Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Ego, in Robert Anton Wilson's hands, isn't your private little villain hiding behind your eyes; it's a group project that gets pinned on a single fall guy. The line works because it flips a familiar self-help moral (kill your ego, fix yourself) into a social indictment: we treat identity as personal property while quietly outsourcing its construction to everyone around us.

Wilson's "social fiction" phrasing does two jobs at once. It needles the reader with the suggestion that the self is partly made up, a narrative held together by agreement, repetition, and reinforcement. But it also shields him from the naive claim that people are fake. Fiction isn't the same as a lie; it's a tool for coherence. We need a stable character called "me" to function, to make promises, to take responsibility. The sting is in "for which one person at a time gets all the blame" - a jab at how conveniently society individualizes failure. When something breaks, we prefer a single accountable ego to the messier truth of feedback loops: families, workplaces, media, incentives, trauma, peer pressure.

Context matters: Wilson came out of mid-century American counterculture and the psychedelic, systems-thinking milieu that distrusted official narratives and fixed identities. His broader project was always to destabilize certainty, especially the kind that masquerades as common sense. This sentence is a Trojan horse: it sounds like a cheeky aphorism, then leaves you stuck with an uncomfortable question. If ego is co-authored, who benefits from pretending it's a solo act?