Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’ – Nietzsche
Without an ego, man is a coward without character, but with an inflated ego, he loses his sanity. If you seek praise, be wary of the dangers of succeeding. Too much praise can get to anyone’s head.
Hitler, a semi-articulate speaker with improperly defined values, was loved by crowds because of his charisma and anger (which perfectly mirrored the German sentiment at the time). But before receiving any praise, he had a downtrodden life. He first spent time in the trenches of World War 1 and lost all his friends. Then he was unemployed and rejected as an artist.
If that was not enough, his country was in political and economic turmoil. Germany’s collapsing economy went through a period of hyperinflation. The Germans faced the Communist threat from the east and had a terrible treaty they had to sign.
When Hitler became a politician and talked to the crowd, he addressed the unconscious fears and suspicions of the German people, but he did so by trial and error. Some of what he said made people wake up and listen – when he noticed that, he said more of those things. And he dropped the other parts of his speeches when they fell flat. There was an unconscious dialectic taking place between him and the crowd that was mediated by his own consciousness. He shaped not only the content of his speeches this way, but his mannerisms and style to suit the public sentiment perfectly.
Crowds grew bigger, and more people joined his cause. Hitler reached a point in his political career where everyone around him told him that he was the savior of their nation. If you, like Hitler, were told the same things about your nation, at what point do you start to believe it?
Perhaps a hundred people would do it for the average person. But what about a million people?
Of course, Hitler was also consciously manipulating people and hired propagandists, but still bear the message. Hitler learned to appeal to crowd’s darkest fantasies. You do not need approval when a million people are supporting you, and at that point, your ego takes the place of your rationality.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely not because there is anything inherently wrong with power, but when given to a single individual, it distorts their egos to epic proportions, and deludes them with a deep belief that they can make no errors.
Like Hitler, you will try inflate your own self-image by doing more of the things that have earned you social praise. On the one hand, an inflated ego can be dangerous to others, because it could lead someone like Hitler to truly believe that they are the saviors of their nation, and will commit atrocities as a consequence of this belief.
On the other hand, an inflated ego can be dangerous to oneself. By having an exaggerated self-image, you will feel that success, in all affairs of life, is owed to you, and not something that is earned. And if you fail with an inflated ego, then you will be more likely to blame others. If you are consistent with yourself, it cannot be, that someone as adept as yourself would fail without the intervention of nefarious characters. In short, the more your ego is inflated ,the more you avoid adopting responsibility.