5. Ego trait: fear

Fear is the dominant element of human life. Despite all human progress, it still dominates our lives today. The fear of losing one’s job, of infection, of material loss, of being abandoned by one’s partner, of strangers, of “foreign infiltration” by war refugees, of professional failure, etc.

Fear is always about jeopardising self-preservation. Essentially, it either takes the form of withdrawal (shirking, evading, fleeing) or turns into aggression, attack, forward defence. It is like the canary that has escaped from its cage and is fluttering around the room. To catch it, you drive it back and forth with a newspaper in your hand until it falls to the ground exhausted and remains sitting in a corner. When your hand approaches to put him back down, he tries to escape one last time, and when this fails, he starts to peck frantically with his beak in panic.

All aggression is ultimately triggered by a more or less unconscious feeling of lack or threat, be it “communists” (McCarthy era in the USA), the “international financial Jewry” of the Nazi era or, today, “Muslims” or, above all, “flooding by refugee invaders”. The ego feels surrounded by enemies, then builds up oversized food stocks, builds bunkers, equips itself with weapons and finally attacks war refugees.

Fear (for self-preservation) as a central characteristic of the human psyche is also evident in the fact that those in power repeatedly succeed in maintaining their power by fuelling fear, e.g. in election campaigns. The surest recipe is to manipulate fear-prone egos with “job losses” or “refugee caravans”.

The combination of the “flee” and “attack” variants also manifests itself in the (reverse) pattern of “hunching upwards and kicking downwards”. The saying “Equip a person with power and you will recognise his character” shows how mixtures of these different ego sub-menus of fear and subsequent aggression work, regardless of whether you are a team leader, parent, teacher, director, head of department or even a dictator. Because when the fearful-aggressive ego gets its hands on power, the previously painstakingly controlled instincts find it easy to break through. It doesn’t matter whether you are an SS man, a ticket seller, a husband or a teacher. The basic pattern of those who run over or shoot down refugees is the fear of “foreign infiltration”, “population exchange”, and so on.

There is power that does not exercise domination over others, as Mandela, Gandhi or Rabin have impressively demonstrated. But the rule is that the ego in power wants to overcome its unconscious feeling of inferiority and inferiority through power over others, not least over women.

In the age of social media, the connection between unconsciously whimpering fear and correspondingly angry aggression often manifests itself in shitstorms, even when it is only about the scandal of women in seemingly male domains such as the moderation of football matches. The anonymity that soothes the fear component allows the ego to strip off the thin varnish of civilisation and express its aggressive anger component undisturbed. The strength of this unconscious fear is evident from the fact that the ego reacts to any deviation from its own position – even if it is just an opinion – with death threats on social media.

Fear of self-preservation is always the most important factor in the ego’s psychogram. It is thanks to the nuclear balance of power between the old and new superpowers that the next global wars have not already broken out in the battle for zones of influence, market shares, resources, etc. The fact that the nuclear power of the respective opponent cannot be assessed means that in the nuclear stalemate, fear has defeated expansive aggression for a moment, at least for the current situation.

At the same time, the fear-fuelled ego seeks social closeness, home, security in the family, circle of friends, fan club, association, party, etc.. In doing so, it automatically collides with its own aggression and that of others. Belonging is often even a direct rejection of others (e.g. fan club). It is a paradox: the ego programme needs both social closeness and discord. As if porcupines move back and forth in a confined space with their quills up (Schopenhauer).

higyou: Hedgehog character stencil black, vector illustration, horizontal, isolated
The ego needs its ethnic home and then lives out its instinct for self-preservation and valorisation there. It doesn’t want to be a community, it wants to have a community. Once the fear component has been calmed to some extent, there is a stage for aggressive self-aggrandisement.

Fear turns into aggression, especially when fear has driven the ego into a corner, as in the case of the canary. As far as the aggressive part is concerned, the wars show what unbelievable atrocities the ego is determined and prepared to commit. This applies not only to Auschwitz, but also, for example, to the Japanese massacres in China (Nanjing), which could not be surpassed in their savage cruelty. But ultimately, such atrocities have occurred everywhere in the world and at all times and occur again and again in the most diverse forms. Then fear opened the floodgates to an aggressively frenzied rage for destruction and annihilation.

The urge for tradition, patriotism and fan culture is one of the many forms of expression of demarcation on the one hand and the search for security in the social group on the other. Within this “cowshed warmth” (column in SPON from 15 December 2015), it is only a small step from demarcation to exclusion. Then the ego wants to assert its self-affirmation tooth and nail, whether in the club, in marriage, in the party, etc.

