"How hard is it to live with yourself? One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal selfhood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group – a nation, political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.
In some cases the personal ego seems to dissolve completely as someone dedicates his or her life to the working selflessly for the greater good of the collective without demanding personal rewards, recognition, or aggrandizement. What a sense of relief to be freed of the dreadful burden of personal self. The members of the collective feel happy and fulfilled, no matter how hard they work, how many sacrifices they make. They appear to have gone beyond ego. The question is: Have they truly become free, or has the ego simply shifted from the personal to the collective?
A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as the personal ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong, and so on. Sooner or later, the collective will come into conflict with other collectives, because it unconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. Its members will then experience the suffering that inevitably comes in the wake of any ego-motivated action. At that point, they may wake up and realize that their collective has a strong element of insanity.
It can be painful at first to suddenly wake up and realize that the collective you had identified with and worked for is actually insane. Some people at that point become cynical or bitter and henceforth deny all values, all worth. This means that they quickly adopted another belief system when the previous one was recognized as illusory and therefore collapsed. They didn’t face the death of their ego but ran away and reincarnated into a new one.
A collective ego is usually more unconscious than the individuals that make up that ego. For example, crowds (which are temporary collective egoic entities) are capable of committing atrocities that the individual away from the crowd would not be. Nations not infrequently engage in behavior that would be immediately recognizable as psychopathic in an individual."
- Eckhart Tolle
I've realized suddenly that just as each individual has his or her own personal ego, or false self, each group, be it a nation or a society, has its own collective ego. Now that one important chapter in my life-long task of taming my personal ego ended with the end of my psychotherapy this week, I've made a conscious decision to resume my old-new challenge of coping with the collective ego of the society I live in - Israel.
I haven't met too many people personally who are spiritually awakened enough to be aware of their egos and its incessant tireless effort to control their lives. I've encountered even fewer people who are aware that their thoughts, emotions and behaviors are controlled, at least partially, by the collective ego of the society they live in. And the collective ego is far more difficult to tame than the personal ego as this requires spiritual awakening of a whole collective.
I already know the "forces" behind the most annoying manifestations of the Israeli collective ego in public as well as in private interpersonal communication - self-centeredness and insensitivity as well as lack of self-esteem concerning their first language Hebrew. Now I'm fully aware that fighting against self-centered and insensitive behaviors of one individual after another in this society is a Sisyphean labor doomed to fail.
Unfortunately, my task of consciously taming my own ego has just begun, so I'm still influenced negatively by the Israeli collective ego. Ironically but quite expectedly, the more I think about what is for me the most annoying manifestation of the Israeli collective ego, the more frequently I attract it in my daily life. I still have to find efficient ways to not let my ego awakened by the Israeli collective ego. The simplest solution is to leave Israel, and actually I've been continuing to think about this option, but as of now, this is not so realistic, partly because I have only Israeli citizenship. In the meanwhile I've decided to accept this challenge as a precious opportunity to work on my ego.
Having been awakened to realize the existence of the collective ego in Israeli society (as in all the other societies), I've also started observing the society as a bystander and discovered something quite shocking - one widely held collective belief as a very dangerous fear-based superstitious dogma of this collective ego from which many members of the society, whether religious or secular, suffer.