Ego is a tool to navigate the world. The way I see it, the goal in spirituality is to transcend your ego so it no longer has control over you. You’ll be using it instead of it using you. You can certainly still take action to better the world if you are enlightened.
In being more connected with the world by being more present in the moment rather than being carried by your ego’s thought patterns, you get a better feel of what the ‘right’ thing to do might be. ‘Right’ in the sense of helping others, spreading love and positivity, perhaps creating positive change in some form. Since you aren’t stuck in the mind set of what your ego thinks is right, you’d be more in the present flow of truth and understand what others may actually need rather than what your ego thinks they need. There’s more of an open mindedness that leads to better clarity in these kinds of things.
The ego is already set on its morals of what’s right and what’s wrong. It is not very open and can be very undermining of other people’s morals. So something we are actually seeing a lot of in the world today are people like Donny Epstein. People who believe in ‘good’ and have positive intentions to help people and change the world. But, they want to change the world to fit what they believe is right or wrong. People who think differently, are in the ‘wrong’ and need to be woken up or in some extreme cases, eliminated.
The Social Justice Warrior movement for example is huge on this. They might have positive intentions but many of them go about it by attacking people who think differently than them. That’s such a silly way of trying to create change. Those people they are attacking, have been conditioned with their set of different morals over a life time and aren’t going to be convinced they’re wrong just because you say they are. They are only going to hate them more and feel more validated by their behavior that stinks of self righteousness and disdainfulness.
Look at some vegetarians for example…. Some of them end up attaining this self righteous attitude and attacking people who eat meat in their ‘Go Veggie’ campaigns. How is that convincing meat eaters to switch to vegetarian lol?
If you want to create change, you can’t go at it from one side or another. An ego picks sides. Change is to fix what’s broken and part of that is to reunite the disconnect to create balance once again.
This is why in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu believes that the leader of a country should be an enlightened one. Because an enlightened man is non dual and doesn’t play to sides. He acts on what creates balance for everyone rather than one side or the other.