Thinking (T)

Ego contraction

 

Introduction

To recap: Both ego expansion and ego contraction hark back to socialization in early childhood and the punishments we received from our parents when we pushed at the limits that they set. When we are two years old, we bounce back and forth between ego expansion (self-assertion to test limits) and ego contraction (backing down when faced with anxiety). 

 

As adults we continue to play out that same dynamic. When our comfort zone begins to feel too confining we engage in ego expansion and depart from our conventional narratives; but then we feel anxiety when we get push-back from our environment and/or we simply feel that we're too far outside our comfort zone of conventionality; so we respond to anxiety with ego contraction, that is, by reining in our ego and retreating back into our comfort zone.

 

But, as I said above, there may be a lot of difference among individuals in their tolerance for anxiety and conflict. People with a bias toward ego expansion differ from people with a bias toward ego contraction in the following ways:

• People with a bias toward ego expansion tend to move toward the outside extremes (ego expansion into extreme one-sidedness); for them, leaving their comfort zone may be a spur to action; when they encounter push-back, they may even welcome the challenge of a conflict;

• People with a bias toward ego contraction, on the other hand, are often overly fearful of conflict; they can get in the habit of hunkering down in their comfort zone, adopting a posture of retreat, and playing it safe in life to avoid anxiety, conflict, and disappointment. They can become so focused on avoiding the negative that it may never occur to them to aspire to the positive.

 

In the standard four-position spectrum, people with a bias toward ego contraction will favor the "conventional extraversion" or "conventional introversion" position (depending on whether they are extraverts or introverts) and try as much as possible to avoid ego expansion into extreme one-sidedness on either side:

 

Extreme one-sided extraversion --> Conventional one-sided extraversion X--X Conventional one-sided introversion <-- Extreme one-sided introversion

 

People with a bias toward ego contraction are likely to ignore the channels that society provides for ego expansion (or find them too much effort) and instead seize upon society's warnings about hubris leading to a fall from grace or homilies about the virtues of humility. Based on negative experiences in the past, they seem to view ego expansion as something generally to be avoided; as they see it, the anxiety and sense of doom that accompanies ego expansion is fate's way of warning them of approaching disaster.

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Long-term ego contraction can take a number of forms, such as a person laboring under a burden of anxiety, guilt, or fear, experiencing a lack of self-confidence, or even pursuing an ascetic self-improvement lifestyle. 

 

People with a bias toward ego contraction will of course experience an occasional need to experience ego expansion: Tired of living under the limitations of a negative self-image or a punishing self-improvement routine, they may occasionally give into the need to binge on "comfort food" or rebel against the constraints of conscience by overindulging a vice such as alcohol. 

 

Petty rebellions of these sorts are often followed by a hangover of guilt and a resolution to avoid such indulgences in the future. Once the need for ego expansion is temporarily satisfied by a break from routine and a binge, it becomes easier to return to a state of ego contraction with redoubled resolve. But ego contraction is restrictive and difficult to maintain for very long, and the binges and indulgences keep occurring periodically. In their own way, people with a bias toward ego contraction end up bouncing between extremes of expansion and contraction just like everyone else. 

 

Such people would do better to pursue a longer-term remedy by analyzing their motives for pursuing ego contraction, moderating whatever burden they might be carrying, finding healthier outlets for ego expansion, and seeking more balance between contraction and expansion.

 

Risk aversion

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says that humans generally prefer safety over risk. He says that humans are, by nature, loss-averse: "You almost certainly dislike losing more than you like winning."[5] He says that loss aversion is a "biological and psychological view in which negativity and escape dominate positivity and approach. [...] The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal's odds of living long enough to reproduce. [...] Threats are privileged above opportunities, as they should be."[6]

 

Some people deal with that anxiety by sticking to their comfort zone and simply blinding themselves to the alternatives. They refuse to see the complexities and ambiguities of life, devoting themselves instead to a circumscribed, conventional, whitewashed view of life and love. They live their entire lives according to simplistic, soft-hearted narratives like some character in a romantic social novel.

