Listening to some people talk about their ego makes them sound like they consider the ego a vestigial organ of the psyche. It's not a group of functions that enable us to do many of those things that define us as the rational creatures that we uniquely are, nor is it an emergent property of consciousness that speaks to our ability to abstract concepts of the self (which, in itself, is a pretty impressive feat). It's more like the appendix of the mind. It's there because we haven't managed to get rid of it, and sometimes it gets really inflamed, causing pain and requiring surgery. Seriously, why do we still have this thing?

Or maybe the ego is like wisdom teeth: we know why we once needed them, humans are already showing signs of evolving out of them and many people who have them get them surgically removed before they can cause a problem.

One last analogy, since Martin and George are both runners as well as sports practitioners: these conceptions of ego are like traditional views of the foot. In the New York Times bestseller Born to Run, Christopher McDougall puts this "born-broken mentality" into evolutionary context:

And then, according to [this] account of evolution, we got stuck. While the rest of our bodies adapted beautifully to solid earth, somehow the only part of our body that actually touches the earth got left behind. We developed brains and hands deft enough to perform intravascular surgery, yet our feet never made it past the Paleolithic era.

Similarly, the "born-broken mentality" of a caveman ego holds that, as we began to civilize and make tools from metal instead of stone, we got stuck. While our bodies adapted in a way that supported the more cognitively advanced tasks that came along with our cognitive evolution towards written language, mathematics, art, music, philosophy and religion, our egos "never made it past the Paleolithic era." Ego, by this account, travelled out of the cave when it really should have stayed there.

And on the next day, “Let there be ego?”

If there are evolutionary approaches to impugning the ego, it stands to reason there are creationist ones as well. And there are.

Author and psychologist Steven Taylor posits that an “ego explosion” launched humanity out of an “earlier, healthier state.” In this prehistoric and pre-egoistic era, according to Taylor, humans lived peacefully amidst plenty. There was no violence, no status, no plagues. Humans spent less than 20 hours a week foraging for food. For this “original affluent society,” in the words of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whom Taylor approvingly quotes, perhaps the most difficult thing was that “half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.”

Life became “nasty, brutish and short” only after an environmental catastrophe forced early humans to give up their hunter-gatherer ways. Survival and selection pressures caused humans to “[develop] a stronger and sharper sense of identity, or of individuality.”

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the Garden of Eden story with archaeological and anthropological footnotes. Taylor calls this turning point in history “The Fall of Man” and speaks of other cultures and peoples who are “unfallen.” Ego, in this reboot, plays the role of original sin.

Since this book is about ego in high-performance work environments, it’s worth keying in on one aspect of Taylor’s pre-Fall, pre-ego utopia.

Taylor leaves hanging the question of what those early humans did with the “half the time” when they did “not seem to know what to do with themselves.” His reconstructions of that era are based on circumstantial evidence. He does not reference ruins or writings. He alludes to “prehistoric art galleries” only to note the absence of depictions of warfare, not to tell us what they show about the individuals and societies who made the paintings.

Ego drives progress: What do you think of that?

Affluent societies leave a mark on the land and on history, from Parthenons to skyscrapers, philosophers to scientists. The “original” one, in Taylor’s telling, left little more than bones. They had millennia of free time on their hands from having to spend no more than half a work week on their subsistence, and yet… nothing. Within a few hundred years of the “ego explosion,” though, history takes off.

Taylor is making a powerful point about ego. Without ego, we eat and reproduce. That was the to-do list in the Garden of Eden. That was the extent of what it meant to be a human.

Then Adam and Eve took a bite of knowledge or, if you prefer, the environment selected for stronger egos. With ego, we have careers and professions that we passionately invest ourselves in. We have the values that we create, and the rewards that come with them. We’re able to know what those values are, how to achieve them and hopefully how to enjoy them. We have a richer and more profound existence than doing the minimum to survive. None of the contributors to this book do the minimum amount necessary just to get enough food to eat - if they did, they wouldn’t be interesting enough to interview or read about.

Throughout EGOals, we talk about the standards and values that shape our ego. Taylor gives us a way to start that conversation.

Let’s accept his basic timeline as true: pre-ego Garden of Eden, ego explosion, post-ego to the present day. The external world presented an existential crisis to those early humans. Some of them had components of their personalities that engaged in a relationship with the external world that enabled them to survive. Despite his pseudo-evolutionary cast, Taylor does not marvel at how those early humans adapted their minds to confronting the challenge of survival in a hostile environment. He does not credit the ego with helping mankind overcome the zero-sum resource competition of that primitive era to bring us to a point where we have more people enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before, even if it comes with downsides.

Taylor condemns that relationship - the ego - knowing it brought us to the world of today.

A world where, among other marvels, you can take break from everything that brings your life meaning to read a book written by a Frenchman and an American who have never met, illustrated by a Lebanese artist and long jumper (who they also have never met) - during a global pandemic, mind you - about their experiences working with some of the most advanced sciences, technologies and human beings the world has ever known.

By your standard of value, was the “ego explosion” the Fall of Man, or the beginning of man’s rise?