The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

tradition has taught us that we have a tremendous personal dignity and confidence. The distortion of this is to feel that if anything goes wrong, we can find a scapegoat somewhere outside of ourselves. We say, “This went wrong; it must be somebody’s fault.” When people do that consistently, then it can lead to demands for rights, riots, and all sorts of complaints, which are always based on blaming somebody else. But we never blame “me.” The extreme outcome of this approach is that we feel we want to rule the world, and in doing that, we display a tremendous personal ego.

Ultimately, we could become someone like Hitler or Mussolini. These people represent the ego of an entire nation, which says, “It’s not our fault. It is our nation’s pride; we have our pride and glory and dignity. We are in the right.’ It is a gigantic ego world based on a fundamental separation from our environment. This is an extreme example, but distorting dignity into egotism can have these results.