About what selfishness is, you surely already know, and you surely also know someone who behaves like a textbook selfish person, an egocentric, an egoist, or simply a narcissist. Whatever your answer is, I want you to know that you'll certainly keep running into them, and I'll go further and say (maybe a little too confidently) that you're running into one even when you look in the mirror, there you go. This theory caught the interest of one of our readers named Zen, and just like with the piece on morality, here too we have an idea from one of you, which genuinely makes me happy. Getting to the point now, I hope, dear reader, that this reading lets you relax, maybe makes the time more pleasant, and if not, that it at least gives you something to think over on this beautiful Sunday.

It would be a shame for me to lay out his biography now, I assume every one of my readers already knows his personality and his almost godlike charisma, and his ego so sharp it could cut your finger, Napoleon used it like a weapon right up to the end, manipulating his opponents as well as his own soldiers. Admittedly that sounds fairly grotesque on its own, but you'll understand it has its grounding.

So Napoleon's figure starts to fit our puzzle, and his ego will be the actual core of the topic and something that will surely fascinate you a great deal. He was a man who believed very strongly in himself, in his own abilities, and in his own future. From tiny Corsica he made it to the top of France and eventually became its emperor. You could call it enormous ambition, you could call it a thirst for power, but you could also look at it a little differently. Maybe he simply wanted very badly to be someone great? A little ironic, if you catch my meaning.

We also know that this ambition spread through him like a virus from his earliest years, because even in his early writings he was already writing about ambition, the state, and his own place in history. So we can assume it wasn't really about France itself. And if it wasn't about France, then what makes his ego so intriguing?

Setting everything else aside, the most important thing is that Bonaparte believed, with total conviction, that he could see things others couldn't, and of course anyone familiar with psychological profiles might expect that this mix is often somewhat "borderline," or that it could simply blow up at some point. Over time Napoleon, in his own estimation, becomes a genuine "demigod," holding the first say over everything, and believing that judgment over the whole world should be passed by him and him alone.

And I think that's the moment that interests me most. Not the mere fact that he wanted to be great, but how strongly he began to believe in his own exceptionalism, and how strongly other people began to reckon with that vision of himself. Because you see, Napoleon's ego didn't stop at simply considering himself a man capable of great things. Over time it began to affect, more and more, the way he saw the people around him.

He could be remarkably generous toward those he valued, he could reward his people and build their loyalty, but at the same time he took opposition very badly. In his world, his own conviction about what should be done often carried enormous weight, if not the greatest weight of all. So really, his ego doesn't have to be something we immediately label as bad. A conviction of one's own worth, a desire to achieve something great, or even plain ambition, are none of them inherently bad.

The problem only starts once the ego begins deciding for the person, and the person himself becomes a prisoner of his own ego. With Napoleon this reached an extreme, and his own conviction about himself began affecting not only him, but also the people around him and, worse still, entire nations.

And this is where, for me, the more important part of the whole story begins, because sure, Napoleon was an extreme case, but ego itself isn't exactly reserved for people who want to become emperors. Every one of us carries some image of ourselves, wants to be seen a certain way, wants to achieve certain things, and very often makes decisions that, in some way, serve ourselves. And maybe that sounds trivial, but once you start really thinking it over, it turns out there are a huge number of such situations.

You can help someone because you love them, but at the same time you might want to feel needed. You can work hard for your family, but after all you also want a better life for yourself out of it. You can do something good for a total stranger, and then feel satisfaction from the fact that you did something good. And this is exactly where my real puzzle begins, because if we almost always get something out of our own actions, even if it's just feeling good, then where exactly does selfishness end?

And these situations aren't easy for me to explain. Because you see, if selfishness simply means doing something that in any way serves us, then it would be hard to find a person entirely free of it, right? Even when we do things for others, we often have some reason of our own. We want to help, we want to be needed, we want a clear conscience, or we simply want to know we did the right thing.

And that's exactly why, grotesque as it is given the heavy territory it touches, the question Zen sent in is no less interesting than the previous one about morality, and why is that? Because we're not fundamentally trying to answer whether a person is selfish, that part is obvious. What fits better here is whether our good behaviors can also carry something selfish inside them. And if so, does that make them any less good?

I don't know, and I hope I won't disappoint you by saying flat out that no, I have no idea whether that's the case, but I'll try to offer you a certain thesis, namely that even if you take it as settled that either there is no goodness in us, or there is, that's honestly less important than what you decide afterward and how you go on "tending to" your awareness of your own ego, and of course you won't follow in Napoleon's footsteps, though subjectively there's another side of the same coin hidden inside him, which one? Because what if we could set aside the dilemmas over whether it's the ego that's bad, or whether we ourselves are bad, and just tell Freud to get out of our heads?

In our current, modernist world, after the industrial-era reframing of success as a marker of capital, ambition, blah blah, young guys of the twenty-first century downright want to drop everything, focus on business, make millions, billions, and they push that ego to the limits of what's possible. I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, theoretically it's the same thing that worked out for Napoleon, this whole "grind." But the question is, why do so few of these guys (and girls, of course) manage to achieve what they set out to do, and Napoleon fits perfectly as an answer.

Because you see, dear reader, the deeper into the woods you go, the stronger an ego you need, at least that's how I see it. If he had thought to himself that he'd basically conquered everything he could, no point doing anything more, Napoleon's story would probably look completely different. Except that a person who achieves one thing very often immediately starts wanting the next one. A million stops being enough once you've seen a billion. One position stops being enough once you could have an even higher one. The ego starts doing something genuinely interesting, because instead of telling you "that's enough now," it starts telling you "you can still have more," and writing this, I mean that the ego genuinely says this, it's not a figure of speech.

Except something strange shows up here. To get high up, you have to believe you can get there. And once you're already up high, you have to be able to accept that maybe you actually can't climb any higher. And that second part strikes me as far harder. Because the ego on its own is excellent at convincing you that you can. It's much worse at telling you that you can't.

If ego can push a person further than they themselves once thought possible, it can also make them keep going when they should have already stopped. And I think every one of us knows this mechanism on a somewhat smaller scale. You want to achieve something, so you start. Then you hit that first goal, and suddenly that goal stops being enough. Another one appears, then another, until at some point it's hard to even say anymore whether you're still doing it because you genuinely want to, or because your ego won't let you accept the thought that you might not get to have something.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and for a really good reason, assuming you haven’t read the book yet. I could probably recommend Napoleon’s biography here, like I’ve been doing lately, where I usually connect a book about a certain person to the topic. But this time, I’m going in a different direction.

Crime and Punishment makes perfect sense because of its main character, who has an enormous, almost extreme ego, which, as you can probably guess, completely leads him astray. So overall, if I had to recommend something to better understand the human ego, I’d probably point you toward classic literature. And I’d start with Crime and Punishment.

And that's basically it for what I think about it, although as we well know, the topic of the ego is endless, so I could just as easily drag this essay on for another 5,000 words, but not wanting to waste your precious time, I'll save that for another day :) because my ego is telling me you enjoy reading the Sunday editions, thank you all so much.

PS. Yes, there was nothing last week, for which you'll have to forgive me, but I was traveling, and I didn't want to just throw material at you quickly, unprepared, like meat tossed on a table, and tell you to read whatever, written however. But I'm back now, and I have no intention of stopping writing for you.

Until Sunday.