Your Activism Is Ego-Driven (And That's Fine)

But wanting to be a good person might be your most dangerous motivation.

1. Ego alignment

A few weeks ago, I shared this story about my friend Josh going undercover in a chicken slaughterhouse:

Between his broad, athletic build and gregarious personality, Josh tends to attract attention. So he was a bundle of nerves when he showed up the first day undercover, loaded up with 2005-era camera and microphone gear hidden under a thick jacket. It took all his attention to keep his hands from shaking as he stood outside in the early morning chill with the other workers; he already stood out like a sore thumb as the only one passing up the chance to smoke a cigarette.

Finally, the bay doors rolled open, and the foreman directed him where to stand along the conveyor belt of empty shackles. A horn blared, the belt started rolling, and moments later, a flood of white feathers tumbled around the corner. Josh was at the furthest back point on the line, and he watched as workers methodically grabbed the struggling chickens and slid their feet into the moving shackles above.

Finally, a chicken made it past this gauntlet and rolled up in front of him. His heart pounded and the world around him sharpened and slowed as Josh picked up this first chicken, flipped her upside-down, and slid her feet into the shackles. As the belt pulled her away from him towards the sawblade that would slice open her throat, he whispered a simple apology: I’m so sorry.

As Josh tells it, something snapped into focus for him in that moment, something he hadn’t understood until right then: I don’t matter. This movement has nothing to do with me. Compared to this endless stream of tortured and murdered souls, I am utterly insignificant.

Josh tells this story as a rallying cry for us to set our egos aside and focus on helping animals. I strongly agree with Josh’s sentiment. However, there’s a catch: everything we know about psychology tells us that setting your ego aside is literally impossible.¹

Obviously, what Josh means is for us to become aware of our ego and keep it in check, which is very important. But that’s only part of the story. Human beings evolved this thing called “ego” in the first place because it is a powerful tool for motivating us to pursue a goal. What if instead of merely setting aside our ego, we could harness its power and redirect it in service of the animal movement?

Reader, if you are part of the animal rights movement, you are already doing exactly that. The truth is that while each of us is motivated in part by the haunting knowledge of what animals are going through, we are also driven by some of our own needs: belonging, purpose, growth, admiration from our peers.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt likens the conscious, deliberative part of your mind, the one that is choosing to be here to help animals, to a rider sitting atop an elephant. The elephant is all those needs and behaviors that evolution has ingrained in you over hundreds of millions of years; the rider is a new arrival, evolutionarily speaking. The rider might have an idea of where the pair should go, but if the elephant decides to take a different course, there’s not much she can do about it.

That’s not a good or bad thing; there is simply no other way a movement made up of human beings could be. But, yes, it is a plain fact that your personal needs are, by default, not perfectly aligned to the goal of creating as much change for animals as possible.

They can be more or less misaligned, however. And with a little self-awareness, we can coax our elephants into pursuing their needs in ways that best serve the movement.

2. Getting to know your elephant

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – C. G. Jung

A couple years ago, I was staying with a group of animal activists and the conversation turned to the Enneagram. I’ve never been particularly interested in personality tests, but one of the people there was an Enneagram expert, and it turned out to be a fun way of getting each other talking about our innermost motivations.

Like most personality typologies, there’s a version of Enneagram that I think goes too far, claiming connections that don’t exist or lack any evidentiary basis. But there’s a more limited version based on first-order observations that can be useful for self reflection. That’s the version I’ll describe from here on, even though Enneagram fans might complain that I’m simplifying it past the point of recognition.

The Enneagram system is built around nine different animating psychological motivations. Each motivation is assigned a number, one through nine. It’s not concerned with basic physiological needs like food and shelter, but rather with the different forms of self-actualization that manifest when those basic needs are met. Because I don’t want to get this more wrong than I have to, I asked Gemini to summarize them for me:

1. to be a good and responsible person.

2. to be loved by and indispensable to others.

3. to achieve success and be admired for your accomplishments.

4. to be unique and creatively significant (e.g. making an important artistic contribution)

5. to collect knowledge and understanding about the world for its own sake.

6. to be safe, secure, and supported by a group or authority.

7. to stay comfortable, entertained, and free from pain or deprivation.

8. to be self-reliant, strong, and in control of your own destiny.

