Unfair Demonization of One Social Collective

I've always felt alienated in any social collective since childhood. Every time I had to formally belong to some social collective such as extracurricular clubs at school, I felt suffocated after a few years and left all of them. The last one I left was my former workplace in academia. In retrospect I must have felt suffocated because of the collective egos of all these social collectives.

In spite of all this I recently started to feel even deeper love for one social collective (henceforce A) than before when I came to realize how it was (and still is) demonized unfairly by its archirival (henceforce B) and how deep-rooted B's hatred toward A is. I feel this deep love for A in spite of the fact that I don't belong to it.

I've always felt empathy toward underdogs, whether they are individuals or social collectives. A isn't an underdog in the conventional sense of the word, but it has been treated unfairly as such by B and its "allies".

I myself am surprised to see that my love has deepened not only for A itself but even for its collective ego! I find myself defending A and its collective ego more and more frequently in my arguments with those who demonize it, mostly out of sheer ignorance and concomitant irrational fear.

In the meanwhile I've fully realized what B has been trying to do by demonizing A - the second attempt to "r*pe" (sorry for the expression) A after successfully "r*ping" it for the first time years ago. B's uncontrollable collective ego is simply unbearable. In this new light I can fully understand A's collective behaviors that are also demonized by B and its "allies" as A seems to be one of the few social collectives that can challenge B and prevent B's toxicity from continuing to contaminate other similar social collectives.

Collective Ego

Ego can be not only individual but also collective. Leo Gura, from whom I've been learning and influenced more than any other nondual master except for some Chabad rabbis, defines it as "an irrational self-preservation instinct".

Souls of human beings are coupled with their respective individual egos when they descend to this world, borrowing physical bodies. Our bodies can't survive as purely spiritual beings with no ego.

Any (sufficiently complicated) social collective or system also has an ego known as collective ego. Social collectives can vary from larg-scale ones such as nations to small-scale ones such as families. Culture in the sense of a set of unspoken rules is how the collective ego of a nation and or a state manifests itself.

It may be difficult for you to imagine how social systems can have their respective collective egos. For example, human languages have their collective egos, which are known as normative grammars.

Just as human thought, speech and action can be better understood through the lens of the ego, so can social collectives be. I'd like to briefly demonstrate how collective egos operate in two social collectives in which I was an insider for about 30 years - Esperanto movement and academia.

These two social collectives are especially useful to understand the nature of collective egos simply because few people would imagine, at least if they only think naively, that their collective egos are far more problematic than they seem at first glance because of their superiority complex, which is parallel to the so-called spiritual ego of individuals. And this is one of the main reasons why I've decided to leave both of them after I encountered Chabad Chassidus and other teachings of nonduality and woke up.

The Esperanto movement and academia are similar to each other in that both of them are cult-like and have dogmas, which are not perceived by their respective members as problematic. I wish I were wrong, but having spent about 30 years in both social collectives, I'm quite sure that many of their members seem to believe blindly that their respective social collectives are superior to other language movements and occupations respectively. If this is the case, this very blind faith is nothing but an illusion of their collective egos, which makes their members believe this way to preserve themselves.

Many people who first get acquanited with the idea of Esperanto may be impressed with its "nobleness". But upon closer examination you'll realize that it's not necessarily superior to other ideologies promoting specific ethnic languages as a means of international communication to unify the mankind. The problem is not so far with what language to use for this purpose but the very fact that a specific language is perceived as a possible - or for most Esperantists the best - solution. You have to transcend language for this purpose. They are stuck instead at the same level of consciousness that is causing this problem.

Academia has a set of far more elaborate (and toxic) rules that are imposed explicitly and mostly implicitly upon its members by its collective ego. This toxicity infects the individual egos of many of these members. How does this infection manifest itself most prominently? This collective ego bloats their individual egos. For many of these with bloated egos the happiest moment in life is when they have their papers-shmapers quoted by their fellow in "peer-reviewed" journals. This very institution of peer reviewing their "holy temple" and peer reviewers and its "high priests". I can easily recognize people with bloated egos not only in their speech and action but even in their external appearances, especially in their facial expressions.

PS: I strongly recommend everyone to listen to a two-hour-long online lecture entitled Collective Ego by Leo Gura. I've even listend to it several times.

National Characters of Students

I suddently remembered how I got along with students from various countries. In the longest chapter in my professional life I closed about two years ago - a 30-year-long chapter called academia - I taught students from about 30 countries.

When I talk with specific individuals, I never label them according common stereotypes of national characters. But when I talk about social collectives, including those who live in any politically and/or culturally delimited country, I often allow myself to generalize about their national characters. From my own experience of observing various social collectives, at least 80% of the members of any social collective unconsciously follow most rules of its respective collective ego, which are also known as culture. It's thanks to these people that any social collective can survive.

I remembered students from which country I got along best - Russia! When I first noticed this, I myself didn't understand why. But as I had the same experience again and again with different students from this country, I understood that there might be something that characterized people in general and students in particular from Russia. After making several visits to Moscow, I've come to understand why I felt most comfortable with more students with Russian cultural background than with those with any other cultural background.

Again I'm generalizing. The characteristics I write below may not apply to every student or everyone with this cultural background, but I've met more students with these characteristics from Russia than any of the 30 countries whose students I taught:

• Warmth: Those who have never had any close personal relationship with people from Russia may be surprised to hear that they are so warm. They are! But only after you become close to them, and they open themselves to you. The initial psychological barrier may be impenetrable, but once it has been broken down through mutual friendship and trust, the sky is the limit. On the other hand, people from certain other cultures seem sociable from the very beginning, but the interpersonal distance remains. I realize that they were not so sociable in the first place as they seemed in the beginning and their friendship was rather shallow.
• Intellectual curiosity: This character may be specific to students. This was crucial to me as a teacher. I had a very hard time trying to instigage students with little or no intellectual curiosity. I especially suffered a lot when I taught students from two countries though their respective lack of intellectual curiosity manifested itself in two rather different manners.
• Sense of humor: My method of teaching was highly interactive - I always bombarded my students with questions. I often said rather harsh things, though nothing was personal. In such a case I tried to "detox" the possible poison in my language by using spontaneous humor. Here again students from Russia responded best and in the way I expected them to.

Having written thus far, I recall now with great nostalgia the most unforgettable teaching experience I ever had in my entire academic life. It was when I attended a summer school of linguistics in September 2017 organized by a team of leading typoligists in Moscow with guest speakers from other countries. I only attended this school as a student, but I volunteered to contribue to the entertainment program on the last evening of this unforgettable summer school. I had the chutzpah to teach traditional Ashkenazic folk dance I studied in three workshops taught by my former teacher Walter Zev Feldman. I enjoyed this teaching experience so much as I had never experienced such curiosity and joy in my students!