A part of me wonders how much and how often a self-serving cognitive bias leads me to perceive my contributions to this world with distorted grandiosity. An inflated ego.
I maintain that the ego is, in and of itself, a neutral and necessary sensor of our separateness from other agents in the world. It informs us that we are unique individuals, and with that power of agency comes some nontrivial responsibility.
So, a part of me wonders how often cognitive distortions mislead us into underestimating our agency. We hail the virtue of humility and condemn hubris, so that we abide in a tension in which our ego seeks credit while we simultaneously reject credit to honor the virtue.
This is the tension in the acceptance speeches of Oscar winners. The speaker is being celebrated for winning a contest, and during their speech, they join the new contest, which is to thank as many people as they can before the timer goes off. The audience listens to judge them on the linear spectrum from gratefully humble to egotistically arrogant.
This impulse to credit others with our own success is not at all ethically misguided, is it? As the spotlight shines on the winner, even we lowly moviegoers feel part of the victory (“That was a great movie!”) or loss (“That movie sucked, this one was way better.”). This is an inflated ego, a little too attached to the paradigm of winning and losing, missing the larger truth playing out, often put more simply by sages and gurus and mystics:
We are all connected.
Someone gives power to Hollywood, and someone gives power to governments. To corporations, to religious institutions. Those someones are us. Yes, once a threshold of power is achieved, the power seemingly becomes larger than the someones who find themselves powerless to affect the power any longer. After that tipping point, we each hope that the institutional power will be used to benefit us someones – that the spokesperson for each of those powers will give a Thank-You speech remembering us lowly moviegoers. “Don’t forget me when you’re rich.”
This is how that personal tension between humility and egoism is translated to a much larger worldly tension between serving the common good and maintaining power. What are we individual moviegoers to do? All become activists? All organize boycotts of institutional powers? We seem powerless to organize. Such organizing itself plays into the rules of building an institutional power.
Labor unions have their critics. Religious institutions have their critics. Nonprofits and NGO have their critics.
So we see the balancing of that tension play out at every level. But we forget, the way we “see” balance at any level has a solitary fulcrum. It does not matter if the level is our own world, the whole world, or even the whole of world history. It is only individuals who “see.” And we see from the perspective of our individual ego.
So what’s a lowly moviegoer to do?
As a fourth generation coal miner, Jimmy doesn’t see that he has been the beneficiary of an institutional power which passed an irreversible threshold because the world needed fossil fuels to grow. Now threatened by the need for a cleaner global environment, Jimmy still packs a lunchpail every day to get the paycheck so his daughter can someday go to college.
Policymakers aiming to obsolesce Jimmy’s job also aim ethically at reeducation and job retraining. Yet the 55,000 Jimmys don’t gleefully receive that complication to their lives. Who can blame them? We do, as the self-centered moviegoer. As if Jimmy and his ancestors made a morally inferior choice to pollute our world while fueling our comforts, and now we resent his entire family tree for… making our world a better place for everyone.
Jimmy isn’t stupid. But like every single one of us brilliant moviegoers, Jimmy gets sucked into the game of using the language that institutional powers depend on. Those powers give Jimmy a new vocabulary of environmentalist hate for the massively polluting coal industry in China, spiced with some nationalism about exporting jobs, and sprinkled with dark racist impulses. As if there are no daughters who want to go to college there.
Jimmy doesn’t talk about his son, who left coal country for brighter horizons, got laid off from his convenience store job in a dwindling town, couldn’t pay rent with his three other roommates required to afford a place to live on that wage. Another of his roommates got laid off, and they found ways to postpone their eviction while they illicitly medicated their shame until they were caught and sentenced to time. What was there to go back to when they were released? Coal mining? Acting careers? Political office? They’re now overdose statistics.
My ego doesn’t like to choose complexity when easier options are available. I have to be dragged into transformational fires unwillingly. Left to our own devices and will, we don’t change willingly. And if the world drags us too mercilessly, some of us must leave it, and take schoolchildren with us.
Like you, I wish I could see Jimmy on the spotlight’s red carpet, and hear his Thank-You list. I bet no one would cut his speech short, risking a decline in moviegoers. On the other hand, many of the celebrated Hollywood stories are indeed about Jimmys. Many pluck our heartstrings. But it’s hard to carry that compassion the next morning, as we carry our lunchpails toward our own cinemas.
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Neil D. 2023-10-29
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