 

In this manner they stay in the mainstream of socially approved narratives. It stills their anxiety and keeps them in their comfort zones. But conventional one-sidedness is still only "half of a truth." Society's approved narratives (whether couched as conservative morality, progressive political correctness, public safety, virtue signaling, etc.) are often so simplistic that they become impossibly noble, with the result that such people must live out a confined, restricted lifestyle in order to conform. They may miss out on opportunities and never realize their full potential. Under those conditions, life becomes about covering one's backside, anticipating and placating critics, keeping a low profile, self-censorship, etc.

 

It's a type of perfectionism: Such people fear making mistakes so they stick to their strengths. But in an uncooperative and ever-changing world, novelty and risk increasingly hem them in and imprison them.

 

In his book Conversationally Speaking, communication consultant Alan Garner describes a visit he made to a ward at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute: "I came at 10 in the morning and saw most of the patients just sitting quietly in their chairs. A few were watching television and one was reading a book. A psychologist friend showing me around told me privately, 'What you see is living proof of the maxim that "Perfectionism paralyzes." Come back later this afternoon--come back tomorrow--and you'll see the same people sitting in the same chairs doing the same things. Why do they waste their time like this? Simple: They're afraid to make a mistake, afraid to fail. And since they never try to do anything, they never do make any mistakes. But they also never get the exhilaration that comes from succeeding.'"[7]

 

Political correctness can have the same effect on people. People uncritically buy into political correctness as a socially approved narrative, but it sets the bar so high that passivity and inaction seem the only safe avenues. In a 1993 New York Times article Camille Paglia talks about the effect of political correctness on Ivy League college campuses: "The totally P.C. male is so anxious about whether he's doing the right thing, he's afraid to do anything. [...] They're like 'nowhere men,' blank and affectless."[8] (Paglia is referring to the 1965 Beatles song "Nowhere Man.")

 

Other people may take a darker, more fearful route. They are probably all too aware of the alternatives offered by life outside their comfort zone. But freedom doesn't have a natural endpoint, and it's easy to slide into excess and extreme onesidedness. When that happens, daemonic fears arise and such people view society and the world as stormy, angry, and threatening; they get caught between the excess of freedom and their fears. They respond with restlessness, brooding defiance, or remorse: Their anxiety clearly signals to them that they are at odds with the community around them, but they aren't even sure why or who is at fault; they spend their lives haunted by a vague sense of overhanging evil and obsessive guilt.

 

A complex society requires guidance, clarity about rules and procedures, and sanctions when errors occur in order to operate smoothly. But when these things are viewed through the prism of daemonic fears, society may appear to be driven by bullying, shaming, and punitive politics. As people take on greater responsibility in life, they may increasingly fear any little misstep. The higher they climb, the more precarious their position. The result: Shyness, anxiety disorders, self-esteem issues, fear of success, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, burnout, depression, etc.

 

I said above that freedom is a cause for anxiety. Freedom equates to a lack of guidance; and without guidance, a misstep in any direction can bring down upon one's head the condemnation of society, which uses the mechanisms of shame and "cancel culture" as punishment even when no actual crime is committed. Among people who are overly prone to ego contraction, the lack of structure or guidance inherent in modern freedom may lead to a constant state of anxiety at the prospect of overstepping some line and running afoul of community sentiment.

 

When one has a mindset primarily oriented toward ego contraction, any kind of change or novelty may give rise to anxiety; for example, positive evaluations or promotions in the workplace can provoke anxiety. Such people may find it difficult even to receive compliments. They worry that excelling sets them up for hubris and exposure: Someone might find fault with their accomplishments and accuse them of cheating, taking shortcuts, or otherwise not earning their accomplishments in full measure. So they feel obliged to expose themselves first, that is, to pick apart and downplay their own accomplishments.

