Value for Friday of Week 04 in the season of Dormancy

Ego – Selfishness

Justice at its most basic level involves caring about more than the self. Ego is the core and root of injustice.

. . . evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole . . . [Reinhold Niebuhr.]
I fed my ego, but not my soul. [attributed to Yakov Smirnoff]
The foundation for the Buddha’s teachings lies in compassion, and the reason to practice the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compassion. [attributed to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.]

Evil is present when we fail to account for the whole. Happiness should not come at someone else’s expense. This is another way of looking at the Golden Rule and worth-based justice.

One view of evil “has grouped together three antisocial personalities known as the ‘Dark Triad’: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy.” Each of these has unchecked ego at its core. Machiavellianism “is a personality trait which is defined as using manipulation against other people’s interests to achieve one’s own personal goals”. Narcissism “is a relatively stable individual difference consisting of grandiosity, self-love and inflated self-views”. Psychopathy “is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior”. Other concepts of the core of evil include greed (“. . . excessive, wasteful, resulting in accumulation beyond what is needed, and often harmful to other people . . .”); and fear, which shuts out compassion and other forms of concern for others.

Real

True Narratives

Arbitrary power is to the mind what alcohol is to the body; it intoxicates. Man loves power. It is perhaps the strongest human passion; and the more absolute the power, the stronger the desire for it; and the more it is desired, the more its exercise is enjoyed: this enjoyment is to human nature a fearful temptation,--generally an overmatch for it. Hence it is true, with hardly an exception, that arbitrary power is abused in proportion as it is desired. The fact that a person intensely desires power over others, without restraint, shows the absolute necessity of restraint. What woman would marry a man who made it a condition that he should have the power to divorce her whenever he pleased? Oh! he might never wish to exercise it, but the power he would have! No woman, not stark mad, would trust her happiness in such hands. [Theodore D. Weld, American Slavery As It Is (1839).]

I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others . . . People like me want to satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course, there are people and objects in the world but they are all there only for me. [Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), quoted in Jung Chang, Mao: The Unknown Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), chapter 2.]

Various books about the ego:

James Lincoln Collier, The Rise of Selfishnessin America, (Oxford University Press, 1991).
Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2004).
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 (Penguin, 2006).
Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random House, 2011): eventually, Britain took the Union’s side but principle may have had nothing to do with it.
Richard Kluger, The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011): describing “the active and often ugly process of taking a continent.”
Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us (The Overlook Press, 2018): “Locating the Western penchant for self-absorption in 2,000 years of history.”
Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: A Recent History (MCD, 2019), on how greed and myopia are at the core of inaction on climate change: “It is an account of what went wrong — of how it was that a moment of growing awareness of climate change, and an apparent willingness to act on the knowledge, was allowed to dissipate into stasis and inaction.”
David Enrich, Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Tale of Destruction (Custom House, 2020): “. . . unchecked ambition twisted a pillar of German finance into a reckless casino and fostered a culture in which amorality and, ultimately, criminality thrived.”
Ben Hubbard, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman (Tim Duggan, 2020): “M.B.S. saw no need for checks on his power and crushed all threats to it. … He would stop at nothing to make Saudi Arabia great again, on his terms.”

History is littered with the evil of conquest.

Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (Viking, 2016): “A New 19th-Century History Focuses on American Imperialism”.

The Vietnam war happened because no one in power, in the United States, would admit that the war was a mistake.

Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (Knopf, 2017): “ . . . Burns and Novick, in their introduction, proclaim their intention to do what few have done: recount the war from not just the American viewpoint but from that of the North and South Vietnamese too.”
Max Hastings, Vietnam: A Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (Harper, 2018): “‘If America’s war leadership often flaunted its inhumanity, that of North Vietnam matched it cruelty for cruelty,’ Hastings contends.”

Remarkably egocentric people:

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

If one places one's self at the culminating point of view of the question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against Paris; it is the _statu quo_ against the initiative; it is the 14th of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in eruption for twenty-six years--such was the dream. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume II – Cosette; Book First – Waterloo, Chapter XVII, “Is Waterloo To Be Considered Good?”]

In Tom’s hurried exchange, he had not forgotten to transfer his cherished Bible to his pocket. It was well he did so; for Mr. Legree, having refitted Tom’s handcuffs, proceeded deliberately to investigate the contents of his pockets. He drew out a silk handkerchief, and put it into his own pocket. Several little trifles, which Tom had treasured, chiefly because they had amused Eva, he looked upon with a contemptuous grunt, and tossed them over his shoulder into the river. Tom’s Methodist hymn-book, which, in his hurry, he had forgotten, he now held up and turned over. “Humph! pious, to be sure. So, what’s yer name,—you belong to the church, eh?” “Yes, Mas’r,” said Tom, firmly. “Well, I’ll soon have that out of you. I have none o’ yer bawling, praying, singing niggers on my place; so remember. Now, mind yourself,” he said, with a stamp and a fierce glance of his gray eye, directed at Tom, “I’m your church now! You understand,—you’ve got to be as I say.” Something within the silent black man answered No! and, as if repeated by an invisible voice, came the words of an old prophetic scroll, as Eva had often read them to him,—“Fear not! for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by name. Thou art MINE!” But Simon Legree heard no voice. That voice is one he never shall hear. He only glared for a moment on the downcast face of Tom, and walked off. He took Tom’s trunk, which contained a very neat and abundant wardrobe, to the forecastle, where it was soon surrounded by various hands of the boat. With much laughing, at the expense of niggers who tried to be gentlemen, the articles very readily were sold to one and another, and the empty trunk finally put up at auction. It was a good joke, they all thought, especially to see how Tom looked after his things, as they were going this way and that; and then the auction of the trunk, that was funnier than all, and occasioned abundant witticisms. This little affair being over, Simon sauntered up again to his property. [Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (1852), Volume II, Chapter 31, “The Middle Passage”.]

Once upon a time there was a wicked sprite, indeed he was the most mischievous of all sprites. One day he was in a very good humor, for he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognised; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth. “That's glorious fun!” said the sprite. If a good thought passed through a man's mind, then a grin was seen in the mirror, and the sprite laughed heartily at his clever discovery. [Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen” (1844).]

Novels, light takes: