Preface
This is not just an essay about Madonna. It’s about all of us — about how the ego shows up in our lives. Our hunger for recognition. The resistance to limits. The clash with authority, and the yearning to be seen on our own terms. Madonna’s career gives us a vivid stage where ego plays out in the spotlight. But, the same dynamics unfold quietly in our families, workplaces, and inner lives. What follows is less a biography than a mirror.
From Boy Toy to Ego Battle
Madonna has never been just a pop star. She has been a mirror, a provocation, and at times, a spiritual experiment played out on the world’s stage. To watch her career is to watch someone wrestle with ego in public. Not only flaunting it, but also trying, again and again, to transcend it.
It took me a while to become fond of Madonna. I didn’t see the appeal of her pop music or style when she made her first appearance in the 80s. She seemed hungry for attention and was willing to push the limits of the music industry and of society itself.
But by the late 90’s and early 2000s came, her music shifted. The sharp edges of ego softened as well as some of her self-centeredness. She became a mother, embraced yoga and Kabbalah, and her spiritual practice showed in the evolution of her music. She seemed more interested in growth and self-examination than in controversy … at least for a time.
This evolution feels familiar: how we go from “I”-centered, to “we”-centered over the course of life. David Brooks writes in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life … “The first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self; the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self”.
I became more interested after I watched Madonna’s video Die Another Day for the 100th or so time. I hadn’t seen it in years and this time I noticed something new. The Hebrew letters tattooed on her arm … ל (Lamed), א (Aleph), ו (Vav). In Kabbalah, ל־א־ו is traditionally linked with ego-dissolution, the movement from selfishness to humility. That detail pulled me in and motivated me to write about Madonna’s musical expression as an ego battle.
Express Yourself: Ego as Empowerment
She broke through in the 80’s with her songs “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin”. Her style was bold and unapologetically self-focused. With lace gloves, crucifixes, tulle skirts and her “boy toy” belt buckle. It screamed: look at me, I’m in charge of my sexuality, I make the rules. Young women copied her, creating the Madonna craze.
Then came Express Yourself (1989). Here, Madonna turned ego into an anthem — the will to want more, demand more, and refusing to settle.
“Don’t go for second best, baby, put your love to the test.”
It wasn’t just a hunger for attention. It was about knowing your worth, self-respect, self-assertion, and a refusal to accept crumbs.
This was Madonna’s “ego era”. She fueled dignity, empowerment, and liberation for women in a culture that often-told women to stay small. Through ambition, grabbing attention, eroticism, and breaking rules, she made ego a force of self-empowerment.
Blond Ambition: Wrestling with Authority
By the 1990’s ego became the spectacle. The Blonde Ambition Tour. Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bras, simulated sex acts, and Catholic imagery. Madonna pushed the limits of taste, art, and religion. Her stagecraft turned into an open war against authority.
This was the Vatican’s first condemnation. Officials pressured the Italian government to intervene, calling the show “blasphemous”. (It also happened again during her “confessions” world tour.) In Toronto, police threatened to arrest her for “indecency” because of her simulated masturbation scene during “Like a Virgin”. She refused to change, went ahead, and no arrests followed. What began as self-promotion was now rebellion.
Through the 90s, Madonna wore ego like a mask. Vogue glamorized reinvention. Erotica flaunted provocation. Bedtime Stories softened her image. Ray of Light shifted toward spirituality and motherhood. The decade was experimentation: ego not erased, but fluid, changing masks at will.
Madonna wasn’t just hungry for attention; she was experimenting with identity itself. Her study of Kabbalah and her becoming a mother added layers of depth to her reinventions. Through her songwriting, she demonstrated that her ego was still central — but no longer rigid. It became more fluid, a mask she could slip on and off, a tool for exploring who she might become.
Die Another Day: The Inner Duel
By the early 2000s, her relationship with ego shifted again and she turned inward and became more reflective. Motherhood and Kabbalah deepened her themes. What once was done for shock value, turned into a self-examination. Nowhere clearer than in her James Bond soundtrack single, Die Another Day (2002).
In the video, she doesn’t fight Bond villains — she fights herself. The ego that once gave her self-empowerment now becomes her opponent. Tied, gagged, shocked, drowned, fencing with her own double. These aren’t just spy-movie clichés. They mirror the everyday battle with ego … craving more, never being satisfied, the pride that keeps us armored, the fear of letting go. Ego doesn’t just sit quietly — it drags us into battles we didn’t ask for and leaves us exhausted.
Madonna herself said the song was about inner conflict and transformation. The Hebrew letters ל־א־ו tattooed on her arm marked that struggle. These letters are connected to “transcending the ego”. Ego, in this sense, is what traps us in destructive cycles — pride, rage, fear, self-importance.
In Kabbalah, ego isn’t destroyed — it’s redirected. The vessel of self can either hoard for itself or open to share. Kabbalah doesn’t call for ego death but for restriction. The learning to pause before acting, so the same fire that fuels self-centeredness can be turned outward to serve. Madonna’s video shows the duel between those two impulses — the self that clings, and the self that surrenders.
The Shadow of Service
Even as her music shifted, Madonna’s public life reflected the same paradox.
Over the years, Madonna was involved in many philanthropic efforts. During the height of the AIDS crisis. She was one of the few megastars to speak openly and fundraise for research. She has been a consistent ally to the LGBTQ+ community. Raising money and awareness for LGBTQ+ rights, HIV prevention, and anti-discrimination campaigns.
She performed at Live Aid (1985), for Ethiopian famine relief, and at Live 8 (2005) to raise awareness about global poverty. She appeared on the Tsunami Aid (2005) telethon and donated proceeds from her “Hung Up” single to Hurricane Katrina disaster victims.
In 2006 she founded Raising Malawi, a nonprofit to support orphans and vulnerable children. She built 10 schools and created the Mercy James Centre for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care in Lilongwe. The hospital named after her adopted daughter. She adopted four children from Malawi. With the documentary I Am Because We Are (2008) she tried to spotlight the crisis. Some critics accused her of this being another one of her famous publicity stunts.
From her perspective, this was Kabbalah in action — tikkun olam, repairing the world with the platform she’d been given. From her critics’ view, it was ego masquerading as service, the “white savior” centering herself in another people’s story. The truth is probably both. The same ego she tried to shed was also the engine that made her philanthropy visible.
That paradox is as human as it gets.
Ego’s True Work
Madonna never killed her ego. Maybe she never needed to. Is the ego meant to be destroyed? Kabbalah doesn’t teach ego death. It teaches restriction. The discipline of pausing before acting. So the same fire that fuels self-centeredness can be redirected toward something larger than the self.
Sometimes her ego betrayed her. Sometimes it lifted others. But the fight with the ego itself … and the endless wrestling between self-centeredness and service, between spotlight and surrender … is what made her career more than a pop music and superstar spectacle.
In the end, Madonna’s journey shows us something true: the ego doesn’t die. It doesn’t need to. It cannot. What matters is not erasing the ego but choosing how we wield it. Whether for our own personal gain, or for something greater that reaches beyond ourselves.
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