How Kanye West solved his ego problem
If you’re a Black man in America, people don’t have high expectations of you. Starting from middle school, you are constantly being told, directly or indirectly, that you probably won’t amount to much. And statistically, they’re right. Black men are twice as likely to be unemployed and five times as likely to go to jail compared to White men. Black men are also likely to be poor: after all, the median Black household has only 8.7% of the wealth of a median White household.
So if you want to make it big as a Black man, you have to have a lot of confidence in yourself. Luckily a little boy called Kanye West had a mother who firmly believed in him, and told him he could be anything he wanted to be, and never to believe anyone who said otherwise. And she was proven right many times over.
Kanye started as a producer, making beats for local Chicago rappers. He slowly worked his way up until he could move to New York, and would eventually be able to sell his beats to Jay-Z: a dream come true for any producer. But Kanye had a dream of becoming a rapper himself. Many people with good intentions, including Jay-Z himself, advised against it, because he wasn’t very good at rapping. They said he should stick to what he was good at: producing beats. Kanye chose to ignore them and became one of the most successful rappers in history. Later, Kanye decided he wanted to go into fashion, and again, people told him he must be insane. Why would he embarrass himself trying to penetrate a notoriously difficult industry when he makes so much money with music? Again Kanye ignored them, and the Yeezy brand made him a billionaire.
Each time, Kanye learned that if he simply ignored anyone who tries to temper his ambitions and expectations, he was able to do amazing things. That then begged the question: is there anything he couldn’t do? Simply ignoring the realists became a superpower. The more confident he became, the more people wanted to talk him down, and this made him resolve to be even more confident, culminating in his proclamation of “I am a God”.
Then he crashed, went to the hospital, and got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. What happened?
By over-inflating his ego, his confidence that gave him superpowers, Kanye created a gaping split between his ideal self, the superman who can achieve anything, and his fallible human self, that well-meaning friends tried to warn him about. When your ego is so inflated, the slightest mistake or stroke of bad luck can bring about a crash: a sudden anxious fear that your whole life is a lie, that you will soon be unmasked and that the naysayers were right about you all along.
So how did Kanye solve this problem? Not by tempering himself and compromising with the realists (he ran for president), and also not by becoming even more arrogant. He resolved the tension by surrendering to a higher power, by becoming a devout Christian.
Kanye can still achieve amazing things, but not anymore through his own superpowers, but purely by the grace of God. Kanye’s ego is sidelined: he has become merely a tool, a medium through which God’s love is made manifest here on Earth. Instead of “I am a God”, he now sings “I bow down to the King upon the throne — my life is His I’m no longer my own”.
Isn’t that a clever trick? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t that the typical religious cop-out, by simply inventing an all-powerful God who solves all your problems?
According to Hegel, the Christian God, conceived as the Trinity, is the religious term for what philosophers call Absolute Reason: the idea that the universe is rational, meaningful. And when this Reason becomes self-conscious, as it has in humanity, it’s called Spirit.
I don’t believe that Kanye is Kanye because of some amazing natural talent. He happens to have come from certain conditions, faced certain obstacles, that forced him to see a Truth about our current time, and is able to express this Truth in a language we all understand. So in a way, Spirit has chosen him to be one of our time’s torchbearers to carry the light of human consciousness forward. And ego can only get in the way of that.