9. to maintain inner peace and minimize outer conflict.

These might all seem obvious, and you can probably recognize each of them in yourself to different degrees. But the first time I talked about this list with other activists, I was surprised by how differently each of us ordered them.

Like I said, it was an interesting way to get to know each other, but the real usefulness was getting to know myself better. In particular, I learned that I was unusually possessed by #1, a desire to be a good person, and to be known as such by myself and others, with a strong hint of #3, to be admired as a successful and accomplished activist. Until then, I had just figured everyone felt that way.

Now, that might all seem hunky-dory, or even a bit self flattering. But actually, I think motivation #1 is probably the most dangerously misaligned and egotistical of them all.

See, at the end of the day, my elephant is not concerned with creating maximum impact for animals or even, necessarily, with doing the most good thing in every situation. It wants to be able to think of itself as a good person, and just as importantly, to be seen as a good person by my peers. There are all kinds of situations where these goals are not aligned, such as:

• If I was choosing between two different ways of focusing my energy in the movement, and one of them was more impactful but the other would be more visible and win me more admiration, my elephant would want to choose the latter.²

• If one campaign would create more change for more animals but another would feel more morally pure, my elephant would again prefer the latter. (I think this was a major part of why I was so strongly opposed to welfare campaigns for many years, and even in part led me to prefer losing morally consistent campaigns rather than winning compromise campaigns. To be fair to my past self, there were other reasons for those views as well, but I wonder if those weren’t post hoc reasons I used to justify what my elephant wanted to do.)

• I think my elephant led me to attach moral pieties to my activism that weren’t related to helping animals, such as the attachment to frugality I wrote about in My Grassroots Identity Crisis.

OK, so being a good person isn’t always aligned with winning the most change for animals, because it puts the spotlight on me meeting my moral obligations rather than on the impact of my actions. But is it the most misaligned Enneagram number? I think it is, because it has such an easy time disguising itself. If someone recognizes that they are strongly driven by #2, the desire to be loved and needed by others, their elephant might have a harder time tricking them into thinking it is aligned. But a whole host of conflicts and inefficiencies in our movement arise from people trying to be a good person rather than do what is best for animals.

That’s not to say that any of these can’t get out of control. For instance, I often learn of research projects in animal advocacy that seem to me to bear little connection to the actual challenges faced by campaigners on the ground, and I wonder if it’s not a case of #5, the drive to collect knowledge for its own sake. So I do think it would benefit all of us to reflect on the full Enneagram list (along with other lists if anyone wants to recommend any good ones?), think about which drives are particularly strong in us, and recognize when those drives might lead us astray.

3. Accidental alignment

“We are loyal to our desires long before we are loyal to our principles.” – Adam Phillips

But I promised more than just not being led astray. I told you that there was a way to use your personal, self-directed needs to supercharge your activism, to become one with your elephant and ride them into battle and victory!³

Your ego is a powerful tool. That’s why evolution put it there. If we could figure out how to get it to care as much about winning for animals as it does about replicating your genes, we’d be off to the races.

I think we can do it.

For most of the ten years I’ve spent in the movement, I haven’t been paid very much. The most I’ve ever been paid for a year of full-time work is $20,000, and in most years I’ve worked full-time for nothing. I say this not because it is unique, but on the contrary, because it is typical for many of the people reading this blog. Many of you probably have the same experience I have of people asking you how you do it: How do you find the motivation to work so hard, year after year, in the face of such a depressing status quo and overwhelming odds? Obviously, caring deeply about animals or injustice or suffering or all of the above is part of the story. But it’s not the whole story. The people asking this question also care about animals and injustice and suffering, and they are right to notice that most people who care about these things don’t choose to sacrifice their free time, or a lucrative career, or even their freedom from prison.

So why do you do it? Or rather, how do you do it? If I’m being honest, I think all of my answers are somewhere on the Enneagram list.

I’m ambitious and goal-oriented. Whenever I start learning a new instrument or sport or language, it grabs hold of me and I want to master it. It’s partly for myself, but I also want to be seen by others mastering it.

I also have a desire to express myself creatively. This is why I wound up studying music composition in college. The dream of every undergraduate composer, artist, or philosopher is to be the next great man or woman of history, and I was no different.

