Ego and the Ruling Class

In Common Features of Ruling Class Society We summarize the major features common to all ruling classes, regardless of mode of domination. Indispensable as these qualities are to the existence of a functioning ruling class, the ego of the individual is the key without which those characteristics can not function properly. The individual is the fundamental unit of the society. Ego is the driver of the individual. Control the ego of the individual, dominate society.Unfortunately, the individual is not born automatically conditioned for ruling class servitude. The ego is not made for subservience. It is the “I” that drives the  organism through life for its own sake, and conscious of feeling itself to be a “separate” thing from where it came.

The individual is born nonjudgmental, unself-conscious, curious, playful and abhorring violence, among a variety of other characteristics. This condition of the individual is termed “child”. It is the uncontaminated purity of ego.

The disposition of the child is fundamentally incompatible with the ruling class agenda. The Profit Logic of the ruling class is at odds with the naivety and inherent common sense of the child. This creature is open and obligation-free, it does not know to hate Nazism and socialism, and to love capitalism and all things Establishment.

Children are not given to toil for toil’s sake (that is, for the ruling class’s sake), and prefer to play and make friends. Children are unattached to doctrine, and are blissfully unaware of fads and fashion. Their inherent honesty calls out the Emperor’s nakedness. The child’s ego is small, unweathered and pure.

The Great Institution must capture the individual’s mind right from birth, while it is weakest, pliable, and a veritable blank slate. The mind must be colonized and turned it into the herd mentality, before it can grow up to resemble an independent and honest adult. The Establishment essentially interferes with the natural development of individuals, and molds them into the subservient class — individuals who will then spend the rest of their lives curtailing their own potential for the benefit of a “superior order”.

Thus, it is crucial that the Establishment gets to the individual while the mind is still as yet unformed. The Great Institution attaches the proper perspectives and assumptions to the developing ego. These labels and the ego grow up together, like skin growing over a foreign object embedded in the body, or a tumor growing from within. It would be much harder to manipulate an “independent” individual, than one who matures with the “manipulation” ingrown from birth. If indoctrination does not begin early, the ruling class risks the growth of a strong, confident ego that demands more for itself.

First, the child’s young and fragile ego must be crushed. It begins before birth, for the mother’s traumas and experiences affect the fetus. Then the child is born into a marinating ocean of Establishment inputs and conditioning. The Establishment goal, at this point, is to abort the natural growth and expansion of the mind as much as possible. Pumping the ego as a muscle of pride, confidence, entitlement and courageousness is discouraged, despite the efforts of parents.

Anything that shrivels the ego into helplessness and resentment is welcome. A child must learn distrust, humiliation, anger and self-consciousness. We call this ego deflation. This process is popularly known as “growing up”, wherein the “healthier” aspects such as nonjudgmentalism and self-honesty are frustrated in favor of denial, ignorance, guilt and ego as security blanket.

The Establishment assaults the individual with round-the-clock conditioning. Through messaging, including television, education, entertainment, peers and usually with the unwitting collaboration of already indoctrinated parents, the successfully bred individual grows to adulthood with Establishment herd thinking as an almost inseparable part of their being. The properly bred individual will then take criticism of the Establishment as a personal injury.

Children are taught doctrines of self-denial and sacrifice, that there is safety in numbers, authority is usually correct and moral, life is dangerous, and being “good” is right and  being “bad” is wrong. The ego shrinks under the stern gaze of morality and social pressures.

Then ego is rebuilt in the image of a ruling class loyalist — epitomized by the unquestioning herd individual such as Liberals and Conservatives. But “rebuilt” is not the proper word. Rather, the aborted  ego is weighed down with a constructed “identity” as compensation. Parasitic social labels give the illusion of mass to the shriveled up ego. Through the Establishment, labels latch onto the prey, effectively making the individual think that some (preferably all) of the ruling class agenda is actually a part of themselves and their interests.

The individual learns that the country they live in is part of their “identity” and learn to love it. And while that is true in a certain sense, it certainly takes on a more personal out-sized and fetishized meaning, which turns nationality into “nationalism”. The individual will learn that their parents’ gods are supposed to be theirs too. God, country, identity! The stunted, unsure ego unwittingly seeks redemption in the ruling class agenda and its labels.

Fighting wars, to the well bred individual, means they are protecting their country (as ego). It is not a question of facts on the ground, “imperialism” or seeking advantage against vulnerable peoples. How can that be so when the ego in question is a good moral “person”? When they believe in “America”, “liberty” and “freedom” for all?

For better or worse this what the evolution of ruling class society has brought its masses. But there is a major defect inherent in the ruling class social organism (which demonstrates its unnaturalness). Even if the ruling class perfectly dominated its society and bred an overwhelming majority of its subjects into the herd mentality, even if it did everything exactly as a ruling class should, it will still destroy itself sooner rather than later due to the inability of the successfully bred masses to recognize when and by whom they are being brutalized and destroyed.

But even well bred individuals have their limits. The hour fast approaches.