The Role of Ego - No. 49
It is impossible to overestimate the role that ego has played in shaping human history and the world. Think of all the wars and conflicts, from tribal feuds to world wars, so many of them have been sparked and fueled by human ego. Think of the economic challenges in nations around the world throughout history that have been caused and prolonged by ego. Consider all the businesses that have used and abused people in order to serve the ego of their leaders.
I think the simplest way to think of ego is that it is, “our broken sense of self.” We want to feel like we are extra special, unique, and better than other people. So we compare ourselves, craft narratives about our identity, and live into them. All of humanity’s issues seem to be perpetrated by this simple problem. We don’t know who we are, so out of our insecurity, we try to convince ourselves and others that we are something we aren’t. If my story is that I am better than other people at something, then I will always feel that I have to prove myself. It is in this proving, this jostling for position, that the world's biggest problems have grown. All of it is the simple result of each person protecting themselves and their egoic narratives at the cost of others.
In the modern world, our understanding of who we are and the purpose of our lives has gone off the rails. Our broken understanding of individuality leads us to be self-obsessed and overestimate our own importance in the world. We accidentally put ourselves and our desires at the center of everything in our own heads. Because of this we fail to see that we are part of a much bigger body in which we play a small part. I don’t think most business owners set out to exploit people, and most politicians probably have good intentions. The challenge is that self-obsession over time leads people to focus more on what they want and need than on what others or the larger body needs. They see their lives as a means to getting what they need and fail to see the larger story in which they are a small part. That is the only way that you can have people with more than enough for many lifetimes living just blocks away from those without enough for today.
We dress up our self-obsession in fancy rhetoric and complex economic and social theories. All of which allows us to ignore those around us and who we are responsible for caring for, and instead worry about and obsess over what we feel that we need at any given moment. I am not casting judgment; I do the same thing. I am on a journey to relearn in my heart and mind who I really am and what role I am made to play. That process takes time because we have deeply entrenched ego structures and patterns of thinking that are very hard to overcome.
We tend to see the world’s problems as something outside of us. We are basically good; we aren’t part of the problem, but we see the problem all around us. When we look at ourselves through the lens of the teachings of Jesus, we start to see that these problems in the world may not just be other people’s problems; perhaps they are in me as well.
In the 4th century, after the Edict of Milan in 313, Constantine officially blessed and began to fund the Christian church. Prior to that, Christianity had grown through persecution, and now these radical followers of “the way” of Jesus were no longer persecuted by the Roman Empire. Some radical men had been retreating to the desert starting in the 3rd century to pursue a monastic life as a form of radical discipleship. After Constantine’s alliance with the church, thousands of people began to retreat to the desert. They felt that for themselves and as a message to the wider Christian community, they needed to take radical measures. So they retreated to the desert, where they lived as hermits. Their entire lives became a message that contradicted the direction the church was headed. These men who retreated to the desert became known as the desert fathers. Through their lives and writing, incredible wisdom has been preserved.
Henri Nouwen’s book The Way of the Heart is about the wisdom and spirituality of the desert fathers. Speaking of the desert fathers' practice of solitude, he says that, “in solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us, that the roots of all conflict, war, injustice, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, and envy are deeply anchored in our own heart.” The desert fathers saw these roots in themselves, and their lives were built around the transformation work of Christ in them.
One desert father, Saint Antony of Egypt, shut himself away in an abandoned fort in the desert for 20 years. When he came out, he was said to have been spiritually transformed. He began healing the sick, casting out demons, and bringing reconciliation to conflict. He went to the desert and pursued holiness, and then emerged as a spiritual father and healer filled with power. Then, after a period of ministry, he retreated again to even deeper solitude for most of the remainder of his life.
The desert fathers recognized that the roots of the world's evil and injustice lived in them and that through the pursuit of transformation, they could be healed from this brokenness. Their radical path stands in stark contrast to a Christian world today that seems to focus more on the problems around them than the transformation needed in them. This failure to see our own brokenness is likely what has cost us the power we as Christ followers are called to walk in. Our failure to see our own brokenness and need for transformation is not a failure of the Gospel; it is a failure of the human heart to understand the way of Jesus. He didn’t call us to fix all the world's problems in his name. He invited us to come and follow Him, to be born again. It is through this rebirth that we become the solution to the world's problems, not as a reaction to them but as a manifestation of the restoration work of God.
Our egos keep us from seeing ourselves and what Jesus was inviting us into clearly. All the wars of greed, corruption, persecution, and injustice in the world are not a problem outside of us, they are first a brokenness inside of us. We can’t fix those evils by fighting them, they must be displaced. The only thing that displaces systems built by self-obsession and greed is people who walk in the way of Jesus. The only way to heal generational pain and trauma from systemic exploitation is to have leaders who are no longer carrying and perpetuating that same brokenness inside themselves. In order to do that, we must first recognize where the problem truly is. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner in the Gulags and later wrote, “The Gulag Archipelago.” He witnessed firsthand the incredible evil that man is capable of and famously said, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” His time in hell on earth did not lead him to believe that some people are just good and others are bad, but instead, he, like the desert fathers, recognized there is a root of evil inside of every human heart.
The role that ego has played in shaping the world is truly unimaginable. I believe that we are almost always fighting the wrong battle. We think the world's problems are poorly constructed systems, but they aren’t. That is a scientific way of thinking about the world and creation. We assume that if we can just rearrange all the pieces, we can make it work. How well is that working? Clearly not well enough, we have brokenness all around us, and it only seems to be escalating. Our theory of change is totally wrong. The evils of the world have grown in the soil of human ego, and its natural self-obsession. The message of Jesus was the path to freedom from the bondage of ego and the restoration of our true identity. When we consider the compounding effects of broken egos on humanity’s story, the only response can be repentance and a radical commitment to following Jesus. We can’t save the world from its problems, but we each can be saved from the bondage of our ego. Through ego death and spiritual rebirth, we are initiated into our role as agents of restoration in God’s Kingdom. I truly believe that is the only hope the world has.
People groups, organizations, empires, and nations come and go. The generations of work that went into creating them and trying to maintain them are almost entirely forgotten. Along the way, they fight everyone else for power and control. With their eventual fall comes the unraveling of whatever good they seemed to have momentarily brought to the story of humanity. Then someone else picks up where they left off and tries again. The story of humanity has always been an attempt to get back to the garden without God. It is driven by the hope that we don’t need God. As I have said many times, we live on a rock circling a ball of fire floating in a limitless expanse called the universe, and we have the audacity to think there isn’t a God. What do we call that other than ego? The great tragedy of humanity is that we have forgotten who we are and the work of Jesus restoring us from our brokenness. When we look at the world this way, then we quickly start to unravel the ego structures and narratives our world is built on. We start to truly understand what Jesus was inviting us into when he said, “Come and follow me.” More importantly, we start to understand why we must each go on that journey.
- John Walt
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