Lastly, I crave intellectual challenges. My favorite feeling in the world is of working on a problem that takes 100% of my cognitive repertoire to solve, and even forces me to expand it. If I arrive at the end of the day feeling exhausted and fully used up, like I gave it everything I had, then it was a good day.

I was already meeting these needs when I first encountered the animal rights movement. The thing that first got me involved was nothing more than my distress about what was happening in factory farms. But looking back, I can acknowledge that altruism alone would not have been enough to keep me around this long. A key ingredient in my journey was realizing that I could be good at activism; that if I stuck with it, I could meet my needs for ambition, creative expression, intellectual growth, and being a good person all at once.

4. Embracing ambition

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
– Marc Antony’s eulogy for Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare)

From a certain perspective, the animal movement is like an army. The chain of command is not nearly as strict; some percentage of people in the movement are employed by an organization and may have to follow instructions from their boss, but the rest of us are here of our own accord. However, while there isn’t much hierarchy of command, there is still something like a pyramid structure in terms of how much influence or initiative people have. A few people at the top of the pyramid are able to make choices that shape the priorities of entire sections of the movement. These include, for instance, the largest funders in the space, and the leaders of large organizations. Towards the bottom of the pyramid, there are a much larger number of people doing the frontline work: organizing protests, collecting signatures for ballot initiatives, etc. All these activists are free to define their own participation, but have less influence over the direction of the movement as a whole. This is effectively a hierarchy of initiative.

The most important difference between our movement’s hierarchy and a military is that in the movement, you don’t need anybody’s permission to promote yourself. This is a great advantage for us.

In a military, most of the people need to be out there holding guns, ready to charge towards the other people holding guns when the general orders them to. If too many of those people get the idea that they’d be better at giving orders and decide to set down their rifle and pick up a bullhorn, the battle will be over real quick. (Obviously, it would be ideal if every soldier did exactly this and the whole military imploded tomorrow, but you get the point.) Thus the expression “too many generals, not enough soldiers.”

In the animal movement, we do need people to hold signs. But we don’t need anybody to only be a sign holder; the most high-initiative executive director of the largest organization can also be a sign holder, and indeed, they usually are. Beyond that, every sign holder who decides to become an organizer can easily recruit ten new sign-holders to take their place. Our movement has infinite room to grow and diversify from people grabbing hold of more and more initiative. In other words, all this initiative-grabbing is not a zero-sum game– when one person steps up and starts exercising more leadership, it doesn’t take away from anyone else, but on the contrary, makes the movement larger and stronger, creating a demand for still other people to exhibit even more leadership.

This is what I have always loved about the grassroots wing of the movement. At their best, grassroots orgs like Animal Rising and Pro-Animal Future are the part of the movement that enable any person to join as a volunteer and use their own creativity to innovate new approaches that might eventually propagate across the entire movement. These groups tell their members: hey, the number one thing we need is for everyone to hold a sign or a clipboard for a couple hours a week. But in all the other hours of the week, if you have an idea for how to supercharge our work, we will give you a platform to try it out.

If someone just wants to show up after work and hold a sign, we celebrate that. But we also encourage people to dream bigger. When they do, skilled grassroots leaders provide some support, but their most important job is just to stay out of the way.

I can think of loads of recent examples from my time at Pro-Animal Future. In one, a pair of volunteers on our Denver ballot initiatives independently organized a benefit concert. Entirely on their own, they secured a venue, recruited bands pro bono, advertised ticket sales, and got artists from across the country to donate incredible artwork for a silent auction. All told, they raised over $9,000 for the campaign. Another activist started a door-to-door fundraising team that has grown to several people and has raised a similar amount in the first few months. These were both ideas that I privately wrote off when I first heard them, but because they were unpaid activists who wanted to try it, I obviously wasn’t going to stand in their way. I figured they’d see the idea kind of fail and it would be an important learning experience. Instead, both were smashing successes.

5. Micromanaging from below

“Ambition is the wish to be responsible for oneself.” – Hannah Arendt

This open, democratic quality of grassroots movements comes with a unique set of challenges. All that free initiative just lying around can send our elephants the wrong message. There is a difference between seizing initiative to benefit animals and seizing power to satisfy your own ego. I’ve certainly made that mistake before, for instance, by trying to assert my opinions on other people’s projects rather than starting my own projects.