 

Trauma can also cause people to resign themselves to a limited, confined existence. In The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious psychologist Carl Jung notes that some people may have difficulty bouncing back from a significant loss. Jung gives the example of a businessman who takes a big financial risk and ends up bankrupt. If the businessman keeps his cool and doesn't become too discouraged, he can probably recoup the loss over time. But Jung says that sometimes the businessman "goes to pieces, abjures all further risks, and laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality, doing inferior work with the mentality of a scared child, in a post far below him."[9] Jung calls this "regressive restoration of persona": After the loss, the businessman is rebuilding his persona in a state of regression to an infantilized version of himself. It's a coping mechanism, but not a particularly healthy one. Jung warns that "resignation and self-belittlement are an evasion, which in the long run can be kept up only at the cost of neurotic sickliness."[10]

 

Dropping out

One way to calm your anxiety is to drop out of society to the point where you simply stop caring what others might think of you. If you reject the conventional narratives and values of the community, then you feel no anxiety when your ego threatens to expand beyond those conventional narratives. In this context, dropping out becomes an anxiety-stilling strategy.

 

The downside of dropping out of society is that it's a very isolated life. When people drop out and cease to care what others think of them, it's usually under duress: The community is making demands on them that they can't meet for one reason or another, and dropouts retreat or withdraw from society to the point that they lead shrunken, isolated lives avoiding contact with others who might challenge them on their choices. Some lead normal lives and simply keep to themselves and find cheer in solitary entertainments, while others may go off the grid and become hermits, and so on. Isolation brings them peace and release from anxiety. They are free to think and do what they want without accounting to anyone else; but the price of that peace and release from anxiety is withdrawal, passivity, and a solitary life.

 

The long-term result of dropping out is often a state known as "anomie": Disconnected from society and its conventions, narratives, and values, it's easy for individuals to fall into boredom, apathy, alienation, and loss of purpose. Meaning is lost, and the dropout's motivations become increasingly self-serving and impulsive.

 

How does that look on the four-position spectrum? Above I said that on the four-position spectrum ego contraction represents a retreat from extreme onesidedness back in the direction of conventional narratives and the safety of our comfort zones. Dropping out (and anomie) takes this process a step further: It represents ego contraction to the point of collapse into the center.

 

From that description, a five-position spectrum can be generated as follows:

 

Extraverted ego expansion --> Extraverted ego contraction --> Anomie <-- Introverted ego contraction <-- Introverted ego expansion

 

Anomie and meaninglessness

In fact, the concept of anomie is often studied in the context of life under dictatorships and in prison camps. Living under inhumane conditions, persecuted people and prisoners often withdraw into themselves so much that they simply lose the will to live. In his book Man's Search for Meaning psychologist Viktor Frankl reflects upon his own experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II and suggests ways to find meaning and purpose and retain one's desire to live even under the most deadly and degrading conditions.

 

Similarly, Sartre, Camus, and many of the existentialists and nihilists of the post-World War II period lived through the horrors of war, imprisonment, occupation, etc. and came away from the experience questioning what meaning life could have under conditions of global war, misery, and chaos. Existentialism and nihilism became a couple of their ways of dealing with meaninglessness.

 

Meaninglessness then becomes the commonality that dropouts share with prisoners of war, existentialists, and nihilists. In his book The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites research performed by Emile Durkheim on the subject of anomie and says, "We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago."[11]

 

Dropping out via ego contraction into anomie serves to calm one's anxiety, which dropouts register as relief from the torment of freedom-induced over-expansion and extreme one-sidedness. But dropouts lose any personal agenda or agency once they no longer identify with a set of preferred narratives on one side or the other of a dichotomy. Dropouts become non-participants in life, observing but not engaging. Dropping out puts them in much the same position as prisoners of war, existentialists, or nihilists: What do you do with your life once it becomes meaningless?

 

A modern example of anomie on a large scale might be the phenomenon of young men in the US in the mid 2020s who drop out of the workforce in large numbers and retreat to their parents' basements to get high and play video games all day. Young men don't deliberately set out to isolate themselves from society; but social changes have deprived many of them of the structure and good male models needed for proper socialization. Bereft of guidance and unsure of their proper role in modern society, anxiety causes them to drop out and live truncated, limited lives.

