answers.com/topic/ego
In my first post I will just define what the word “ego” means to me.
You may add your opinions on the ego aswel.
I think that we are born without an ego. We develop it based on memories.
However we remember a large amount of memories and experiences, this builds our world view
and our world view is an expression of our personality, of which is a part of the supposed “self”.
I’d say there is a difference between being egotistical, and having an identity.
When someone is egotistical, their mind is surrounded by a haze of desire and opinion.
When someone has a modest identity, they can see through themselves into the outer world
and relate with it to some degree.
I don’t feel ego is a big problem for myself, but I do however believe that the human mind
exists in a constant state in which it is at the edges of madness. Madness is just around the corner,
and I’ve got to try hard to be as reasonable and as nice as possible, within reasonable degrees.
What is your own understanding of ego and its good or bad points?
I’m willing to go off topic about this subject, because I think it’s still relative.
Sane madness is when someone thoroughly uses sophism. It can become convincing and complex.
Complexity doesn’t equate to sanity, but complexity can be used to make an ideology appear full and complete
or even truthful. The nazi movement was, i think, an example of a form of madness being highly influential
and convincing the “sane” people. I think religions that did human sacrifices were also crazy, but, they
had their sophism and their “reasons”.
Sanity is an idealism. It’s something we can imagine, and it can look appealing.
Idealisms are very personal and different from one person to the next.
For me, sanity would be truthfulness and healthy behavior.
I think it can be a sane thing to dismantle the delusions that reinforce the idea that we are essentially alienated from each other and from our environment. To do this requires a healthy sense of self - a person who is not simply blown about by the movements of his or her own mind, or by external forces.
“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.” ~Artaud
“Insanity is a sane response to an insane situation.” ~Ronald David Laing
“I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~Edgar Allan Poe
“If we are all insane, then all insanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (except neither of those two amateur-night surgeons were ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go about your business…although it’s doubtful that you will ever be invited to the best parties.” ~Stephen King
“Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.” ~Ronald David Laing
That is one of the saddest things I’ve read in a while…
It also doesn’t make sense, “forces” are not concerned with anything, they don’t have consciousness from what I can tell. To state that parents are mainly concerned with destroying most of their children’s potentialities is also incorrect, parents are not perfect and often do not know what is the best way to handle a myriad of issues in nurturing their children to grow up, so they do what they think is best for them as a whole. Whether that is destructive on a whole or supportive will ultimately boil down to a case by case basis… but this is a large generalization offered by Ronald David Laing with only some sort of innuendo to intentional terrible parenting, which I’m sure if he was questioned would not fess up and refer to some ignorant parenting issues which of course occurs on a regular basis. After all, not all parents are profound thinkers or philosophers, we already know the general population is filled with what can be viewed as morons, if you’re in the upper class of intellect. Wouldn’t an intelligent child see through some lies and illogicality of their parents nonetheless? In time, surely they would.
Exactly! Ego as something constructed from usage of people and things with no regard for their intrinsic value is ultimately what divides us. The Eastern (and other religious and philosophical) concepts of ego are that it is a mask worn for social approval, that it consists of obsessions with appetites , that it is the source of our sorrow. Distinction between a Self as the point of view from which we act and react and ego as a necessary disquise for gaining social acceptance begs questions about why we have to present false fronts in order to belong and survive.
I don’t think RD Liang’s intention is to anthropomorphize these forces, but rather to identify them in their fullness and severity. Through objectifying these ideas in this way, personifying them if you will, one is able to better grasp them as a whole, to understand what causes them and the relationship between them and those which are affected by them… in many ways, collective forces can appear to act as if of intention, even though of course we do not literally mean they are “intending” anything, in the human sense of the word.
If the effect is the same, what really is the difference between bad parenting bred from ignorance and bad parenting bred from malice? In some ways, the first is more insidious, because the child suspects it not as easily, its harmful influence is more difficult to detect, sinks in deeper and more easily and is thus harder to later identify and overcome… what Laing would call “violence in the form of love.”
Yes. Buddhist philosophers are very careful to define “ego” or “self”, and to point out what it doesn’t mean (i.e. where “selfhood” is refuted), as well as what it means.
