The ego is not an individual psychological anomaly.
It is a structure of orientation.

In the individual it appears as identity. In civilization it appears as shared coherence.
In both cases it fulfills the same function: to produce a unified image where reality is complex.

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Complexity is not chaos or instability. It is excess—an excess of causes, layers, effects, and responsibilities that do not align without loss. It demands that tensions be held without immediately closing them. The ego does not reject this complexity because it is false, but because it is uncomfortable. It guarantees no innocence, draws no clear lines of responsibility, and does not allow for speed or moral cleanliness. That is why it responds by reducing.

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Reducing not to understand better, but to continue operating.

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On the individual level this mechanism is recognizable. The ego is sustained not by the depth of its thought nor by the solidity of its reasoning, but by the emotional energy that defends its position. It does not require complex arguments or prolonged coherence. It settles for sufficient explanations, simple narratives that maintain continuity. It is profoundly self-indulgent because an honest review would put it at risk.

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Contemporary civilization reproduces exactly this pattern, only on an expanded scale.

It functions like a collective mind that needs legible conflicts, clear oppositions, recognizable figures on which to concentrate indignation and guilt. Not in order to resolve them, but to orient itself morally without passing through the complexity that produces them.

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Here, culture does not act as a mirror, but as a device of selection.

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It does not merely display the violence of the world; it organizes it perceptually. It persistently indicates which horrors should occupy the center of the moral field, which deserve sustained attention, and which can dissolve into a diffuse background. 

This signaling is neither explicit nor coordinated, but it is effective. It works through repetition, accumulation, atmosphere.

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The effect is clear. There are forms of violence that can be condemned without anything essential in our daily lives being altered. Forms of violence whose denunciation does not force us to question the objects we use, the way we dress, the technologies that connect us, the speed at which we consume, replace, and discard. Pointing them out produces indignation, but also relief. It allows life to continue unchanged, with a pacified conscience.

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However, there are other forms of violence of a different nature.

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Slow, structural violences, sustained over time, embedded within entire infrastructures of production and consumption. Violences that do not express themselves in a single outburst, but in continuous wear. They do not generate singular images, but accumulated figures. They do not produce hundreds of visible victims, but millions distributed across years and generations.

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Often, these violences reach a quantitative magnitude of horror far greater than those that dominate the prevailing moral attention.

And precisely for that reason they are almost impossible to hold without defense.

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Not because they are less severe, but because they are greater, and because they point directly toward the benefits that structure our everyday lives. Recognizing them does not allow for a clean external condemnation. It requires admitting material implication. It requires accepting that the damage does not occur only “out there,” but also through ordinary habits, common objects, and apparently neutral decisions.

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The collective ego does not tolerate such proximity well.

When implication appears, the mechanism is predictable.
The system displaces.

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It seeks clear, external horrors, ideally suited to be pointed at without return. Visible monsters that absorb the moral weight that cannot be distributed within. By condemning them, society experiences a symbolic purification that does not alter the material conditions sustaining more extensive and deeper forms of violence.

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The external monster thus fulfills an indispensable function.
It allows the internal monster to remain unnamed.

The criterion of attention is not the magnitude of suffering, but the comfort of innocence.

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This same pattern operates on the identitarian plane. Each individual today has access to multiple possible frameworks of belonging. Among them may be gender, race, cultural identity, language, nationality, religion, ideology, social class, political affiliation, or aesthetic or cultural tribe. These matrices function not only as descriptions, but as available moral positions.

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The ego does not define itself through these identities.
It uses them.

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It selects the one that best guarantees narrative stability, symbolic protection, and moral advantage in each context. In this use appears a decisive feature of contemporary identitarianism: the exemption from merit. When belonging alone suffices to occupy an elevated moral position, the ego acquires prior legitimacy. There is no need to think better, to act with greater precision, or to assume real individual risks. Identity provides anticipated value. Superiority is not constructed; it is inherited.

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This displacement has profound consequences.
Thought becomes optional.
Self-critique becomes unnecessary.
Complexity becomes suspicious.

Any questioning ceases to be perceived as intellectual contrast and is experienced as an existential threat. That is why the reaction is no longer argument, but energy. 

It is not dialogue, but rejection. Not revision, but closure.

In contemporary culture this closure takes a precise form: cancellation.

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Not as an occasional moral deviation, but as the immunological response of the collective ego. Its function is not to protect truth, but to preserve group coherence. It does not expel errors; it expels dissonance. It activates wherever a question, a relationship, or a fact puts the shared image at risk.

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This reflex rests on something older than any ideology: our biological need for belonging. The fear of exclusion precedes any argument. It is enough to suggest the risk of falling outside to activate self-censorship and alignment.

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Thus, prohibition is unnecessary.
Pointing suffices.

Every ego projects.
And it projects what it cannot sustain.

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The violence denounced outwardly often functions as a symbolic container for a more refined, more integrated, and less visible internal violence. By expelling it toward a clear enemy, the system can condemn it without recognizing the ways it reproduces it in everyday life.

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This mechanism is not accidental.
It is structural.

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Never before has a civilization had such capacity to direct collective attention, regulate indignation, and administer silence without resorting to direct coercion. Explicit censorship is unnecessary when perceptual orientation is already aligned.

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None of this denies the need to denounce visible violence or relativizes concrete suffering. The problem is not denunciation itself, but its soothing use. It is not indignation, but its interested selectivity. The collective ego does not point in order to transform itself, but to preserve its image.

Changing the enemy does not alter this logic.
Refining the moral language does not either.

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As long as perception continues to be organized around the reduction of complexity, the need for belonging, and the discharge of guilt onto a convenient outside, civilization will continue to produce visible horrors while concealing others of greater scale that directly implicate it.

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The only real fissure appears when the ego ceases to organize the gaze.

This promises neither comfort nor superiority nor new certainties. It demands something more uncomfortable: to sustain complexity without reducing it, to accept material implication without projecting it, to inhabit discomfort without turning it into an enemy.

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It does not produce relief.
It does not guarantee belonging.
It offers no refuge.

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But it introduces a possibility that no selective condemnation can generate: lucidity.

And only from that lucidity can something begin that is rarely truly desired: the real resolution of conflicts.
Because resolving them would mean deactivating the very function they fulfill.

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The ego, individual or collective, claims to want peace, justice, the end of harm. But its stability depends on conflict. Without friction, without an enemy, without a threat to justify it, it would lose the privileged place from which it is organized.

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For the ego, conflict is not a problem to be solved, but a resource to be managed.

That is why it prolongs it, displaces it, or substitutes it, but rarely allows it to disappear.

To truly resolve it would demand something the ego does not voluntarily grant: abandoning centrality, renouncing moral superiority, and ceasing to define itself through opposition.

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Only when that logic is interrupted, when lucidity is used not to point but to implicate, can a transformation begin that does not need to preserve conflict in order to sustain itself.

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Not more effective at winning.
But for the first time, effective at ending.