=Neurotic Complications=, however, due to the necessary repressions of
modern civilisation, throw them too often into conflict.
We might say that there is a natural source of conflict between them,
for the ego urge is selfish, aiming as it does at the conservation of
the individual and its personal upbuilding, while the sex urge, whose
aim is to assure the continuance of the species, is altruistic.
By altruistic I mean that one human being must, before finding the
complete gratification of his sex urge, join his body to that of
another human being of the opposite sex, whose sex urge he helps
gratify, the result of that cooperation being the creation of a third
human being.
From this we may see clearly how the neurotic temperament, unusually
self-centered, is likely to exacerbate whatever conflicts may exist
between ego and sex.
Even in the so called normal human being, that is, the human being
who in spite of life's repressions, manages to live at peace with his
environment and himself, the will-to-power, the desire for possession
and domination expresses itself constantly in what is generally
considered as typically sexual manifestations of love.
Do not lovers say that they "possess" each other. Was not the Biblical
God power before he became creation? In the beginning there was the
Word, that is the expression, the utterance of the divine ego.
Does not the unmated God of the Western nations symbolise the absolute
supremacy of power over sex? And when people pray to God, what do they
ask for, in the majority of cases, if not power (help)?
=Self-Love.= Yet we often consider the craving for power as a form
of love, self-love. When Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" he
testified to the fact that our self-love is the most powerful human
feeling and he presented it as a goal which our love for others _might_
reach.
He admitted that we all love ourselves first and he was too world-wise
to advise men, as some of his followers have done, to repress their
self-love. He only advised men to try and love others as much as they
loved themselves.
All the great conflicts between nations have been precipitated by ego
rather than by love. Love and sex were responsible, we are told for
the most famous war in history and legend, the Trojan war. I am quite
sceptical about it in spite of the "evidence" presented by a poet who
probably never existed as an individual, Homer.
I know, however, that the most atrocious war ever fought, the world
war, was unchained, not by sexual jealousy, but by the most sordid, the
grossest form of predatory ego cravings, the will-to-commercial-power.
In innumerable cases, ego overpowers sex and compels it to suit its
purposes. It masquerades in the guise of sex and deceives many as to
its true nature. Prostitution, in its last analysis, is the enslavement
of sex by ego, sex working to feed the ego and supply it with
necessities or luxuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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