Ego Death

 

As I get older I think, pessimistically, people don't’ really like to be good people. Not really. Doing the right thing rarely gets any reward aside from your own sick egoism. Rather, people like to think of themselves as good people because again, it gives them an egotistical high. Isn’t if funny how without ego people probably wouldn’t ever do the right thing?

Unless you are principled about it. Unless you begin somehow to see how moralism is less about doing the right thing and more about keeping each other alive, yourself alive, that anything that threatens one person’s right to a life of dignity also threatens your right to a life of dignity.

I must confess I haven’t actually read a lot of Fanon, only the first chapter of the Wretched of The Earth. And that was nearly seven years ago in university, when colonialism was still a new word to me.

I remember being most interested in his concept of the creation of new men. What did this mean? Maybe he meant a sort of ego death of the individual, of everyone coming together and understanding their interconnectedness. Joseph Campbell actually talks about this in his book, The Power of Myth. He talks of a moment where a police officer nearly jumps off a cliff to save a boy because he has an epiphany moment where he realizes they are all inherently connected.

I’ve had one of these epiphany moments. During a psychotic breakdown the police were outside my door. I opened the door prepared to die, and this was the first time I have ever truly felt god’s presence. I could feel that if they killed me now, all my thoughts and emotions and feelings would find home in someone else living, and I was okay with that knowledge. And I meant this quite literally. It wasn’t like, “ oh, someone will remember my life and I’ll have an impact on the world” rather I would be subsumed by the chaos of the universe, integrated into the feelings of everything that is alive. I guess this was a moment of ecstasy and rapture.

Fanon says the colonizer is most anxious to discredit the myths of the colonized. Ever since I read this line I have been in a rabbit hole of thinking about myth and how it functions in our everyday lives. That’s why I love Joseph Campbell’s book so much. It shows how myth leads to this creation of ego death, to enlightenment.

I used to think, for this reason, that the internet’s album ego death was particularly Fanonian - one reason I love it so much.

This is how I interpret revolutionary politics. The dissolution of the individual.

One snare I find is when I think about romantic love. I'm not so sure about how to think of this emotion. Romantic love is seeing two as one, but for this to happen you need to see yourself as an individual first, which isn't very revolutionary of you. I think the whole process of love, the ecstasy and joy, is this very dissolution. And then you acknowledge your responsibility for this other life outside of you. Romantic love confuses me. I'm not sure how to integrate it into my general understanding of love, of a constant love that does not waver, that is principled.