The word ‘ego’ has been used in a number of ways, ranging from defining a characteristic of personality (self-centeredness) to, in a larger sense, defining the whole of self.
In this post, I will use the word ‘ego’ to mean the boundary that a person creates to determine who matters and who doesn’t. The people outside the ego can be referred to as the outsiders.
At birth, there is only one person within the ego. But as a person grows this boundary (or ego) expands as more and more people come to matter to us for e.g. parents, siblings, friends, etc. However this boundary is not a binary division, rather it is fuzzy and continues. At all times, oneself matters the most, then comes the family and then comes the friends and so on. The extent of ego has a significant influence on the person’s behaviour. All actions will be taken in order to maximize the gains for one’s ego. So self-interest comes first, followed by family’s interest, followed by friends’s interest, followed by colleague’s interest, followed by community’s interest, followed by nation’s interest, followed by the interest of the humanity, followed by the interest of life.
A typically behaviour associated with ego is hypocrisy. It means that we have different standards for ego and outsiders. The different standards (more stringent) for outsiders arise due to the fact that they don’t matter to us, and we don’t care about their well being. Consider for example, the loss of lives in the ongoing civil in Syria. How does it affect you? Does it affect you the same way if it was happening in your own nation, or god forbid if one of your loved ones was involved? Probably a little less. People who are largely empathetic or care about the larger lot of humanity, simply have a larger extent of ego.
However, as addressed earlier, ego is subject to change and so is the behaviour. The structure of the ego is the primarily the result of one’s experience, especially in the childhood. This means that we are not predestined to have a particular structure of ego. It means that there is a possibility of living in a less hypocritical world.