Narrative and the Ego
Shadowlands #6
In the film Memento by Christopher Nolan (2000), former insurance investigator Leonard relentlessly pursues the man who murdered his wife. He tracks the man all over California, moving from town to town investigating tips and pursuing leads. This proves difficult, however, as Leonard suffers from a brain injury that prevents him from forming new memories. He has anterograde amnesia, meaning he can remember his entire life before the injury, but nothing after, and cannot keep track of what’s going on around him for more than five minutes before he forgets it all and becomes disoriented.
To continue his pursuit of the murderer, and function in daily life, he relies upon constantly taking notes and photographs to remind himself of his current situation and plan: where he’s been, what he’s doing right now, and where he’s going next. Rather than being able to rely on memory, he must constantly, manually update his timeline—his self-narrative.
Throughout the film, Leonard (and the audience) are repeatedly confronted with the suspicion that his notes and photographs might not be reliable; that the people around him are not who they say they are; and that the self-story he’s written out for himself may be a lie.
The film is notable for having a strange and novel narrative structure: it’s backwards. The end of Leonard’s story is shown first, then the film progresses chronologically in reverse, until the beginning of his journey is revealed at the end of the film. The result is a satisfying unraveling of the mystery of why Leonard is on his current path in the first place.
Memento is compelling, and fun, specifically because it is a narrative puzzle. The reverse chronology forces the audience to pay close attention to every detail, and piece together a strange and confusing timeline, mirroring Leonard’s disorienting and fractured reality. Every scene is a new piece to the puzzle, and the audience must rapidly figure out where to place that piece in order to complete the story.
What’s interesting is that the film’s narrative puzzle, and how it works, is not explained to the audience beforehand—we are simply thrust into the confusion of a story playing in reverse. But despite the counterintuitive structure, despite the lack of instructions, the audience knows how to put the pieces together in the proper order and complete the narrative in their heads.
But how? How is it that we can be given a garbled mess of images, characters, and dialogue, and somehow arrange that information into a coherent, linear timeline purely by instinct?
Because we are doing it daily, everywhere we go, all the time. I am doing it right now as I write this chapter. You are doing it right now as you read it. Humans, in their very nature, are authors and consumers of narrative. It is the water we swim in. Reality, as we know it, is not just a landscape of objects, but a landscape of time, where we fluidly arrange those objects onto a self-perpetuating timeline—a self-narrative of past, present, and future.
When our ape ancestors developed techne—began to objectify the world, develop language, and slowly emerge into consciousness—they also developed a relationship with time. We began to project time-objects into our reality, like ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’; or ‘yesterday’, ‘this morning’, and ‘tomorrow’; or thoughts like “Wait...”, “Save some food for later...”, “The snows will melt four moons from now...” and so on.
Techne entails problem formulation, which entails getting from your current state to a desired state, which entails the concept of time, which entails the phenomenon of narrative. Problem solving is not much different than formulating a story about: where you are, where you’re trying to go, and how you’re going to get there.
Therefore, this capacity for narrative afforded powerful, never-before-seen problem-solving capacities. It made humans very adaptable: the ability to keep track of how long ago something happened, how many times you’ve tried something, or how long you might have to wait for something to appear. But more importantly, it afforded the ability to constantly, fluidly adjust those timelines in your mind. Just like humans can find 40 different uses for a tree branch, they can project 40 different timelines into the future, and choose whichever trajectory makes the most sense given the current context.
This allowed humans to constantly innovate novel solutions and powerfully adapt to any and all environments throughout the world. For instance, the rhythms of surviving in the British Isles may have been different than the rhythms of the American plains; you may have needed to hunt game weekly and fish every morning in the former, check your traps every two days and move camp monthly to follow the buffalo in the latter.
Additionally, if you had to abruptly change your mode of existence in order to survive, changing your narrative allowed you to do that. “I was a hunter... now I am a warrior in an army... and now I am a retired farmer” are all different self-stories that allow someone to abruptly change gears, implement a new mode of existence and leave an old one behind. Animals cannot make these adjustments; there is no story; there is simply instinct conformed to a specific natural habitat. Move an animal out of that habitat and they die.
Being able to objectify time—to slice and dice it, to organize and rearrange it, and most importantly to predict it—would have been powerfully adaptive; the difference between life and death. And so humans evolved complex faculties for narrative, for arranging the objects of consciousness onto a timeline of past-present-future.
The thing responsible for weaving these narratives is the Ego. The Ego essentially formulates objects, arranges them onto a timeline, and then feeds that timeline back into the body. In doing this, the Ego creates a path for us. It creates a linear trajectory for us to follow, which allows us to move swiftly and effectively through our existential surroundings, to be adaptable, decisive, act with purpose, and get things done.
