The Ego-Legacy Complex: On Ancient Monuments and Modern Malaise

A handful of years ago, I visited the Roman Forum in Mérida, Spain. And I found myself contemplating a peculiar fact: I was standing among ruins that had survived longer than most modern nations have existed. These towering columns had watched Spain become Spain, seen the Moors arrive and leave, survived Franco, and would probably outlast whatever government sits in Madrid today.

The Romans built things to last millennia.

We build things to last decades.

The Romans built stuff that could survive the fall of Rome itself.

We build condos, at the cost of our planet. 

What changed?

What the hell happened to us?

Ask why ancient buildings outlast ours, and you’ll get a simple answer: cost, different construction materials, economic incentives, and modern efficiency. Ancient builders used massive stone blocks because they had to - they lacked steel, concrete, and precision manufacturing. Those same limitations forced them to overbuild everything. The Pantheon's walls are twenty feet thick. Of course it's still fucking standing.

But something nags at this explanation. If ancient methods were purely about technical limitations, why do we find the same monumental ambitions across civilizations with vastly different technologies? Reading through ancient accounts of construction projects reveals something more fundamental: a radically different relationship with ego and legacy.

Think about the ancient monument-builders. Who they actually were. When Ramesses II commissioned Abu Simbel, he wasn't thinking "Let's build something cost-effective that meets our current temple needs." He was thinking "I want people thousands of years from now to look upon my works and despair." And they did! Modern tourists still gawk at his colossal statues, exactly as intended.

Modern leaders who display such naked ambition for eternal remembrance get savaged. Imagine if Bill Gates announced he was spending his fortune on a mile-high obelisk inscribed with his accomplishments. The mockery would be instant and brutal. We've developed antibodies against grand displays of ego-driven legacy-building. We react the same way to Governments and Presidents who want to leave their mark on the world. 

This creates a paradox: our cultural rejection of ego-driven monument-building may be hampering our ability to think and build for the very long term. The ancients' very narcissism – their desperate desire for immortality through monuments – drove them to create structures that have benefited humanity for millennia.

What if this aversion to ego-driven legacy projects is actively harming our ability to address existential challenges? 

And, like clockwork, like any and every blog post written in 2024, we’re back to climate change, perhaps the ultimate legacy project of our era. 

Successfully addressing the climate crisis is going to need thinking and planning on timescales that would make a pharaoh proud. But, our current approach to climate change is notably ego-less. We frame it entirely in terms of collective responsibility and shared sacrifice. Nobody gets to put their name on "solving climate change" in giant letters. Is it possible this is part of the problem?

The counterargument writes itself: "Are you seriously suggesting we need MORE ego in climate policy? What's missing is sufficient megalomaniacal ambition?" 

And yes, that sounds absurd. 

But consider:

1. The largest private investments in clean energy often come from ego-driven tech billionaires
2. The most ambitious climate proposals tend to come from individuals seeking to make their mark on history
3. The "collective responsibility" approach has produced decades of insufficient action, because it is repeatedly hampered by the actions and decisions of individuals at the top of the pile who are entirely focused on their power and affluence in the here and no, with no thought to legacy or immortality beyond blood baths and cryo therapy.

Perhaps we've overcorrected. In trying to suppress individual ego in favor of collective action, we may have inadvertently suppressed our capacity for the kind of grandiose, multi-generational thinking that massive challenges require.

I’m not trying to claim we should return to pharaonic god-kings or that ego-driven projects are inherently superior. The pyramids, impressive as they are, were built by slave labor. The Roman monuments we admire were funded by imperial plunder. We shouldn't romanticize the past. 

But maybe we could benefit from rehabilitating the concept of the personal legacy project. Instead of mocking anyone who wants to ensure their names echo through history, we might consider whether their ego-driven ambitions could be harnessed for long-term social benefit.

What if we told aspiring world-changers: "Yes, you can have your name on it. Yes, you can be remembered as the person who solved this piece of the climate puzzle. Yes, your ego can be as big as you want – IF you actually deliver results that last."

There's something deeply uncomfortable about this proposition. It feels like making a deal with the devil, trading our egalitarian ideals for practical results. But maybe that's the point. The ancients understood something we've forgotten: sometimes the path to lasting achievement runs straight through the human ego.

None of this guarantees success. Maybe our modern approach is correct – maybe ego-driven projects are inherently prone to failure in our complex, interconnected world. Maybe the era of individual legacy projects is simply over, replaced by the necessity of collective action.

But thinking back to those ancient ruins, I can't help but wonder: what will they see, when our descendants, two thousand years from now, look back at our time? Will they see any physical testament to our existence comparable to what the ancients left behind? And more importantly – should we care?

The best outcome is probably landing somewhere between our current ego-suppressing collectivism and ancient Egypt's personality-cult monument-building. We need the ambition and long-term thinking of the ancients, but we need to combine it with modern values and scientific understanding. We need to find a way to harness individual ego in service of collective survival.

Perhaps our descendants won't care about our monuments. Maybe they'll be too busy thriving in their fusion-powered arcologies to wonder why we spent centuries stacking stones. But I suspect they'll care deeply about whether we had the audacity to imagine their existence at all - whether we could look past our quarterly reports and campaign cycles and dare to create a future for humanity itself.

The ancients weren't noble. They were vain, brutal people who built eternal monuments to their own glory. But their vanity left us something valuable: proof that humans can think beyond their own lifespans. We don't need more pyramids. But we desperately need that capacity for transgenerational thinking.

And if that means tolerating a few assholes who want their names carved in history's bedrock?

Well, there are worse prices to pay for the future.