Not all decisions can be open-sourced to everyone– if every volunteer for Animal Rising was allowed to amend the budget however they saw fit, the money probably wouldn’t last long. Learning to accept that was one of the most important moments in my activist journey.

I learned it the hard way during my time with Direct Action Everywhere. About a year after I started organizing the Colorado chapter of DxE, I got a call from a member of the core leadership team at DxE’s headquarters in Berkeley. He told me that because of how much the international network had grown, they had decided to put together an advisory committee made up of organizers from around the network, and I was being invited to join it. I remember feeling that this invitation was the most important honor I had ever received in my life. DxE was a big organization with hundreds of people working hard to change the world for animals, and I was right to feel humbled.

Unfortunately, that humility did not last long. I started attending biweekly calls where the leadership asked for input on important strategic decisions. There was just one problem: I didn’t really know why they wanted me there. I was inexperienced as an activist, and I didn’t have any special technical expertise relevant to any of the topics being discussed. That’s when I made my first mistake. Without ever thinking it explicitly, I formed the idea in my head that they must just think I’m really smart and want my opinion on everything! I decided that I needed to justify my presence in these meetings by forming an opinion on every topic, then vigorously arguing on behalf of that opinion. Of course, I usually didn’t have time to research or even think carefully about these decisions before the meetings, and many of them had to do with topics I knew nothing about, such as press strategy. So I formed snap judgments and then soldiered valiantly for them.

This went on for months, and pretty soon I was dragging meetings out, to the great frustration of the people actually responsible for managing the organization.

Things came to a head one evening a few hours before a major direct action. I was there to play a minor role, but I dragged the final preparatory meeting out for almost an hour late into the night to quibble over a minor decision. I didn’t get my way on the topic, and a couple days later, I responded to an email thread bringing the topic up again and complaining about the way the decision was made. Keep in mind, I fundamentally hadn’t done anything to earn the invitation to join this advisory group. It was not something I was owed, it was an opportunity I was given, and I was doing my naïve best to live up to it.

I sent my email after midnight, and a few minutes later, to my surprise, I got a call from Wayne Hsiung. When I picked up, his voice was obviously tense. The first thing he said was: “This email you just sent makes me not want to work with you.”

The blood drained from my face. I froze up. As I heard it, he might as well have said “pack your bags, you’re not an animal rights activist anymore.” Wayne was the key leader in DxE because he had built the organization and earned that designation. He initiated all the most impactful projects because he had both the vision and the execution. It wasn’t that nobody else was allowed to initiate things– people did, all the time. But Wayne’s projects were the most exciting and impactful because he had the vision and experience to make big things happen. Not working with him meant not doing the work I wanted to do. I had no idea what to say, and to be honest, I don’t really remember what I said. I know that over the course of the conversation, Wayne gave me some blunt feedback about being overconfident, forming strong opinions on topics I didn’t know much about, and disrespecting everybody’s time by dragging decisions out.

It was a tough call to get at 1:00 in the morning. A few days later, he tried to apologize for being too blunt. But I am so grateful that he was direct with me. To this day, I think of this as among the most important feedback I’ve ever received. All of it was true, and I needed to hear it directly for it to get through. I think of it as the moment I became an adult. I was 22 years old.

The lesson that I look back on as the transition from childhood to adulthood was how liberating it is to let go of the things that aren’t my responsibility. Rather than trying to stick my fingers in everybody else’s pie, I realized that the most effective version of me would take responsibility for a specific role and focus on kicking ass at that role. If someone else asked for my input on a decision, I’d be happy to share my thoughts, but I wouldn’t take it personally if they made a different decision than the one I recommended. In other words, if my elephant gets easily distracted by the temptation to micromanage other people, it’s my job as the rider to compassionately redirect us towards our own responsibilities.

Usually, when we think about micromanaging, we think about it coming from a manager in a power-up position, like your boss always wanting things done their way. But micromanagement doesn’t always have to come from above. Micromanaging is when people who aren’t the ones doing the work want to control how the work is done. Wayne and the others on the leadership team had more power than me in the organization, but by insisting on defending my opinions much longer than was reasonable in these meetings, I was micromanaging from below. The consequences were the same: decisions took longer and everyone was frustrated. Worst of all, the work suffered: the people doing the work are always going to have a better idea of what needs to be done than someone popping into a meeting once a week and forming a snap judgment based on a few minutes of explanation.

