The Id(iocratic) Moment & Ego-Subsumption in the Age of New Medievalism (1)
For the purposes of this note, consider the ‘id’ as our instinctive animal brain (of the human animal, that is) and the ego as referring to the will to power of human rationality, which, like the ancient charioteer of Arya philosophy, holds the reins of the wandering impulsive mind, to guide it on course towards higher thought. Implicit in this analogy is the understanding that the human mind can operate either on a higher or lower frequency.
In its ‘natural’, or even default state, the human mind is driven here and there by impulse. These impulses are more often than not reflective of our animal nature: desire, lust, hunger, and so on. But a reined in mind, on the other hand, can not only ascend over and past these impulses, it can also (if harnessed to realise higher capabilities) transcend them (making them its fuel).
The process of harnessing we might call the ascent of the ego (or rational will) over the id (or animal impulse). Every human being lives (to extents greater or smaller) in a state of perennial conflict between the id and the ego. I propose this conflict can also be observed in the movements of history – history after all is the scaled up aggregation of *all human experience.
Our times are, I would say, an age of the return of an Id(iocratic) logic of (the movement of) history. This has gradually come to be (I believe the threshold moment has been passed) as the power of the Id in the aggregated human mass has destroyed the ‘rein’ of the Ego which dominated the previous age of human history, that began some time around the mid to late 16th century, as humanity (after becoming interlinked into new, globe spanning networks of movement and the flow of ideas) began to challenge previous logics, as in a crescendo of almost concurrent iconoclastic revolutions of the mind, old orthodoxies were demolished.
In Europe, this was achieved as the late Renaissance phased into the Enlightenment; in the Indian Subcontinent, beginning with the iconoclastic Kabirian revolution, that reconfirmed the idea of ‘One-ness’, followed with the entrenchment of a new world order based on this idea, consolidated in the Nanakian (re)invention of the ‘idea of man’. There were other revolutions too, perhaps one could speak of the Shia resurgence gradually creating an anti-Hegelian split leading to the emergence of the Baha’i, as an outward manifestation indicative of deeper currents flowing in subterranean channels across the Islamic world; and also, in the great birth of the New World Cosmopolis, observable in the eclectic neo-Spinozean Panentheism of the Transcendentalists and the personal philosophies of the American Founding Fathers.
There was a fissure in history in this Age. With one enduring theme. Man could take control. Not merely of his own life, body and destiny, but of the movement of history. This was the age of Ego Ascendancy.
In the rule of the Ego over the Id, there is a primal necessity for control. Beginning with control over the self, and extending to control of the self-controlled self over the un-controlled, or the Id-controlled mass. One might call this despotic. So it is. The Enlightened Despot was the hero of this age, for good or bad. [The most disastrous moments in history however are created by Id-controlled despots, so one must be wary of merely thinking that despotism is the good here – no. It is the harnessing and the direction of the chariot that determines the warrior’s destiny. Ride it into a broken civilisation, and launch a new age. Take it into the wilderness, and be forgotten to time and age.]
Now, one must always note that the Id and the Ego are always entangled in an unstable Tao, though one might be ascendant over the other, and one might (through effort or failure) expand or contract, both always exist in entanglement. And they interact with a wider intersection of fields composed of all the underlying impulses in the nature of man. [An Ascendant Ego might interact with Lust for instance to create magnificent Eros-infused Art evoking the finest civilisation enhancing Rasas of Shingara; while the Id interacting with the same impulse creates human monsters. One can contemplate on other combinations.]
Humanity has achieved great things in the last 200 or so years. This was consequence of the age of the constellation of the Ascendant Ego with the Will to Progress. Such ages of rapid acceleration in human progress occur from time to time in history. One can think of the rapid emergence of large planned cities in Sumeria, followed by the Indus Valley and Egypt; one can think of the Axial Age, and one can think of the lesser-Enlightenment of the 10th to 12th centuries, which produced numerous scholars, philosophers and translators of great texts across the world, in addition to an early proto-industrialisation in East Asia.
Such ages fall, when the will that motivates them fails, or withers. The great Ummān Mānda poured historical scorn in floods of barbarians that crashed against the walls of Sumeria, time withered away at the wheel of the Axial Age, and the twin winds of destruction of Genghis Khan and Timur laid waste to the third age. But this is not a reflection on past historical ages (for now, not this one). But was Ibn Khaldun right? Does Id-driven decadence corrode the Ego-Ascendant will to discover, to build? To command, to defend. Or destroy, if need be?
No Ummān Mānda befalls without its attractive cause.
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In our age, the Id has regained a super-ascendancy because of a completely unforeseen phenomenon: the extension of the neural synapse into and across the world, via the internet; before this, the human mind, despite the facility of intercourse, was, a lonely dweller ‘drifting far, all alone, formless, recumbent in (its) cave’ to (mis)quote the Dhammapada.
The early internet was a great enabler. It allowed all human beings to do something which in pre-modern traditions only great accomplished sages were said to be capable of – direct mind to mind contact across great distances of space. With the invention of fibre optics, this became instant contact. With social media, this facility of instant contact between one common mind and another became a great Id-feeding monster. Accomplished sages honed their minds to the highest degree before they (supposedly) became capable of harnessing the pulsations of inner space to transcend the limitations of outer space (consider this only as a literary analogy if that is how it seems palatable to you); in our times however, minds that are yet to even be ‘fully formed’, even physiostructurally (as brains), are forced into environments where they must absorb and deal with not only their own, but aggregated world-spanning impulses from other similarly challenged minds. The weak feed on the weak.
The solitary Id, once contained in the chambers of the mind, a monster in the cave that our Ego bravely fought with to tame and keep entrapped, now has an escape, and a theatre of the impulses where it can feed on, grow and fuse into a Super-Id. The solitary purposeless Ego in the cave is left to wither, forlorn.
Thus, we enter an age that in which the movement of history is driven by a super-mutated megamassed monster, aggregated from the unharnessed impulses of a mass society of weak, frail ego’d individuals – Individuality, is the expression of an Ascendant Ego, that now for most lies cowering and alone in a cave, fearful of the super-massed emotionally manipulative mega-Id, always quick to judge, attack and if need be destroy any expression of self assertive individuality. Even a spark must not be tolerated.
And so we yearn for heroes again. Those who embody Will, and drive, and are fuelled by Ego, who rise to command destiny, and shape their lifepaths as they choose, and assert their Individuality, even if it is offensive to the massmind. In this assertion of the self, the Ego-Driven Hero offers us a glimpse of the possibility that the monster can be tamed.
For me, I cherish disengagement.
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“One who is wise should guard the mind,
a guarded mind brings happiness.”
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[To be continued.]
