natural selection of genetic traits that adapted us to our environment.
HOWEVER, it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a terrible battle broke out between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which we have historically referred to as the HUMAN CONDITION—humans’ less-than-ideal, seemingly-imperfect, ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted, even corrupted or ‘fallen’ competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentric behaviour.
How this angry, egocentric and alienated human condition emerged has been the great outstanding question in biology, and the question that had to be solved if the human race was to survive—as the renowned biologist E.O. Wilson recognised, ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298).
Unable—until now—to explain our competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentric HUMAN CONDITION we justified it with all manner of false excuses, but most wonderfully biology is now able to provide the real explanation of the human condition—a redeeming, relieving and thus healing explanation that brings about the complete TRANSFORMATION of the human race, ending our angry, ego-embattled, repressed, escapist, alter ego-needing, alienated condition forever!
The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that only finding understanding of our dark, competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentrism could end our underlying insecurity about our fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in so doing, make us ‘whole’.
Certainly, we have invented excuses to justify our species’ seemingly-imperfect, egocentric competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour, the main one being that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Of course, this ‘explanation’ put forward by Social Darwinists, Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists that basically argues that ‘genes are competitive and selfish and that’s why we are’ can’t be the real explanation for our divisive competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentric behaviour. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind or ego. Descriptions like egocentric, arrogant, deluded, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, alienated, etc, all imply a consciousness-derived, psychological dimension to our behaviour. The real issue—the psychological problem in our thinking minds that we have suffered from—is the dilemma of our human condition, the issue of our species’ ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted, less-than-ideal, ego-embattled/ egocentric state. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-derived, stimulus-and-response-driven animal condition—our condition is unique to us fully conscious humans. Secondly, the savage-instincts-in-us excuse overlooks the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, loving moral instincts—what we recognise as our ‘conscience’—and these moral instincts in us are not derived from reciprocity, from situations where you only do something for others in return for a benefit from them, as Evolutionary Psychologists would have us believe. No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral conscience. Our original instinctive state was the opposite of being competitive, selfish and aggressive: it was cooperative, selfless and loving. (How we humans acquired unconditionally selfless moral instincts when it would seem that an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic trait is going to self-eliminate and thus not ever be able to become established in a species is briefly explained in the What is Science? article in The Book of Real Answers to Everything! that this article also appears in (link provided at the end of this article), and more fully explained in Part 8:4 of the freely-available, online book Freedom (link also provided at the end of this article)—however, the point here is that the savage-instincts-in-us excuse is completely inconsistent with the fact that we have moral, NOT savage, instincts. Charles Darwin recognised the difference in our moral nature when he said that ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, p.495).)
So, what is this truthful, human-condition-addressing rather than human-condition-ignoring, biological explanation of our species’ present seemingly-imperfect, competitive, selfish and aggressive egocentric behaviour? To answer this question, we need to look more closely at what happened when the self-adjusting conscious thinking self or ego emerged in the presence of already established instinctive behavioural orientations.