The Collective Ego

How hard can it be 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.
[An excerpt from a work by Eckhart Tolle]

  In some cases the personal ego seems to dissolve completely as someone dedicates his or her life to working selflessly for the greater good of the collective without demanding personal rewards, recognition or aggrandizement. What a relief to be freed from 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 this 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 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 ego entities) are capable of committing atrocities that the individual away from the crowd would not be. Nations not infrequently engage in behaviour that would be immediately recognizable as psychopathic in an individual.
  As the new consciousness emerges, some people will feel called upon to form groups which reflect the enlightened consciousness. These groups will not be collective egos. The individuals who make up these groups will have no need to define their identity through them. They no longer look to any form to define who they are. Even if the members who make up those groups are nor entirely free of ego yet, there will be enough awareness in them to recognize the ego in themselves or in others as soon as it appears. However, constant alertness is required since the ego will try to take over and reassert itself in any way it can. Dissolving the human ego by bringing it into the light of awareness - this will be one of the main purposes of these groups, whether they be enlightened businesses, charitable organizations, schools, or communities of people living together. Enlightened collectives will fulfill an important function in the arising of the new consciousness. Just as egoic collectives pull you into unconsciousness and suffering, the enlightened collective can be a vortex for consciousness that will accelerate the planetary shift.