Resistance Is the Ego's Voice: Steven Pressfield on Fear, the Self and the Next Idea

Lex Fridman opens by asking Steven Pressfield, author of *The War of Art*, where Resistance comes from. Why is there a force in the mind that keeps undermining our work with laziness and excuses? Pressfield says he is not the first to think about this, and he points to the *yetzer hara* of Jewish mysticism as a similar idea. He admits nobody may really know the answer, but he offers his own.

Pressfield says we can seat our identity in one of two places. One is the conscious ego. The other is the greater self in the Jungian sense, which includes the unconscious and touches what he would call the muse or the divine ground. The ego is only a small dot inside this bigger self, and it sees life very differently.

The ego believes death is real, that time and space are real, and that each of us is separate from everyone else. Because we are made of flesh and can be hurt or ruined, its dominant emotion is fear. Even our urge to create can grow out of that fear of death. The greater self believes none of this, he says. It sees no difference between you and me, so hurting someone else means hurting yourself, and its dominant emotion is love.

Pressfield's examples of acting from the self are Jesus on the cross and the 300 Spartans who chose to die at Thermopylae. In his view we are caught between these two ways of seeing, and Resistance is the ego's fearful voice. When an artist or scientist moves into the larger space, the ego is tremendously threatened because it is no longer needed there. Resistance is the ego trying to keep control.

Pressfield gives a political example of the ego, describing Donald Trump as living in a zero-sum world. He sets that against figures like Martin Luther King and Gandhi, who stand for the opposite. He adds that such figures often end up assassinated, because the ego clings to itself and feels so threatened.

Fridman asks why fear is so dominant and why Resistance undermines everything. Pressfield answers by looking at storytelling. In a story the villain is almost always Resistance, meaning the ego. The hero more or less stands for the self. He offers the alien from *Alien* as a villain with one monomaniacal goal, though he concedes Sigourney Weaver's character has to fight on the alien's own terms.

A better example, he says, is *Casablanca*. Humphrey Bogart's character, acting from the self, gives up his selfish dream of going away with the love of his life. He puts her on the plane to Lisbon and goes off to fight the Nazis. In almost every story, Pressfield argues, the villain is fear and the zero-sum mindset, and the hero is someone willing to sacrifice to help others.

Fridman asks whether Resistance has an evolutionary advantage and what life would look like without it. Pressfield says he believes Resistance, like death, gives life meaning. Without it we would be in the Garden of Eden, picking fruit, happy and stupid. He reads the Eden story as being about this: Adam and Eve take matters into their own hands, acquire knowledge, and are cast out into a world where they must face fear.

On that view, the human condition and its purpose come from Resistance being there and from the struggle to overcome it. Pressfield also adds that Resistance is not a real external force and exists only in our heads. Fridman compares it to turning on a light in a dark room, and Pressfield agrees. The darkness vanishes, but it returns the next morning, so you have to keep changing the light bulbs every day.

Asked about the most relentless source of Resistance in his own life, Pressfield says it is always the same: writing, and evolving within his own body of work. It never goes away or gets any smaller. But it keeps changing form, because Resistance is protean. As you reach a higher level it gets more nuanced and subtle, trying to fake you out, and you learn it will always be there.

Fridman asks about Pressfield's process, including how many hours he puts in at the blank page. Pressfield says the battle is fought on the highest spiritual level but won in the most mundane way. He compares it to martial arts. He goes to the gym first thing in the morning and does not want to get out of bed, and he sees the gym, which is literally resistance training, as a way of fortifying himself for the day.

Over the years, he says, he has learned to get into the right mindset, and showing up is not as hard as it used to be. For him and for anyone else, the real Resistance is deciding what the next idea, book or project will be. When he asks that question, he is really asking the muse, or his unconscious, what it wants from him.

He uses Bruce Springsteen as an example, wondering what came after the Broadway show. In his view the body of work already exists inside us like a biological clock, and we must serve it or it will take revenge on us. Fridman asks whether the sequence is already known somewhere in the universe. Pressfield says there is something like that, though he doubts it is predetermined. Fridman compares it to quantum mechanics: what you create is really a distribution of possibilities, and talking to the muse picks one. Pressfield adds that the alternatives are not far apart, since Springsteen would never write a Joni Mitchell song, and that in retrospect it all makes sense.