 

The sociologist Richard Reeves documented some of this phenomenon in his 2022 book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. He says that men continue to do well at the very top of the social structure, but boys and men at the middle and bottom of the social pyramid are falling behind girls and women on a number of measures (education, work, incarceration and suicide rates, etc.) This too may result in a sense of anomie among the male cohort that Reeves studied.

 

Comparing centroversion and anomie

As I have described them above, both centroversion and anomie occupy the same position on the five-position spectrum--in the center. However, they are not the same thing. Anomie occurs when a person drops out of society and ceases to care about life in general. The drop-out may think that he is achieving something like centroversion, insofar as anomie reduces his anxiety and deadens him toward the worries of the world. But centroversion is a state of creativity and insight, not a state of deadening of feelings.

 

To spell it out:

• Centroversion involves embracing your conventional one-sidedness on one side of the dichotomy while also recognizing the validity of the shadow function as the "other half" of the dichotomy. A "tension of opposites" is maintained between the two sides of the dichotomy.

• Anomie, on the other hand, represents more of a collapse into the center. As I said above, when the drop-out simply refuses to participate in life then the distinction between the two opposite sides of a dichotomy no longer matters, and no energy is shared between them. With no anchor to either side of the dichotomous pair, the dropout appears to have no personality at all. The "tension of opposites" is lost, and it's easy for the dropout to slip into passivity, inaction, and listlessness.

 

Anomie represents a nullification of the two sides of the dichotomy: The introvert and the extravert both end up in the same place. If the drop-out simply refuses to participate in life, then the distinction between the two opposite sides of a dichotomy no longer matters.

 

So anomie doesn't share many features in common with centroversion. Anomie does, however, share a number of features with androgyny and with non-participation in life, as described in the chapter on Sensing. Anomie and androgyny aren't the same thing, but they are close. In androgyny, as in anomie, the distinction and the resulting tension between yin and yang are lost: The androgyne blends together both yin and yang in equal measure, and the dropout represents neither. Also, both the androgyne and the dropout are "a closed circle, self-contained." In my supplemental essay on the androgyne (in the Sensing chapter) I said that males may turn into withdrawn androgynes when masculinity is discouraged; anomie could also result in such a situation if the male feels that he is cornered or otherwise denied outlets for his desires and energy.

 

To sum up: In centroversion, yin and yang (the two opposite sides of a dichotomous pair) remain separate and maintain a degree of tension between themselves but also share energy. In anomie, on the other hand, the distinction between yin and yang is lost, no energy is exchanged, and the dropout falls into a disengaged void in the middle.

 

I'll stop here and wrap up my comments on ego contraction. However, I have developed a few ideas on how anomie manifests in society in a supplemental essay on that subject:

Link to supplemental essay: Anomie in Society

 

Summing up ego contraction

To sum up the material on ego contraction: Individuals have different tolerances for anxiety. Modern freedoms create anxiety, and the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and structures allow people to contract down to the point of non-participation in life and anomie as an anxiety-stilling device. Multiply that by millions of people, and there is a potential for an enormous amount of disengagement and disaffection in society as a whole.

 

Naturally, I'm not trying to suggest that freedom is bad or that modern society is stuck in some kind of long-term anomie-bound "death spiral" leading to breakdown and dissolution. In the previous segment describing ego expansion I talked about ways that modern society also supports and promotes formation of values and meaning, self-confidence, and assertiveness.

 

As I said above, my point is simply that freedom gives us choices. Individuals can demonstrate a bias in the direction of either ego expansion or ego contraction; and either orientation can be healthy in moderation or become unhealthy when taken to extremes.​

 

Decadence

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I want to touch on one more subject that runs parallel to both ego expansion (resulting in sadomasochism) and ego contraction (resulting in anomie): The subject of decadence in western culture. In order to do that, let me start with a quick summary of what has been discussed so far:

 

Traditional, pre-modern societies were less free and more rigid than modern times, but the positive side of that rigidity was that society provided guidelines for behavior (in the form of cultural canons and narratives based on sex, class, ethnicity, etc.) that kept individuals anchored in the realm of conventional, healthy one-sidedness. These narratives weren't meant to be a straitjacket; there were also "hero" narratives for individuals who aspired to pursue a higher truth at the risk of conflict with institutional narratives. But the traditional socially-approved narratives were comfortable enough for the vast majority, and they provided guardrails for integrating the individual into society without too much trauma or drama.

