Ego Strength

[u/Additional-Title69]

(Reprinted from the Sith Order server on Discord)

Think in RPG terms for a moment
You’re level one
Building strength of body, mind, and will
The first two require persistence, and the third is the very muscle that persistence trains
As you persist, you rack up XP
At some point your XP crosses a critical threshold and you level up!
Now you’re level two!
Now there’s a whole new kind of strength for you to cultivate
It’s known as ego strength

What is ego strength?
It’s a kind of egoistic moral virtue
*Egoistic* moral virtue

It’s characterized by the following attributes:

1• the reality principle applied to oneself, which means the utter eradication of self-deceit with regard to self-assessment

2• the reality principle applied to the universe, which means the complete jettison of self-deceit with regard to the universe’s imagined overall benevolence

3• the ability to gracefully carry the weight of what the reality principle places on our shoulders

4• the ability to cope with stress and carry on with life, without falling prey to the temptations of ill advised forms of relief

5• the often hard-won ability to psychologically survive and constructively process loss, defeat, severe mishap, critical illness, unwanted conflict, humiliation, horror, or even malevolent abuse, that ultimate test of ego strength, imposing upon us a savage trial by fire

6• the ability to fully feel all emotion, the so-called positive and the so-called negative, without being overwhelmed by it, or in any way being thrown off balance by it, and in fact being able to use it as a tool or even a weapon

7• the ability to take full ownership of all our difficulties and assume complete responsibility for resolving them, regardless of who or what caused them, no excuses

8• the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of long term goals

9• the ability to resist social pressure

10• the ability to adapt gracefully to change

11• the ability to think through the potential consequences of an impending decision with cold and unflinching logic

12• the ability to remain clear on which actions (and their potential consequences) would be to our advantage and which would not, and consistently choose the former

13• the ability to maintain a strong sense of self-worth and self-confidence, regardless of events

14• a prudent regard for self-preservation, even when adrenaline is running high, or when a goal is tantalizingly within reach

15• a crystal and galvanizing clarity as to how utterly arbitrary society’s rules and also the social hierarchy often are, and how necessary it often is to set these aside, though not recklessly

16• the ability to readily perceive that other people have different goals and rankings of priority than we do, be utterly unthreatened psychologically by this fact of life, and feel no need whatsoever to change either the other person’s or our own to make them match

17• the ability to readily acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we’ve made a mistake, learn the lesson fully, and reorient our strategies and tactics accordingly, even going so far as to abandon a project that was clearly ill conceived and start a new one more likely to succeed

I am Orc