I think that some of you here feel that you belong to a nice set of people. It may be an ordinary kind of bourgeois coterie of pleasant squares or it may be a church group of some kind, a club, or a special cult, or just a group of friendly drinkers, but at any rate you feel that by virtue of membership in this society, you belong to a special in group of nice, or saved, people. Now when you consider what nice people talk about when they sit ‘round the dinner table and have an opportunity to nurture their collective ego, you’ll find that the most fascinating topic of conversation is the nasty people; how awful they are, what dreadful things they do, and 'what is it all coming to?’. This very, very satisfactory condemnatory conversation nurtures your ego, but people who do that don’t seem to realize that they thereby depend on the nasty people in order to know that they’re nice. They are as a matter of fact highly indebted to them. On the other side of the picture the nasty people, they on their side consider that they really are the best people and nurture their collective ego by blasting the bourgeoisie, the squares, the wasps, the know nothings, or whoever they may be. So for the collective ego of the non-squares the squares are extremely necessary. If they were to disappear tomorrow many of us would lose a cause… The minute you begin to become aware of this it’s rather embarrassing, because at once you begin to realize how much you depend on an enemy or an outsider or a group of damned people as distinct from your own group for saved people. So you begin to realize that your collective ego, or your Self, depends on your being on the in, but you can only be on the in with the relation to something that is out, and since the in and the out are inseparable - if there is to be any in or any out - you suddenly discover that your self is bigger than you thought it was. It includes the other, and you can’t do without it. This brings about a fundamental change in the understanding of the meaning and nature of Self, and thereupon there becomes a change of attitude to other people, even if you continue with some formal opposition to them and disapproval of them.
The Spectrum of Love, Alan Watts (1973)
