In 2025, let’s give up our “fat, relentless egos.”

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“In the moral life,” wrote the late Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “the enemy is the thick, implacable ego.”

One could take out the words “morality” and the sentence – from Murdoch’s philosophical work The sovereignty of the good (1970) — would work just as well. Not only can the ego be so destructive in our inner moral life, but also in civil and political life. And when the ego is wounded, it can be particularly dangerous.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since hearing an excerpt from an excellent interview with the late BBC foreign correspondent Dame Ann Leslie HARD talk Program. She talked about what “makes powerful people bad.” (The entire episode, originally recorded in 2008 and re-released after Leslie’s death in 2023, is well worth the 23 minutes of your time.)

“We never fully understand the role humiliation plays in the creation of a monster,” Leslie told interviewer Stephen Sackur, arguing that the Arab world (where many dictators still ruled at the time) had been humiliated by the feeling that it was no longer that major global “intellectual and military powerhouse.” She also cited Adolf Hitler, who was humiliated by being rejected twice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna because his paintings were “unsatisfactory.”

“I know it sounds like awfully cheap psychobabble, but if you look at all the monsters in modern history,” Leslie continued. “There’s always an element of humiliation that makes them feel like, ‘I’m going to get them.'”

Personally, I don’t mind the old psychobabble, and besides, I don’t think what Leslie was saying was “cheap” at all, but rather profound. Humiliation, similar to its more frivolous sister emotion, embarrassment, is the unpleasant feeling that arises from feeling that your social status or self-image has been damaged. But unlike embarrassment, there is usually an abuser involved, who often entices the humiliated person to seek revenge in some way (even if it is not directed directly at the abuser).

I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a monster – in fact, I think it’s broadly unwise to categorize people as heroes or villains – but I do note that the once “politically moderate” Elon is in a slightly circular one Way Matters Musk seems to move further into right-wing extremist territory the more he comes under fire (and the more people leave his social media platform). He may be the richest man in the world, he may be the next US president’s best buddy, but I have the distinct feeling that Musk is a man with a problem: a fragile ego.

He’s not the only one. Many of us – especially in the age of the “curated” internet – spend far too much time worrying about ourselves and how we appear to other people, and far too little wondering how those other people feel. The funny thing, though, is that if we could give up our fat, relentless egos and focus on what’s going on in the world around us, we’d end up feeling a lot better.

For Murdoch, the best way to give up this ego was to spend time admiring nature and works of art (an idea that the emerging field of “neuroaesthetics” would certainly validate). She wrote that she looked out the window “in an anxious and upset state of mind, paying no attention to my surroundings” and then saw a kestrel, which completely changed her entire way of thinking

“Appreciating the beauty of art or nature is not just the simplest spiritual exercise available,” Murdoch wrote. “It is also a completely appropriate introduction to the good life (and not just an analogy to it), since it represents the examination of egoism in the interest of seeing the real.”

“Seeing the real” may not be what first comes to mind when thinking about living a good life in these more worrisome times, but Murdoch is actually describing something we often call “mindfulness” these days : to be present in the moment. And it is indeed—the process of “selflessness,” as Murdoch described it—that can lead us away from our ego-driven fears and toward something entirely different and wonderful: love. “In the ability to love, that is, to see, lies the liberation of the soul from fantasy,” Murdoch wrote.

Musk’s isn’t the only fat, unrelenting ego that will play a prominent role over the next 12 months. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow this example. It has become a little unfashionable to talk about love outside of the romantic context, just as we talk about virtue and honor. But ego is about fear. And at the risk of veering into psychobabble again: the only thing that can overcome fear is love.

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