The title subject is much on my mind, for reasons partly derived from fiction. One of my fiction gurus, Robert A. Heinlein, early in his career produced a stunning short story titled “They.” It was an exploration of a species of madness… or so it seems at the start. In his anthology The Dark Side, Damon Knight introduces the story thus:
This brilliant and compact story has the hallmark of great fiction: you will never be quite the same again after you have read it.
The story reaches for the heights of solipsistic paranoia when its protagonist says this to his therapist:
“All of these creatures have been set up to look like me in order to prevent me from realizing that I was the center of the arrangements. But I have noticed the key fact, the mathematically inescapable fact, that I am unique. Here am I, sitting on the inside. The world extends outward from me. I am the center…”
What makes this story so compelling is that each of us sees things exactly the same as its protagonist. Berkeleian subjective idealism arises from that fact. In its collectivized version, it becomes the social construction of reality.
And we can never wriggle completely free of that wholly individual viewpoint. You can’t really “see it the way he does” unless you are “he”… and you’re not.
That this is “built in” to the human psyche is one of the downsides of individual consciousness. Heinlein wasn’t the only great writer to use it. Judith Guest employs it in her first novel, Ordinary People, in building up the ultimate rift between Calvin and Beth Jarrett.
Each of us is the center of his own universe. Maturation is in part the process of learning to accept others’ equally egocentric viewpoints. He who cannot do so is unlikely to have a good time in society.
A great deal of social strife arises from certain persons’ inability to allow others to believe what they wish. The difficulty of accepting other people’s convictions as beyond your power to change moves some to embrace force and fraud as their methods. Think a little about politicians and you’ll see the causal chain at once.
But none of this is really news. It’s just that it’s seldom addressed openly. Even the word egocentric has been shorn of its etymological meaning. Today it just denotes the attitude of someone you wouldn’t want to be around. That’s because he’s an egotist. He’s on an ego trip. In other words, he’s not you.
Ayn Rand did some good and some harm by emphasizing egoism in her novels Anthem and The Fountainhead. Ethical individualism is a vital stance, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with a genuine egotist. In social dealing, the practicing egotist tends to evoke the egotism of others. The consequences are seldom pretty.
The challenge for public discourse is to assert the rights of the individual while remaining untainted by the accusation of egotism. That is, we who champion the individual must strive to uphold the political implications of our egocentric nature without allowing the promoters of collectivism to claim that “you only care about yourself,” as they so often do. For that reason, the defense of egocentrism must be coupled to the promotion of Golden-Rule-patterned behavior and the rejection of self-absorption in all its forms.
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