5.1 Horizontal structures are a perversion of ambition

In an extreme version of micromanaging from below, grassroots organizations in any movement perennially face calls from a subset of activists to adopt completely flat, democratic structures, where every member has equal say regardless of the contributions they have (or haven’t) made. I’ve seen this same conflict play out firsthand in Direct Action Everywhere, Extinction Rebellion, Pro-Animal Future, and Animal Rising, and I’ve heard about it in a dozen more orgs. These demands are a perversion of the initiative-taking attitude, and one of the most blatant examples of ego encroaching on activism in a destructive way.

This movement exists to help animals, not to meet the needs of activists. Meeting the needs of activists is a strategy we use to retain members so that we can build up the power necessary to help animals. When meeting an activist’s needs starts to cost the movement more than it gains us in power to help animals, we should stop doing it.

That basic principle should guide leadership and decision making. Here’s another principle: quality decision making depends on experience and information. People who have more experience, especially if their experience includes a demonstrated track record of success, should have more influence over decisions than people who are brand new to the movement. Likewise, people who are more involved in the organization’s work are more likely to be seeing important signals and gathering important feedback from the world about how that work is going. So the people doing the work should be the ones making decisions.

This is precisely what horizontal, leaderless structures fail to accomplish. Horizontality erases experience and expertise in favor of serving the egos of a group’s members, in inverse proportion to their level of contribution. Instead of motivating activists to work harder by offering the reward of greater influence over a group’s direction, horizontal structures incentivize our egos to spend less time campaigning and more time arguing.

This thinking often drives a handful of activists to call for the most proven and dedicated leaders of an organization to be removed and replaced by a horizontal, leaderless structure. I remember a case where an activist leading one such call boasted in a letter that she had spent more than 50 total hours volunteering for the organization over the previous year. 50 volunteer hours is a great commitment and is 50 more hours than most people will spend in their lives. But some conservative back-of-the-napkin math showed that the two founders of the organization had spent at least 13,000 hours each pouring their heart and soul into building that organization. More importantly, they had succeeded in creating a thriving organization– so much that this activist wanted to impose her vision onto it rather than building one herself. After all, if she kept up her pace at 50 hours a year, it would have taken her 260 years to catch up.

Innocent as it seems, the attempt to impose a horizontal structure on an activist organization is an authoritarian maneuver by out-of-control elephants who want to seize power incommensurate with their contribution.⁴

6. The veil of ignorance

“History advances not by the correctness of ideas, but by the abundance of experiments.” — Albert Hirschman

These days, the steepest cliff my elephant tries to lead me off is a desire to work on the most effective thing. The best form of advocacy. My conscious brain knows there is no one best approach; many different strategies rely on each other to make sustained progress, and on top of that, we don’t know enough to know exactly which ones they are. It would be disastrous if everyone in the movement held this attitude. Every time a new study came out, everyone would drop what they were doing and flock over to the trendy new thing, tripping over each other on the way.

We don’t need people striving to do the single most effective form of advocacy. What we need is more people knuckling down to develop expertise in a particular domain, building different kinds of momentum and using them collaboratively when the time comes. Harder still, we need people earnestly pursuing paths that may or may not work. There is a delicate balance to be struck here; we should be willing to question our own methods and consider dropping strategies that don’t pan out, but we shouldn’t be too quick to give up on a strategy, either. Some strategies might only work one time out of a hundred, but deliver enough value that hundredth time to make it all worth it. Other strategies might only start working after a long period of trial and error, or after building up enough momentum.

My elephant makes it hard for me to strike that balance. Regular readers will know that I’ve been reconsidering some of my long-held beliefs about what effective advocacy looks like, and that the emergence of transformative AI has further scrambled my sense of what our movement needs right now.

I was recently ruminating about this to my good friend Tyler Johnston. When I first met Tyler, he was working on corporate cage-free campaigns and I was doing abolitionist-style grassroots organizing. But a few years ago, when it became clear that AI was progressing faster than just about anyone had expected, Tyler made a big decision to shift his energy into the AI alignment movement. He started an organization (The Midas Project) with the intention of using the same corporate pressure tactics he’d learned in farmed animal advocacy to pressure major AI labs to adopt stricter safety protocols.

