The human Ego will be our own undoing

It’s all the same: the patriarchy, homophobia, white supremacy. People don’t want to listen to what they cannot experience. They want to feel like they know shit, so when you talk about something they can’t possibly understand, they shut you down.

Our rise to the top of the food chain is what will lead us to our undoing. We have become the masters of the world and what that has done to our psyche has had and will have far deeper consequences than on anything else.

It has made humans egomaniacs. We no longer see ourselves as pieces of the puzzle. We are the ones making the puzzle, manipulating everything and anything to fit into our laid out plan. Nature is at our feet, animals at our mercy.

No wonder whatever deviates from what we have decided for ourselves to be true triggers our defenses and we reject it. We claim it to be unnatural and we pour all our self-validated ammunition into the conversation. We listen to respond, instead of understand. We listen barely enough to select the ammo that seems more likely to hit the target, and dismantle it. But conversation shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t aim at winning, or at dismissing, it should aim at growth, evolution, change.

We keep getting stuck on the idea that things are the way they are because there is some kind of supernatural reason for them to be. But there is no such thing as truth. There’s no such thing as absolute validity. There is no such thing as eternal stability. Everything changes, everything is in flow. And we keep trying to stop it, control it, as we build dams to the river of change to tailor it to our needs and comforts. You can’t tame the river of change. Most importantly, you don’t need to.

This fear and mania to defend present social orders only foments vicious cycles that, however, no matter the efforts of their advocates, will, eventually, undue themselves. We humans have fomented cycles of oppression that would have come undone much earlier, had we been less controlling, less self-centered.

No one wants to know they are wrong. Because that hurts their ego. And ego is what we have come to build our identity around. And a hurt ego is a hurt identity. And a hurt identity invalidates you. And validation is all an egomaniac truly wants.

So we are destroying our ecosystems, our sense of community, our relationships, to protect our egos. And that, that is what will kill us all.