Ronaldo, Messi and Ego
First, congratulations to Lionel Messi on helping Argentina reach a World Cup final. And congratulations to the people of Argentina.
People debating Messi vs Ronaldo online seem to be saying more and more, it seems: Messi is the greatest. But I don’t think this is just about football…
The ego is the definitive marker of our times, where we happen to find ourselves at this point in human evolution. Thank god, like the self-absorbed teenager, we’ll grow out it!
To me ego means two things: first it means paying a lot of attention to thoughts (even to the point of being completely absorbed in, consumed by, and even controlled by them.) Second it means creating a sense of identity from thought.
The first is probably pretty easy to understand and accept: for a lot of us, it’s a self-evident daily experience. The second is not. Typically we can barely understand or even imagine what this means, because it seems there’s no alternative. It’s hard to wrap your head around because we are like goldfish swimming in water who don’t have the first clue what water is. And that’s not our fault. As my great auntie Ethel used to say, ‘you can’t blame a goldfish.’
This identity is constructed from thoughts which are derived from our experience, i.e. our memory. The letdown is: memories are partial and unreliable, and entirely individual & private. Without fail when my grandparents came back from holiday he’d tell a story and she’d say ‘No, dear, that didn’t happen at all. It was like this’ (or vice versa) and then my mother would say, regular as clockwork, ‘Are you sure you went on the same holiday?’
Your version of the past (and of reality) may overlap with other people’s, but they can never be the same. Your memory, your model of reality, and the story of ‘your life’ (your identity) that you construct from it is an entirely individual, private thing. It doesn’t exist outside of your head.
It gets worse. The ‘pure’ ego is completely self-absorbed (in its entirely private reality), it’s keenly self-interested, and it’s categorically right. This may imply (if subconsciously) ‘I know better than everyone else’ or simply ‘I’m better than everyone else.’
If you’re Christiano Ronaldo, the insane thing is you actually are better than everyone else! (At soccer. Except for, perhaps, Messi.) So it really is open season for Christiano’s ego to gorge on and nurture the completely private but gorgeous thought-identity he’s created in his head, built on remembered glories of his past. You can’t really blame him for it! But as his ego has gone unchecked, over and over, into his personal narrative of the-wonder-of-Christiano, the feast has left it grossly overweight, in the very public window of the football-watching world.
The total bummer of all this for Christiano is - even if there is something substantial to back it up, which there undoubtedly is, in his case - “I’m the best” is just… a thought. It’s a concept. It’s an idea. And there’s only so much satisfaction you can take from something so ephemeral, no matter how aggrandizing any particular self-idea is.
And he doesn’t need this idea to function. He can just get up and have his (presumably delicious) breakfast and jump in the Lamborghini and pop off to training. He could probably function just as well, or even a lot better, without this particular concept. Self-concepts generally are not particularly valuable or even helpful when you’ve got to negotiate traffic, get to work on time, chat to the tea-lady, and all the rest of daily life. In fact self-concepts like this probably cut you off from a lot of people.
What’s more, if Christiano wants to indulge this thought (“I’m the best”), he has to support it. Like any beast, it needs to be fed. Like anything insubstantial, it needs to be reinforced. He has to hang on to it, invest in it, look for constant validation of it. Perhaps he surrounds himself with people who provide that validation, as many big egos do. Perhaps he has pictures of his superb self all over the walls of his home, with “I’m the best” written on them (signed by him, of course.) The point is it takes a lot of energy to maintain this or any self-concept and ultimately it’s largely unhelpful and even destructive.
To be clear – this is about all of us. This is where humanity is today, wasting all its energy on building and defending fantastical (personal or collective) self-concepts, that necessarily put us in opposition with others’ self-concepts. Yours is probably different from Christiano’s. You probably don’t wander around all day looking in every available mirror, blowing yourself a kiss, and telling yourself you’re the greatest (and so cute too!) Yours, like mine, is more likely to be about everyday stuff like your role in the family or at work, that opportunity you missed, what your parents or school did to you, or what a clever or stupid person you are. Christiano’s example is just a great one because it’s such a beautiful, textbook example of ego.
When Christiano is substituted or (shock-horror!) benched for a Manchester United or Portgual game, he struggles to take it in. “My greatness is not being appreciated!” Those thoughts about his own superiority have been so robustly buttressed all these years, he has invested so much in his outstanding but fictitious identity, that to all intents and purposes the model in his head is actual reality for him. (Again, this is all of us.) Because it’s real for him he acts as if he really is superior - and people dislike him for it.
That’s because deep down, we all know it’s phony. We know it’s unreal. Somewhere in our psyche we know people’s self-concepts are just ideas in their heads. We know on a deep level that any human is just the same as any other human. Beyond his skills and success, which have indeed bought joy to many, this is the greatest service that Christiano Ronaldo is doing for humanity. He is showing us the limitations, the frustrations, and ultimately the stupidity and humiliation of the thought-derived identity, by taking it to its beautiful purest extreme.
Why are people saying more and more that Messi is the greatest? Because for all his achievements, Messi has a humility, and a concomitant dignity, that Ronaldo doesn’t have. And people respond to that. They are simultaneously drawn to Messi’s dignity and repelled by Ronaldo’s egocentricity, because the dignity and the humility is natural in us, part of our inherent beauty and rightness, and the egoism is not.
The Messi vs Ronaldo question is far more than a footballing clash between two of its greatest ever gladiators; it is the very acting out and microcosm of the battlefield humanity finds itself on at this time in human history.
[Addendum: congrats to Messi on winning the World Cup and the perfect cherry on the icing of your incredible career. And thank you God / Universe / Whatever for this lovely little bit of justice. Cracking.]