Is Ego Bad?

People often accused me of having a big ego and compared me to people in history with big egos who’ve done wrong things. My response is that there are many things worse than having a big ego. One can be brutal. One can be deceptive. One can be hateful. One can be cruel. One can be part of a wrong cause such as Nazism or Islam. Big egos don’t own wrongdoing.

Now there are many ideologies that see ego as universally bad. I take a different line. Anything human can be good and anything human can be bad. Ego can go either as wrong as Hitler or as right as Thomas Edison or Bill Gates. As for altruism, it too can be both good and bad. We see in altruism everything from Mother Theresa to Joseph Stalin.

I do not see anything human as correctly constituting either good or bad. I say that anything human can be either. My present project is translating poetry by Russian poet Igor Severyanin. He invented a literary style called ego-futurism, in which he extolled the ego and said that ego was going to be important in the future, which of course it has been. Despite his egotism he was in no way unwise, and he has produced some scintillating poetry (https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambat/severyanin-complete).

What really is worse, self-centeredness or Nazi-centeredness? That something originates in the self does not mean that it is bad. There are plenty of situations in which people’s egos get subsumed under the ego of the collective, and frequently the results of that are disastrous. Does it matter, really, if something starts with one’s own self or someone else’s self? Why should one be seen as good or the other as bad?

It is of course possible for wrong to originate both in one’s self and something else. From the position of the person impacted by the action, it doesn’t matter if the source of the action is one’s own self or something else. It is generally seen as noble for people to be altruistic and bad to be selfish. Once again, both can either go good or go bad. The same, once again, is the case both for higher self and ego.

I consider it meritorious to make the most of all that we have. Ego is an important motivator, and to denigrate it is wrong. Where people with this attitude are right about is that ego is not always right and that there are other things beside ego that are valuable. They are right to have that attitude. If you are caught up in the ego, look up. The sky is much broader than the ground under your feet and much stands to be gained from looking at it.

Do I have a big ego? I have less of an ego now than I did when I was younger. That does not however mean that I’m anti-ego. As I said, anything human can go right or wrong. Thomas Edison, Igor Severyanin and Bill Gates have done great things and achieved wisdom in spite – or maybe partly because – of their egotism.

Is ego bad? I suppose too much of anything can be bad. That does not mean however that it is bad in itself. Ego can be both good and bad. So can anything else. Make the best of all one’s influences whatever their source and maximize benefit from them.