Every couple of days we’ll try to give articles from around the web, in the areas of science, literature, current affairs, art, politics, philosophy, and anything else we think would help you provide exercise and nutrition for your brain. The articles will help you in various ways:

They will interest you

They will illuminate you

They will educate you

And they will prepare you for Reading Comprehension

The articles may be recent, and may not be, but then I believe “recent” is overrated. What’s important is not how new it is, but how lasting it is. Does it give us something which will linger? Something which will teach us something important? Anything which is insubstantial in time is necessarily so in content.

Some will be easy, some challenging. Again, that shouldn’t deter us. With a little bit of effort, you will understand. Be patient. And persist. (The same applies to length. Some will be short, and some quite long.)

So let’s begin:

The Pressing Need for Everyone to Quiet Their Egos

Why quieting the ego strengthens your best self

Scott Barry KaufmanMay 21, 2018

Credit: Getty Images

We live in some times. On the one hand, things are better than they’ve ever been. Overall rates of violence, poverty, and disease are down. There have been substantial increases in education, longevity, leisure time, and safety. On the other hand… We are more divided than ever as a species. Tribalism and identity politics are rampant on all sides of everything.

Steven Pinker and other intellectuals think that the answer is a return to Enlightenment values— things like reason, individualism, and the free expression of as many ideas as possible and an effective method for evaluating the truth of them. I agree that this is part of the solution, but I think an often underdiscussed part of the problem is much more fundamental: all of our egos are just too damn loud.*

Watching debates in the media (and especially on YouTube) lately has been making my head explode. There seems to be this growing belief that the goal is always to win. Not have a dialectical, well-intentioned, mutual search for overarching principles and productive ways forward that will improve humanity– but to just win and destroy.

Now, don’t get me wrong– I find a good intellectual domination just as thrilling as the next person. But cheap thrills aside, I also care deeply about there actually being a positive outcome. Arriving at the truth and improving society may not be explicit goals of a WWE match, but surely these are worthy goals of public discourse?

There is also an interesting paradox at play here in that the more the ego is quieted, the higher the likelihood of actually reaching one’s goals. I think we tend to grossly underestimate the extent to which the drive for self-enhancement actually gets in the wayof reaching one’s goals– even if one’s goals are primarily agentic. (Continue here)