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.