This linear, coherent timeline is our self-narrative. Everybody has one. It is unconscious, a priori, preceding and giving rise to experiential conscious reality. We maintain, adjust, and follow our self-narrative very closely, though we hardly realize we’re doing it.
In Memento, Leonard’s Ego is broken: he cannot make updates to his self-narrative. In order to know what to do next, to know what path to follow, he must update his narrative manually by taking notes, snapping photographs, and drawing maps. He must write out the facts about where he’s been, what he’s doing right now, and what he needs to do next.
Our Ego does this automatically by creating memories, using those memories to constellate some kind of notion of now, and simulating a multiplicity of potential realities that stretch into the future so that we may create a linear, decisive trajectory for action and—most importantly—share that trajectory with others tribemates through language.
To do this, firstly, the Ego weaves the past. It creates memories: interpretations of where we’ve been and what we’ve done, in service of guiding future actions. Memories are not ‘objective’ recordings; they are tools; they are the past's advice for the future. Accordingly, the past may be updated over time—optimized—by things we encounter later in life. For instance, if a woman suddenly learns that her husband has been cheating on her the last five years, she will begin to unpack her memories and possibly rewrite them, from a pleasant and content period of time to one of deception and tragedy. Even the ‘facts’ may change. Maybe she will update her self-story to include several occasions where he disappeared for long periods of time, in which he must have been cheating. What ‘really happened’ may not matter as much to the body as having evidence that she needs to leave this man and protect herself from it happening again. Motivation and guidance over fact.
Secondly, the Ego weaves the future. The future is a complex of simulations we run in order to optimize our decision-making in the now. I might imagine a future where I live in the forest by a waterfall, writing books, raising my family, and think to myself, “Cool.” I confirm this simulation—this potential future—and begin taking whatever actions will get me there. This narrative becomes my problem-space, a framework for my projections, through which I filter all incoming situations. Family-man-writer-living-in-the-forest becomes my context, and the objects of the world take the form of ‘helpful’ or ‘hindrance’ in relation to that context.
Lastly, the Ego weaves the present, which is kind of like the border between past memory and future simulation. The present is constantly slipping both into the past becoming memory, and into the future by virtue of time moving in the forward direction. So we exist in this kind of narrative borderlands, a collision of timelines, a liminal space in which the Ego is hard at work objectifying the world, weaving both memory and simulation. In this way, the Ego is the mediator of time. And that mediation is what we experience as the now.
But it’s important to note that our self-narrative is not only a timeline, but an identity: a coherent complex of ‘Me’ by which we live by. It is an autobiography that’s always ‘on’, always being constellated by the conscious mind.
“I am.” “I exist.” “I become.”
Identity is uniquely human. Animals do not have an identity because they do not have narrative. Even animals that respond to the name we’ve given them are just reacting to a command pattern. Your dog does not think to itself, “I am Spot, Guardian of the Backyard,” because your dog has no self-story—it only has instinct. If you sit your dog down in front of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, it will not follow the plot, because a dog has no Ego, no techne, no language, no capacity for narrative.
Because the Ego is charged with maintaining a coherent, linear path for us to follow, it can be very resistant to contradiction. It wants to keep our existence moving in a focused direction, rather than flailing, splintering, or collapsing under the weight of paradox. And so the Ego is constantly paying attention to everything that’s happening, objectifying the world, ingesting loads and loads of information, and using that information to augment, perpetuate, and confirm its master self-narrative—to confirm that we’re on the right path.
For instance, if my story is “I’m going to be a professional soccer player”, I will look to confirm that I am consistently competing at the highest level, that I am climbing the ranks in sports competition, that I am still young enough to make it, and that people in my position have demonstrated the ability to make money in this sport. If all the evidence points to ‘yes’, my story of “I am going to be a professional soccer player” is confirmed, and I will continue on with the path my Ego has laid out for me, continue to formulate the problem-space according to that context.
However, the Ego occasionally runs into evidence that is contradictory to its self-narrative—evidence that it may be flawed or even wrong—and then is prompted to adjust the self-narrative accordingly. “Coach has removed me from starting the last few games (contrary evidence); perhaps I need to train harder and live a healthier lifestyle (narrative adjusted).” “Every time I try to dribble straight to the goal, I lose the ball and fail to score (contrary evidence); perhaps I need to pass the ball and rely on my teammates more (narrative adjusted).” The self-story gets adjusted, altering the problem-space, resulting in a different course of action.
But these adjustments require egoic labor. The Ego has to expend energy rewriting the narrative, and it doesn’t always want to do that. Adjusting the narrative is also risky: it changes our path, it changes our problem-space, resulting in different decisions. What if we make a bad adjustment that results in bad decisions? That could mess up our lives. In the ancient world, that could have easily killed us.
