Groucho Marxism

Some years ago I was on a work trip to Paris and found myself with some time to kill at St. Pancras station whilst waiting to board the Eurostar. I had no reading material with me, so I decided to buy a book to read to pass the time. Without paying too much attention I selected a book called Ego Is the Enemy by an author I’d never heard of named Ryan Holiday. And I’m glad I did because whereas I can remember almost nothing about the meeting in Paris, it is no exaggeration to say that reading this book changed my life. In fact I consider it to be a watershed moment. Before reading this Ego Is the Enemy I, like many people, was a slave to my ego. Since reading it, although I can’t say that I have conquered my ego entirely, I have become much more aware of my ego and the pernicious effect it was having.

Ego Is the Enemy puts forth the argument that our biggest problems are not caused by external factors such as other people or circumstances. Instead, argues Holiday, our problems stem from our own attitude, selfishness, and self-absorption. Holiday makes the case that introducing ego into a situation prevents us from being rational, objective, and clear headed. But what exactly does he mean by ‘ego’? The word ego comes Latin and literally just means ‘I’. Both the English and Latin words can be traced back to the same Indo-European root. The word was famously imbued with a clinical sense by Freud, but Holiday’s argument refers to ego in a colloquial sense, which we may loosely define as ‘a propensity to see the world only from one’s own perspective’.

Given this definition, it might seem strange or even nonsensical to argue that ego is the enemy – after all, surely we can only ever see the world from our own perspective! Perhaps an example from my own life will help illustrate what Holiday means by ‘ego’, how it can be tamed, and the benefits that can result from taming it. Before reading Ego Is the Enemy I used to regularly become anxious in work meetings, to the point where it seemed like a kind of pathology. After reading the book, I started to realize that my anxiety was not being caused by the situation itself (the work meeting), but by my own ego. My ego was telling me that I should be able to make many clever and insightful comments, and if I wasn’t able to do that, I would start to become anxious.

After waking up to this, I started to approach work meetings differently. Instead of worrying about my contribution, I began to pay much more attention to what was going on around me. The effect was revelatory: not only did I have a much better understanding of what the meeting was actually about, but through observing others I soon discovered that most people in these meetings were just as anxious as I was! My ego was creating a cognitive bias known as the ‘spotlight effect’, whereby I believed others were paying more attention to me than they actually were. The truth, I realized, is that everyone else is fighting a personal battle with their own ego. This revelation led to me becoming much more empathetic towards my work colleagues, and to others in general.

Increased empathy is one of the key benefits of taming your ego (I say ‘taming’ rather than ‘losing’ as it is very difficult to get rid of your ego entirely). Another is coming to the understanding that human beings aren’t atomic decision-making agents acting out of self-interest, as right-wing ideologues would have us believe. Rather, we are all part of an interconnected whole. One of the central tenets of socialism is a focus on the collective over the individual, and a repudiation of the ‘great man fallacy’ – the idea that human affairs are driven by individual rather than collective action. There is a clear connection with the Buddhist concept of ego death: the process of ego liberation through a deeper understanding of the interconnected nature of existence.

The flip-side is that if you don’t tame your ego then you can never experience these benefits. In fact, it’s worse than that: failure to get control of your ego means you run the risk of becoming completely consumed by it. Nowhere is this more apparent than with middle-aged celebrities. How many times have we seen a prominent celebrity blight their career by saying or doing something daft, then digging in and refusing to apologize for it because their over-inflated ego won’t allow them admit that they were in the wrong? Perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon is Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer and creator of multiple sitcoms including Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd. It was the last of these which was the cause of Linehan’s downfall.

In 2013, an episode Linehan had written for The IT Crowd was publicly re-examined and widely criticized – rightly, in my view – as transphobic.  The episode features a man who, on learning that his girlfriend is transgender, proceeds to viciously beat her up. (Yes, that’s the ‘joke’.) But instead of accepting that he had crossed a line and apologizing, Linehan’s ego kicked in and he became a rabid transphobe. As a result of his transphobic behaviour he has been banned from Twitter multiple times, suffered the break-up of his marriage and estrangement from his family and friends, lost out on work, and had legal and financial problems as well as visits from the police. All because his ego wouldn’t allow him to admit that he was wrong and say sorry.

The tragic case of Graham Linehan should serve as a warning to all of us of the perils of not getting control of your ego. And Linehan is far from alone. There are dozens of examples of celebrities with careers that have followed a similar downward trajectory because they have allowed their ego to get the better of them (although to be fair, few have destroyed their lives to the same extent that Linehan has). If only they had read Ego Is the Enemy, they might have saved themselves and everyone else a lot of unnecessary misery.