Ego is the biggest enemy of humans.

– The Rig Veda

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness

– Max Planck

Do the best you can within the limits of your abilities and understanding without relying on external authorities.

The key problem faced with any attempt to build society at any level is in the nature of human beings, the human ego, that affects any common interests.

Self-centric nature, prioritizing personal gain over societal progress, represents an everlasting evolutionary game of competition vs. cooperation within an ecosystem, much like replicators vs. symbiotes.

Our self-perception, the cognitive model of 'i', often limited to our bodies, holds the key to solving this problem.

Society can prosper, develop, and grow when there is a common consensus model of what it looks like within individual members, when every participating individual expands their model of 'i' to the society level, putting society interests over individual ones, while maintaining healthy ego priorities and individually defining the common model principles, values, virtues, beliefs, priorities from game theories, philosophical and religion ethics, declarations, and community dialogues, e.g., be nice, be forgiving, be retaliatory, be clear.

When individuals define and adopt this model, prioritizing society's well-being and collaborating toward shared goals, societies flourish.

It works on all levels, from individual, when one needs to control certain organ-level desires for the healthy development of the body as a whole; to family, neighborhood, community, workplace, nation, civilization, humanity, planet levels.

By changing self-perception, individuals evolve and transcend into society by accepting the shared responsibility for common society model principles while maintaining a healthy ego motivational drive.

Societal change depends on everyone's individual action, doing the best within the limits of one's own abilities and understanding without relying on external authorities.

Everyone plays a role in this change, even small actions contributing towards common goals with everyone being able to choose their own path.

I would like to thank Bard, a large language model from Google AI, for their invaluable feedback and support in the development of this essay.

Latest pdf version can be obtained from: https://blog.anatolykern.com/static/ego.pdf