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Modern freedoms, on the other hand, remove cultural guardrails and lead to anxiety. Anxiety, in turn, can express itself in two opposing trends: Ego expansion into sadomasochism or ego contraction into anomie.

• Ego expansion: One's ego is free to expand in the direction of extreme one-sidedness, in other words outwards towards the two ends on the five-position spectrum; I have characterized the extraverted extreme as masochism and the introverted extreme as sadism.

• Ego contraction: One's ego is free to contract toward the middle of the spectrum, representing anomie, disconnectedness from society, alienation, apathy, and cynicism.

 

Thus in modern times the five-position spectrum looks like this:

Masochism <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Anomie <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Sadism

 

But what does that actually look like in practice? Camille Paglia argues that the anxiety of modern freedoms tends to result in decadence as a cultural and aesthetic lifestyle. Other historians and commentators agree that western society is currently stuck in a long-term trend of social and cultural decadence, which can subsequently turn into existentialism as a philosophy and nihilism as politics.

 

Decadence: A definition

Civilizations reach a cultural peak, and then decadence appears in the culture when those civilizations begin to teeter and collapse under their own weight. The French word "decadence" means "falling away" in the sense of a decline from a peak or a height. There were decadent periods toward the end of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations; and many cultural critics argue that modern western culture is undergoing a prolonged period of decadence as well.

 

Decadence typically occurs when society seems at an impasse, for example when an idyllic past is seemingly replaced by a grim, dystopian present and future. With no investment in the present and no faith in the future, culture and aesthetics turn toward rebellion or escapism. Many dictionaries define decadence as transgressiveness and/or excessive self-indulgence. 

 

In his book From Dawn to Decadence the historian Jacques Barzun says that modern decadence doesn't represent a stoppage or total ruin. People still have energy, talent, and moral sense. "[I]t is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces."[12]

 

In his book The Culture We Deserve Barzun suggests that today's decadent western culture represents "the end of the high creative energies at work since the Renaissance." The goal of modern culture "appears to be no longer the making of things but their unmaking--by travesty, pastiche and parody, and the allusive kind of art that relies solely on design, sense-appeal, and shock."[13]

 

Camille Paglia agrees that modern times are decadent, but in her book Vamps and Tramps she describes decadence as a rich aesthetic with identifiable themes and rules. Paglia says that decadence is "a complex historical mode, a thrilling, sensationalistic late phase of culture dominated by themes of sex and violence. In decadence, the major revival is of the primitive, which is juxtaposed with the supersophisticated. We see this pattern in Nero's cruel banquets, in Swinburne's poetry, and in the recent popularity of sadomasochistic regalia and tribal body-piercing."[14]

 

Elsewhere she adds, "Decadence is a style of excess and extravagance which approaches self-parody. It operaticizes by overliteralizing. Hence one laughs even when shocked or repelled..."[15]

 

To sum up: I said above that modern freedoms lead to anxiety, and anxiety leads to sadomasochism or anomie depending on whether people tend toward ego expansion or ego contraction. If decadence is the cultural and aesthetic manifestation of anxiety, then I'll argue the following:

• In states of ego expansion, masochism and sadism manifest themselves as decadent victimhood and decadent rebellion; and

• In states of ego contraction, anomie manifests itself as decadent disengagement from society.

 

As a result the five-position spectrum changes from this:

Masochism <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Anomie <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Sadism

 

to this:

Decadent victimhood <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Decadent disengagement <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Decadent rebellion

 

However, given that decadence is a cultural phenomenon and tends to be a rather large and amorphous subject, I'll devote a separate supplemental essay to the subject and describe it in more detail there:

Link to supplemental essay: Decadence in Western Culture

 

~Posted September 23, 2025; revised to add a new section on decadence on December 29, 2025​

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