The Pathological Forms of Ego
If we look at ego in its most fundamental way, ego itself is pathological in the sense of the suffering and dysfunction it causes.
When someone like Hitler appears to be pathological to the general public it simply means that the pathological foundation of the ego are so exaggerated that the pathology is obvious to everyone except, of course, the sufferer.
Many so-called “normal” people may fib or tell stories in order to do better in a job interview or get a better deal on a used car. But a small proportion of people, driven by the deficient emptiness of the personality, need to lie compulsively all the time. Their narrative is a fantastical, fictional construct the ego has made for itself to feel more powerful and more significant.
The personality’s paranoia and mistrust of other people by focusing on other people’s failings is magnified into making others into threatening adversaries. Hence, history is full of the purges of Stalin, the paranoia of Nazi Germany, and the ravings of Gadhafi at the United Nations in 2009. Unfortunately, the paranoid person is actually in a hell realm which helps to justify the extreme measures they take to “protect themselves”.
The lesson here is that the stronger your egoic personality manifests, the more the probability that you believe that other people or other things are the real source of all the problems in your life. As this ego relaxes from these delusions, it becomes more and more obvious that the problem has always been with you and the structures of your ego. Dissolve them and each time a little bit of liberation becomes possible.
