It's not a rational accounting of the positive against the negative, hedonic quanta as against pathetic ones (πάθημα = suffering, or strong feeling - but this is only negative when experienced as without transformative meaning), that the ego is taxed with, but the remit of moderating between the interests of imperious and impatient subsystems. The ego is not inherently paranoid but political, which means that its task is of overwhelming complexity and that it must always leave some of its constituents dissatisfied. In fact, it ought to do so rather than imagine that its task is to reeducate them so that they can sympathetically identify with its own point of view. It ought to respect diversity rather than seek to sublate it. Just as there are paranoid and authoritarian ways of simplifying, if not solving its problem, there are also Leninist solutions, in which the mediating bridge, or pontif, assumes the role of vanguard consciousness, representing the real interests of all the psychic members in advance of their own self-realisation. In this role the ego possibly outsmarts itself, it is a pathology of the sophisticated, like Buddhism, or humanism, perhaps.