“Peaceful coexistence in a community:
“Human nature is simply opposed to this. “Film “The Hunt.” (Thomas Vinterberg)

“Everyone is everyone’s enemy. … There is war of all against all.”
(Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan)

The ego will never leave the community, it hates seclusion and also silence. Even a short break to talk annoys the ego, longer phases of solitude without conversation are completely unbearable. Silence would make the gentle, extremely quiet inner voice audible, which would be life-threatening for the ego. It needs companionships, alliances, brotherhoods, connections, groupings, communities and alliances of all kinds in order to feel safe on the one hand and to be able to develop its striving for dominance, power, aggression and importance on the other.

The ego believes that the more possessions it has, the more it is. This can be clearly seen in examples such as a man wanting a bigger car than his neighbour, regarding his wife as a kind of possession, wanting to have his own house if possible, and so on. In the past, there were the conquests and territorial occupations of the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan, the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch raids, the land grab in North America, the Japanese expansion in East Asia, the British Empire, the colonial subjugation by the German Empire, by France, the Nazi Lebensraum in the East, etc. etc. Crimea sends its regards.

The ego clings to material possessions, fears their loss, does not want to share, cannot give up.

Concessions to one’s own standard of living – e.g. in connection with the immigration of refugees – are out of the question for the ego. However, this attitude is by no means limited to immigrants from other cultures: US General Charles P. Gross told American journalists after the war, in reference to German homeowners’ resistance to Germans displaced from the East, that “… the German population showed indifference and lack of helpfulness towards their displaced countrymen.” This reserved description is far surpassed by the locals towards their displaced compatriots:

“Filthy, miserable people from the East
living at our expense.
We have already sacrificed day after day
day after day,
there is already a hole in us.
If we want our lives,
the others will just have to float to heaven. …”
(Kossert, A.: Kalte Heimat. Munich 2008, p. 78)

Director Stanley Kubrick deals with the universality of this behavioural programme in the waterhole scene at the beginning of his film “2001 – A Space Odyssey” (see below in “The Function of the Mind”).

But it’s not just about material loss. The more mental orientation is lost, the more clearly this can be seen in the loss of peaceful and harmonious coexistence through the conspicuous increase in phenomena such as aggressive rubberneckers, rowdy behaviour in road traffic, racist attacks, going berserk in overcrowded trains, an increase in paedophile misdeeds etc., in general a brutalisation of our dealings with one another.

It is precisely those who enjoy relative affluence in Western Europe who do not want to share: The richer, the more unwilling. This is because the fear of loss and a self-centred self-image are behind this refusal. However, when charitable donations are made (see the high volume of donations before Christmas), this is mostly due to the “do-gooder ego”. This term refers to the fact that even “good” people – and the vast majority of them – are only empathetic to a limited extent.

As far as the background to the willingness to donate is concerned, there is the telling example of a billionaire who wants to donate 99% of his fortune to social causes, leaving him with “only” just under a billion.

“…they make feigned sacrifices that are not really sacrifices.”
(Bhagavad Gita 16:17)

In Christianity, the story of the poor widow and her “mite” shows the counter-example of truly self-sacrificing behaviour without ego: the rich “sacrifice” out of their abundance, while this widow nevertheless gives something out of her lack of food. So she sacrifices from her substance. This distinguishes the ego from love. This is an ideal-typical realisation of the Golden Rule, which says that I should do to others what I would like done to me if I were in their place.

Another characteristic of an ego-donor is to publicise his gifts. Christianity warns against this in a similar context – public prayer – and not without reason. This is because the ego tries to valorise itself by making its good deeds visible. Real love of one’s neighbour in connection with the fight against the ego’s trumpeting can only be seen in the consistent concealment of giving – outside of politically motivated illegal donation practices, of course. The evolutionary biologist Manfred Milinski notes that there are virtually no anonymous donations (Spiegel 51/2010).

Fear of loss manifests itself in many ways. This can be seen in the fact that many people do not throw anything away, do not give anything, are extremely hostile to immigration (see above on the reception of the twelve million displaced persons from the German eastern territories in 1944/45) or are pathologically jealous in relationships. At the same time, this behaviour impressively demonstrates an inner feeling of weakness, a sense of inferiority and fragility. Every day we can read in the newspapers what men are capable of when their wives want to leave them. There is a real reason for this feeling: this weakness actually exists as long as the “chopped off branch” is not grafted back onto the tree trunk itself, i.e. as long as the man does not take the path back to conscious dependence on his inner voice. But this fundamental decision would be the worst thing that could happen to the ego programme, as it would result in its destruction. Mind you, it would be the death of the programme, not of the person who has realised this programme. Only the other programme in man would then remain, that of non-egoistic love.