Since I met him, I’d always been struck by what a disciplined thinker Tyler was,⁵ and I considered his choice to focus on AI to be paradigmatic of that. While I don’t believe everyone in the animal movement should switch to AI safety campaigning, and I have no plans to do so myself, the logic of Tyler’s decision demonstrated a triumph of the rider over the elephant. He traded in a secure, comfortable career at a large advocacy nonprofit for the daily glass-eating ritual of building a startup in a completely different movement where he had to learn many fundamentals over again from scratch. And he did it because he felt that the impact of AI was likely to transform the world so much that the impact of current animal advocacy interventions would mostly get washed away, like a tsunami sweeping away a sandcastle.⁶

To me, this seemed like a fierce commitment to doing the most important work. So when I told him that I was feeling restless because of doubts about whether my own work was the best thing I could be doing, his answer surprised me.

Tyler pointed out that there is something very egotistical about wanting to do the most important work. That desire comes from the part of me that doesn’t just want animals to be saved– it wants me to be the one who saved them. It wants to leave my mark on history, to be remembered the way undergraduate art and philosophy majors want to be remembered.

And the problem is, that’s not how it works. None of us knows which strategies are going to be most important in the long run. If our movement is successful, it won’t be because of a few geniuses who peered into the nature of reality and devised a perfect strategy based on what they saw. Instead, it will be because of tens of thousands of people who all tried different things, who all were able to try what they tried because nine thousand other people were trying nine thousand other things.

In recent posts, I’ve been describing the process by which I came to appreciate incremental welfare campaigns after strongly opposing them during my early years in the movement. When I reflect on the enormous impact these campaigns have had on billions of animals, I feel the urge to convince skeptical abolitionists not just that they should be glad of this impact, but that they should feel proud of it even if they never worked on welfare campaigns directly. That, in part, is because I notice that while 2025 Aidan feels enthusiastic about working on or donating to welfare campaigns while articulating some of my doubts about more absolute approaches I used to prefer like vegan advocacy, I wouldn’t actually want to see fewer people delivering a fully abolitionist message. If the abolitionist wing of the movement disappeared tomorrow, I’d suddenly feel a lot less comfortable about campaigns that use incremental welfare messaging. And the opposite is also true: without the concrete incremental wins being notched up by welfare campaigners, abolitionist outreach would feel performative and hollow. At least in my psyche, these different approaches enable each other, if for no other reason than my uncertainty about which one will have the most impact in the long run. (And in reality, I suspect some form of each is necessary.)

Designing strategies for something as utterly unprecedented as animal rights is like practicing archery with a blindfold on. Every arrow we shoot, we may or may not get a bit of feedback about whether we got closer or further to the target. Trying to get closer to the target is great, but ultimately the best hope we have is to have as many people taking shots as possible. And if we eventually land enough arrows on the target to change the world, the credit will be due to every one of us who picked up a bow.

Build on,

Sandcastles

Mantras:

• Your personal needs are not perfectly aligned to the goal of creating as much change for animals as possible. But they can be more or less misaligned.

• Your ego is a powerful tool, if you can get it to care about winning for animals.

• You don’t need anybody’s permission to promote yourself in the movement’s hierarchy of initiative.

• When meeting certain activists’ needs starts to cost the movement more than it gains us in power to help animals, we should stop doing it.

• If our movement is successful, it will be because of tens of thousands of people who all tried different things.

1. Temporary episodes after long hours of meditation or psychedelic drugs notwithstanding, since we cannot do activism effectively in those states of mind.

2. You might point out, “Hey Aidan, maybe that’s why you’re spending all of your time on this blog instead of campaigns?” To which I say, yeah, fair, but in my defense I only have time for the blog because I got cancelled.

3. In a consensual, non-speciesist way, obviously.

4. I discussed this mentality at greater length in When Activists Start Thinking Like Bureaucrats.

5. See part 3 of this essay for a discussion of disciplined thinking.

6. Tyler pointed out, however, that this pivot also served his desires for greater intellectual challenge and autonomy in his work. Nice ego alignment, Tyler!