The Road to Tyranny is Paved with Self Help Books

And you love every minute on it

There is a bit of a game that is being played. And you can get caught in it. If you’re not careful it can lead you to perpetuate the human condition. The game makes it harder for humans to be free.

The game can be summed up in two words: “Become Special”

This idea, that you have to make something better of yourself, needs to be examined critically, for it is a very dangerous idea to human freedom.

How the game starts

“Go out and grab the world by its tail.”
”Make a difference!”
”You can change the world.”

These and similar messages are with you from a very early time in your development. Do you remember being told by school teachers that you could be the President of the United States one day? You were likely about eight years old at the time and you could barely manage to make yourself a sandwich. But there was your elementary school teacher, implying that if you didn’t get perhaps the most selective job in the world, you were doing something wrong. Had you examined your teacher closely you would have seen that she was just as far away from being the President of the United States as you were!

This is how it starts. You are told that it is your responsibility to do more than simply experience life. Living isn’t enough. You have to do something. You have to be something. Something special. Something you apparently are not.

See? Implicit in this call to action is hidden a couple of very disturbing messages. The first is that there is a meaning to life that you need to unlock by engaging in a human activity, a political activity. If the mere act of living was meaningful, we would all have meaning in our lives already, and it would be much harder to convince us to chase meaning. The second message is that the world only smiles on the special people. If you’re not one of them - if you are just <shudder> ordinary - why then you get what you deserve. A Hobbesian nightmare awaits.

So these are the two premises that get you into the game. And they are both lies. But they are powerful. The messengers also have an ally, a spy, that makes it very hard to resist. They have an “insider” that is constantly undermining you. And that makes it nearly impossible to resist the game.

Your ego loves the game

There is nothing that the ego enjoys more than trying to be special. The game elevates the ego above the intellect and the heart. And this is going to create a cycle that you will instantly recognize, but when you’re in it you have no idea this is happening.

It is a simple truth that there is more to each of us than we are currently aware. Now, you could spend your life perfectly happy, productive, and loved without ever being aware of this truth. But what if someone comes along and teaches you to assign a negative judgment to this difference? If someone tells you it’s wrong to not be that special person you can be?

If we perceive this gap between a potential version of us and our current us as a negative, we create the condition for the ego to step in and try to capitalize. The ego is rewarded. It can judge you, and it will constantly. Just as importantly, it can judge others.

Have you ever noticed that when your friend or partner starts working out all the time, they become a bit of judgmental jerk? This is especially true the first time they really get serious about it. Suddenly, everyone else is a lazy bum stealing their precious oxygen. They have become a slave to their ego. And it is so annoying.

When the ego gets involved, you are in big trouble. You are guaranteed to be stuck in the game for as long as it’s running the show.

Why the game never ends

You can’t become special by listening to the ego. You can only make the ego more powerful. You reward it and it wants more. So it finds new problems. Ever notice how someone with an amazing physique can tell you exactly how their body is flawed?

You want reality to be comfortable. You need it to suit you. For most people, the raw harsh reality of our existence is completely unacceptable. So we are born already preconditioned to participate in a game that says the world is a hostile place. And that’s what this game does.

Remember the second implicit message is that the world will only smile upon you if you become special. By default, then, the world is hostile. This is a very key concept in understanding why so many people embrace tyrannical government. And it does not get explored nearly as much as it should. If the world is hostile, then it is a threat and it needs to be fixed. And because humans are imperfect beings, there is absolutely no limit to the amount of problems that can be found in the world.

If you think becoming special requires you to fix the world’s problems, the game will never end. You will spend your entire life fretting about one human problem after another. Even if you manage to solve any of these problems, which you almost certainly will not do anyway, there would just be another problem waiting for you.

So your ego, which has now been empowered by the job of becoming special, has before it an unlimited capacity to hold your awareness and remain elevated throughout life. Have you ever noticed how your overly political friends tend to be neurotic and self absorbed to an unhealthy level?

They are driven by the need to fix a hostile world to cope with their own lack of life meaning.

Of course, very few of us would ever feel rewarded by such a game, and so our participation ends up in the self help section of the book store. We must be doing something wrong, we think. After all, if anyone can become so special that they are the President of the United States, then by comparison you are a complete abject failure. And in that book store, our ego gets picked up. We learn that we shouldn’t give up on becoming special. We just weren’t doing it right, you see? Go back in the game and try again, but just use this trick next time.

And so on and on it goes.

The Game is hostile to human freedom

It should be obvious how this game can be damaging to human freedom. It’s bad enough to have a handful of despots running around this world screwing everything up. Imagine an army of them. Looking for problems under every rock.

And oh how the ego loves to “solve” problems. It makes you feel special, intelligent, important, the big shot. You can brag to everyone about how you are the reason that particular issue no longer exists for them. You changed the world.

Even if you just voted. Right? What drives someone to actively display that they performed the nearly mindless task of picking between a couple of names? Picking between two people they have never personally met and have no reason to believe are at all interested in them? And then, after you complete this task… you brag about it. Why? Your ego lapped it up. You became special. You are a problem solver.

This need to become special is a road to tyranny. There is no problem that can’t be solved according to your ego. Intellect goes out the window. Intellect is more accurate, sure, but it’s slower and, well, it’s just harder to use. You need quick fixes. No thinking, just do something. There’s a pandemic? Shut up and wear a mask, you say. Ego is in charge, and ego likes simple solutions.

And nothing says simple, easy solutions like a good old fashioned government mandate. What system could be more rewarding to the millions of egos trying to make an impact than the democratic system? Just vote. Just pick one of us. And we’ll take care of that hostile world. We’ll solve those problems. All it takes is a mandate.

And the more they can convince you the world is hostile, the more your ego will want to take that freedom limiting action.

How you can end the game for good

So what can we do? Well, the first step is understanding how you can get out of the game for good.

Remember when I said that there is more to each of us? The key confusion that perpetuates the human condition is that we assume that “more” is found in human pursuits. You must learn to discover the difference between self improvement and self revelation.

“So what? Just go to Church and pray?” you just thought.

Oh not quite, though I don’t mind it if you do or your don’t go to Church to find that “more.” In fact, I don’t mind it if you are content to simply know that you are more, and have no interest in it.

But the game ends when you discover that simply living is the meaningful act. Life will show you what you need to do to make it meaningful to those around you. You don’t need to interject your judgment on every experience, on every aspect of the world. And you certainly don’t need to view your life in a negative way simply because you didn’t meet another human’s standard of a “special” life.

Once you do that, not only will the world become less hostile, one day it will be perfect the way it is. You won’t need to change anything. And you won’t view human freedom as a threat.

This is also how the Self or God is revealed, they say. If that’s true, just by living you become more. It’s almost as if the very thing we turn to in order to become special, our ego, is the thing that prevents us from ever knowing what is truly special about us.

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