The Hubris of Ego

About this poem

Ovid’s treatment of the Icarus myth has come to haunt us in the 21st Century. As a Cautionary Tale, the Icarus myth of the hubris of ego, idealized by the mantra of excessive pride, is now commonplace as an increasingly dominant phenomenon in modern societies around the world. Indeed, it needs to be affirmed that perhaps the greatest malady of our time affecting mankind as a pandemic, is the audacious rascality of ego, appearing psychologically in the form of a Freudian “Das Ich und das Es” and resulting in an extraverted domination of things material and temporal, over the more enduring introverted essence and centrality of the psyche and of things spiritual. This resultant and prevalent malady is the loss of a moral compass, amplified by the diffraction of the personality, now transmogrified, impersonalized, and manifested ambiguously as “it,” “they,” and “them,” with the clarity of gender now neutered and idealized in the malignant phenomena of a divided self. In this undertaking, bereft of an inner core, and with malice aforethought, we have become shadows of our spiritual selves. This three-line haiku poem is composed to remind us that we are off center with our priorities when, like Icarus, we choose pride of ego over pride of our inner spiritual selves and our spiritual values. more »