For these reasons, the Ego is cautious about adjusting the master self-narrative. It is resistant to making changes. It may even refuse to make changes. If a friend were to tell us, “You’re 35 years old now; if you haven’t made it as a professional soccer player yet, you’re probably not going to,” we may respond angrily. We may stop talking to this friend. We may ignore this evidence completely, not even register it consciously, in order to maintain the self-story of “I am going to be a professional soccer player,” and keep on living our lives the same way we’ve been living for the last fifteen years, in pursuit of the dream.
We see these egoic patterns at play in confirmation bias: only registering evidence that confirms our narrative while ignoring evidence that contradicts it. We also see it in cognitive dissonance with psychological stress or mental discomfort experienced by a person confronted with holding contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. That’s because the egoic labor required for narrative adjustment manifests as pain. It can even be agonizing if the adjustment is radical enough.
The woman confronted with the fact that her husband has been cheating on her experiences a radical contradiction to the self-narrative of “I’m in a happy, functional marriage.” A radical contradiction is very painful. It involves a ton of egoic labor: she might scream, bawl, lash out at her environment; she will likely be in a traumatized and fragile state for quite some time, maybe even the rest of her life, as she endeavors to dismantle the old self-narrative, and make the painful adjustments to who she is, how she got here, and where’s she going next, now that her marriage is over.
Which is why—even when the evidence seems overwhelming—people are tempted to simply ignore what’s happening, refuse to believe the obvious, to deny all self-narrative contradictions. “My husband is out late, again, because he works long hours,” “My husband smells like women’s perfume because he works with someone who uses it,” “My husband doesn’t touch me anymore because he’s so tired and stressed from work.”
In a different example, we often hear the story of the person who hits rock-bottom, and only then realizes they need to make a change and get help. The Ego tries desperately to maintain a narrative of “this is fine” or “nothing needs to change” or “go ahead and have another drink.” It sometimes takes something truly shocking—radically contradictory with overwhelming evidence—for the Ego to shatter its narrative and scramble to construct a new one: “Jesus Christ, I woke up in the gutter this morning covered in my own vomit. I really have a problem. I need help.” That’s why the first step to recovery is usually admitting you have a problem: stop denying the contradictions to your self-narrative; accept the evidence that your story of “everything is fine and normal” is wrong.
Building off of chapter 2, I’ll further divide the self into three interpretations: the Ego, the Soma, and the Torch. The Ego is an autobiographical narrative-weaver, objectifier, and language user. The Soma is loosely the ‘body’; everything that might be said to encapsulate our physical, corporeal existence; the thing that existed long before the Ego ever did, and gave rise to it. The Torch is the intergenerational, tribal, biological and cultural entity that each individual—Ego and Soma—is born out of, and tasked with protecting, augmenting, and passing off into the future. So something akin to: mind, body, and tribe.
These three selves relate to each other kind of like a Matryoshka doll, with the Ego nested inside the Soma, and the Soma nested inside the Torch. If the Ego is dissolved when you’re blackout drunk (no longer weaving memories) the Soma carries on without it, for the Soma transcends and includes the Ego. If the Soma dies of old age, the Torch carries on without it through the Soma’s children and culture, for the Torch transcends and includes the Soma.
So when we’re talking about Ego—when we’re talking about our mythology of self, our autobiographical identity, our story of where we came from and where we’re going—we are talking about what we generally consider to be conscious reality. As you sit at your computer reading this chapter, the thing that is ‘experiencing’ the world, that has a sense of “I exist”, a sense of time, a sense of being-there—is the Ego. You—the thing I am addressing right now—are the Ego. You are the autobiographical, social, conscious self. But you are not, exactly, the Soma, the physical body. And therefore, you are not the one in charge; you are not the one making decisions.
And this is where things get weird, confusing, and perhaps even a little bit disconcerting. The Ego—the thing we experience as ‘I’, the thing that seems to be living out ‘reality’—isn’t in control of anything, other than objectifying and weaving a narrative. It then feeds that narrative back into the Soma, which may or may not consider the Ego’s story when making decisions.
You see, when our ape ancestors evolved the capacity for techne and language over several million years, the brain did not abruptly rewire itself to hand over complete control to this emergent new thing called consciousness. Rather the Ego evolved because it did something useful for the Soma, which was useful for the Torch.
Though techne and language probably took hold very quickly, their evolution is still along a continuum. It’s not as if one moment we could not formulate objects, then the next moment we could build machines. We are animals, and this capacity for language and technology emerges like a little seed out of our deeply embodied, animal existence—it does not simply erase that embodiment, that several billion-year-old system that drives us to do the things we do; it’s merely an add-on, a feature that assists us in achieving our torchbearing objectives.
