If a person doesn’t share with the community, if he doesn’t care about others, he’s absolutely selfish, egoistic. Yet he’s not actually working for the ego, because his ego doesn’t really exist. Not only philosophically, but practically as well. In order to be an ego, a personality; you need to build it up in the eye of people. Humans are by definition a social structure, not only biological but a cultural construct. In order to be a human personality, you need to work by people.
Egoistic, selfish people don’t really work for their own. They’ may be working for their ancestors and their past instead of their genuine, original self because working for your biological self instead of cultural-social one is never a creative endeavour. In fact, working for your ego isn’t really possible as long as you’re just a microorganism in this macro-organism.
The radar-consciousness we call ego is an authentic ego if it works for others. If ego works only for itself, it cannot be literally an ego. In other words, if it continues the ancestral burden that does not belong to the ego, we cannot talk about a different personality, If an ego doesn’t do anything for others, that he’s just a continuation of biological cycle; he didn’t add up anything to it. In order to be an ego, it is necessary to add to it, and the addition is through society.
Ego is not actually just the ego. Ego is always the ego plus something else. You’re you, but not only you. You’re also countless things. You plus citizen, you plus soldier, you plus student, you plus passenger and so on. How can a person become selfish?
How can you speak of ego if you haven’t built it? You didn’t come to life by yourself, you’re not raised by yourself, you don’t decide what your’re going to desire or like because society has already determined it. You don’t even decide when you’re going to die. You’re a product of the culture and in order to speak of your ego, you must have produced a part in this. What is your part? Your part can only be something that you’ve built through the society, some cultural elements are your actual self. Without culture and society, what you call as personality is just flesh and bones and they don’t belong to you. What you call yourself without the cultural structure is the DNA of the past people and the meat that will be refunded to the nature.
The irony of ego is that if you work for others you build an ego; otherwise you’re just meat, circling through food chain. Self, has to be built via others. What an irony, ego is not ego; just like you’re never “just you.”