I’m sure this is more sensible but in turn I would call this linguistical deception. Hmm, somewhat ironic indeed, considering how parents may deceive their children
I find his Laing’s except to be “sad” as well, but when we get down to the gist of it, we see it may not be so sad but an inevitability of the human condition with no malicious intent depicted in any matter, regardless whether it was intended or not
Ego, as a word, seems misleading… would we not do better to rather differentiate types of self-identification, such as thinking,feeling, and “pure” subjective-experiencing (prior to the imprinting of form upon conscious experience)…? Social falseness forces one to adjust one’s thoughts and feelings to the “ego”, which creates social identity, and thought obcesses with this image and loses itself therein… the feelings remain somewhat distinct, even though they are in part of course incorporated within this image as well. And the stage of losing this “ego”-attachment would be descending to the level prior to the imprinting of form upon raw consciousness, to the level of subjective experience itself, the singular point of awareness. This wouldn’t so much change the nature of the self-identity as it would remove the self from false and contrived identities, and bring it back into a genuine identity with itself, its authentic inner world…
In my opinion, parenting itself is the chief problem that man faces, the chief harm of our current age. So in this sense you are right, it doesn’t really matter if it is intended or not. Generation upon generation of potentially gifted, enlightening, joyful intelligent individuals are mutilated, crushed and reprogrammed into unthinking anxiety-filled automaton-consumers, one a daily basis and by the millions… parenting, the role and power of the parents over the young child, is the most important responsibility that exists between one individual and another, yet it is a responsibility with almost no oversight or “guidance”, from anywhere… rather, most people seem to think that parents have a fundamental “right” to raise their kids how they want. This is the height of ignorance and absurdity.
I like Laing’s thoughts on this matter because he exposes the extreme harm at the heart of parenting, generally speaking - what it means to be a parent, to be a child of a parent. This relationship is so extremely fragile, sacred and important and yet we treat it, as a society, with an almost equally extreme level of indifference…
Generation upon generation of sociopathic, egocentric bullies are being nurtured and guided to be loving, creative, happy people by loving parents.
If they don’t, presumably it’s the state’s role to look after the children’s welfare?
You don’t have kids, do you? Wild guess.
Laing himself doesn’t inspire confidence as a role model of parenting, from what I’ve read, and his therapies seem to have done more harm than good. Which isn’t to say he’s flat out wrong, I’ve not read any of his stuff… but it does suggest a certain mismatch with reality.
I am quite sure there have been humans suffering from the failure of parenting ever since there have been humans.
Sociopathic bullies is not the norm. These pathologies are for the most part learned, they are damages done upon the psyche through some sort of harmful experience(s).
Yes.
Of course I see where you are getting at here. You are quite the Humean I remember, always steering the conversation away from extremes, towards the middle ground
That is great, and appreciated, but let us not in so doing lose sight of the truths within the perspective I am presenting here: parenting is perhaps the single most important thing one human can do for another. Children are vulnerable in the extreme, who and what they will become is a direct function of their experiences as children, that is to say, of their parents. Now, does it make sense that a human life, born into this world, ought to be subject to two humans who may or may not have any idea what they are doing, merely because the child happens to share the DNA of these two adults? It is absurd when you look at it objectively. I sincerely believe that some day parenting will be seen only as one more form of slavery.
Now, does this mean the state ought govern everything? I am not advocating a Brave New World here. But the question does present itself, that any two random people regardless of intelligence, intention, desire, motive or capacity can and do become responsible for the creation of a new human life. This problem is so glaring, the more so because we in modern society are conditioned to assume this situation is “normal”.
Would you trust a random person off the street to fix your car? To manage your finances? To operate and perform surgery on you? No? Then why would you trust that same random person on the street with a human life that is completely vulnerable and dependent?
I find it curious that you assume if I do not have kids then I am unqualified to have a justified opinions on parenting. I do not have kids; I feel this makes me objective enough to view the situation without undo bias or prejudice.
I understand parenting is very hard - that is my point. I am not judging ignorant or inadequate parents, whatever their intentions - they should never be thrust into that situation to begin with. I certainly wouldn’t fault you if you were suddenly responsible for landing a 747 airplane I was in, with no training at all… we would crash and it would not be your fault. Fault is not the issue here. Parenting should never be left up to just anyone, it is the greatest conceivable responsibility and incredibly difficult. This is why it is absurd that you, me, anyone anywhere can undertake this responsibility over another life, without any stipulation or training or requirements or oversight other than the vaguest laws which will apply only in extreme and noticeable cases, thus missing the vast majority of silent and subtle psychological harms caused to children every day.
Every facet of life that requires skill, that engenders responsibility over others has a process of training, selection, merit - how is parenting different? Only because we are still operating on implied and unquestioned assumptions from the past, assumptions (of a religious nature) which state that children are the property of their parents. But why? Because they happen to share the same DNA? How in any way is this a chain upon a human life??
