The Collective Ego and the Man

The Collective Ego and the Man

There is something deeply seductive

about stirring the crowd:

by defining what a woman is

— as has been done since ancient times,

calling people into the public square.

First the authoritarian mind

is pretentious:

it assumes the right

to define what another is

in order to strip them of their rights.

Then it dares to define

what no man

has ever truly dared to define:

what a woman is…

The reduction of a complex being

whom poets have endlessly tried to capture,

never satisfied with their own words,

into the false brutality

of a simplification.

A woman…

A woman is man in expansion.

And so much hatred pulses through the veins

of the authoritarian mind,

its teeth clenched…

It lights bonfires

to pass off as truth

the very act of destruction it relishes.

Next, its authoritarian morass

calls upon the collective ego—

an ego that feeds, insatiable,

on the rights and dignity

of the most vulnerable,

in order to call itself strong.

And so it must call itself strong

because it does not know what strength is.

It must fight the idea

that victims may possess strength—

strength enough to defend themselves.

Then aggression gathers

the masses in uproar,

like fire drawing

eyes and fury—

ochlos—

in these dreadful spectacles

of cowardice and arrogance.

From there,

diversion becomes profitable:

fame, favors, votes.

Mutual endorsement,

mutual validation

among equals

creates scale,

electoral advantage,

audience.

The collective ego

cannot detach from itself

or from its own pretensions.

It does not know how to welcome,

nor how to be generous;

it does not know how to let things pass.

It does not know peace;

it does not know how to let others live in peace.

It does not know how to walk away and live.

It does not know how to be silent.

But a man—

when he is truly Man—

remains a man:

one who protects

and disperses the packs

driven by hatred.

He does not warm himself

in the blaze of hatred,

but guards the fire that shapes him.

A being who lives apart

from the collective ego,

formed in the wild—

on the trail, by the night’s faint light, by the sea.

One who learns, in silence,

to tend the fire

that does not consume,

but sustains.

One who knows himself

and feeds on the desert within.

Man—

a being to whom the Poets prepare

what he seeks of himself.

To be a man:

in a time when

everyone feeds their own ego

and the collective ego—

an infernal, insatiable ego

that revels

in the despoiling of rights,

one who has no need

to compete for the space of the vulnerable—

but to create space instead.

To be a man…!

To undo

this machine that grinds the future into the past,

setting time itself ablaze—

stone by stone

bringing down

the vote, the voice, freedom, life—

only to look upon a field of ruin,

a final death throe,

and then throw oneself

into prison, into the abyss.

To detach from vilification.

But to be a man—

capable of understanding himself

and carrying himself with dignity

as a man,

and as man in expansion—

capable of finding and living from a passion

nourished by his own life;

a being who rejects the urge

to accumulate victories

for this inane collective ego

of social predation

that drives societies

toward tragedy and collapse.

To care for those to whom he belongs.

With no need to call himself strong,

he must instead stand within his flaws—

and for that, he needs others:

both friend and foe.

To dare living with passion,

to love one’s own kind,

to know one’s own errors,

to walk one’s own path

with courage and resolve…

To defend the strongholds

of what makes a man himself,

to move toward the infinite horizon

of an ideal not yet conceived.

Man—an ideal that must be conceived.

Explorer, traveler, builder, my shelter…

Made to seek what is good

for himself and for others.

What is missing in people

is the steady, burning passion

that I find within you.

The passion

I see guiding your steps

to be a man—

one who builds and safeguards civilization.

I love you so deeply,

Man—

that I must love you

with even greater passion,

like one who shields your flame

from the winds of the world.

Ana Paula Arendt. The Pink Book of Passion.