The biggest ego fantasy is that you can solve the problems in your life while staying largely the same, by simply adding more stuff to your life: more techniques, more knowledge, more muscles, more money, etc. What ego recoils against is deep change, because ultimately that is a form of death. Unsurprisingly, because the system is built by the largely unconscious ego, this same dynamic appears in our collectives: the belief that we can solve the deep structural problems of society through adding complexity: bureaucracy, technology, regulation, etc.
The idea that fundamentally speaking, ego—respectively the system—cannot solve its own problems with more ego—resp. system—can never be accepted by an egoic person—an egoic system. Not very surprising when stated this way, but what this means is that people's ideas of what needs to be done tend to gravitate towards ways of buying time such that they can add more stuff—techniques, complexity, ideas, manpower, institutions, etc.—instead of addressing fundamental issues, because to do so would mean to stare right in the face of the fundamental limited nature of ego and the systems it builds. Everyone dies, but not within society apparently.
Thus, the biggest ego fantasy is that it can get what it wants, and those wants are unlimited as the fundamental problem of economics accurately perceives, 8 but doesn't have to change itself in doing so. Or if it needs to change, then it can simply tweak existing things, or add a bit of complexity here and there, learn one or two techniques, and all is good. The idea that there are limits, including death, or that change is painful and requires compromises, that is not acceptable for the ego.
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2024-08-05