So the mind serves the body, not the other way around. The Ego is consulted by the Soma to help problem-solve—not to decide ‘what’ to do, but ‘how’ we might do it, and—most importantly—how to explain it to our tribe mates.
The Ego can do several useful things for the Soma: it can weave a past-present-future timeline, allowing the Soma to make better decisions in the now; it can wield techne and language, which can drive the creation of skills and tools and then deploy them to help the Soma pass the Torch.
But most importantly, the Ego acts as the spokesperson for the Soma, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the Soma is thinking. The Ego whips up stories for the Soma. It is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for the Soma’s actions, and finding ways to justify whatever the Soma wants to do next—whether or not those justifications are accurate.
For instance, if the Soma is afraid of going up on stage to sing karaoke in front of a crowd, the Ego might come up with a story, “Karaoke is stupid.” Or if the Soma wants to have a romantic relationship, but without any expectations or accountability from peers, the Ego might whip up, “We are just friends who sleep together.” Or if the Soma is in a toxic relationship, but is afraid of being alone, the Ego will come up with, “Regularly being beaten and insulted is just how people resolve their differences and is perfectly normal.” The Soma has irrational needs, and the Ego finds a way to rationalize them. It will lie, bend the truth, and use faulty logic to achieve this if necessary; it will weave a bullshit story to cover the Soma’s tracks.
This is because once humans developed language and began to use it to engage in tribal politicking, it became valuable for Somas to carry around a full-time public relations agent. This is also why we are so good at lying, acting, and deception. The Ego evolved to serve the strategic purpose of managing our reputation, building alliances, and recruiting followers to support our side in the disputes that are common to tribal life.
At the end of Memento, Leonard comes to realize that his self-story—that he is heroically pursuing the murderer of his wife—is flawed; that not only is he living out a lie, but he’s constructed that lie himself, intentionally—from his notes and photographs and tattoos—to construct a fake timeline that gives himself direction and purpose.
What’s creepy, is that we are likely doing this ourselves: weaving a story to rationalize our situation and clinging to it tightly, ignoring all contradictory evidence, in order to avoid a difficult truth, the pain of narrative collapse, the agony of having to build a new story of “who I am,” “where I’m going,” and “what my life’s about” from scratch. The prospect of narrative collapse—that my self-story is bullshit, that I am out of touch with the world, that I am living a lie—is terrifying. So we avoid it at all costs, regardless of the evidence.
But allowing our narratives to collapse is not only necessary, but healthy. That is why a major sign of wisdom and maturity is the capacity for entertaining contradiction. People who tend to handle themselves well in the world, make good decisions, skillfully problem-solve, and adapt to any situation usually have a highly developed, highly integrated Ego. In other words, they are skilled at writing, maintaining, and adjusting a healthy self-narrative, even if that means occasionally tearing it down.
These individuals readily admit when they are wrong about something; they know when to apologize to someone; they know when they do not know something. They can deftly handle egoic labor, and do so willingly; they change their self-story skillfully: not weakly conceding whenever someone tells them they’re wrong; not stubbornly refusing to accept that they might be; but having the discernment to know when their narrative is flawed, and the will to make the necessary adjustments to get in proper touch with the world, reorient their existence, and carve the proper path forward.
Such individuals also understand the subordination of the Ego to the Soma: that we operate body-first; that most of the psyche lies within the unconscious; that we need to have a loving, communicative relationship with our bodies, with our inner-child, with our inner-animal. That the irrational, emotional self is not the enemy; that it does no good to deny its existence or repress its needs; that if we cut off communication with the unconscious body it does not subdue it, it only gives it the freedom to act independently of the rational mind, to burst forth at inappropriate times, in inappropriate ways, and make us do things we regret.
Such individuals know that we must accept the Ego as a mere passenger riding in the backseat of the Soma (who’s riding in the backseat of the Torch), and willingly, lovingly offer directions, without demanding control of the steering wheel which we can never truly reach. That is wisdom; that is maturity; that is the way.
Later in the series, we will come to see that the Ego has become inflated in the modern world. Not only is it engorging itself on a scintillating landscape of archetypal decadence, fondling a projection of itself through online avatars frolicking in a virtual pleasure house, but we’ve come to develop an entire worldview that reifies the Ego as the one true self, the ultimate truth-sayer, the king of the real. Meanwhile, the Soma is relegated to a gross inconvenience anchoring us to an unpleasant earthly prison, and the Torch reduced to a ghost, haunting the halls of a forgotten temple buried beneath the sands of time.
