You are actually so powerful that you are scared of yourself. The ego doesn’t want to give up. That’s what the scare is all about, because betterment of the ego is nothing but the reduction of the ego. Who wants to reduce?
We all want to accumulate. We all want to be bigger. We don’t want to be smaller. In the case of the ego, betterment is not getting bigger; betterment implies getting smaller. And ego does not want to get smaller. Who wants to get smaller? Nobody.