The Us/Them Response

If you are a person who believes they are better than many groups of people, you can stop reading here because what follows just won't make sense to you.

Its one of the universals of how human beings are constituted: we all feel that we are part of a group that is better than any other group. The boundaries of your group can be determined by lots of different things. Family is determined by good old genetics, as is race and ethnicity. Nationality is another simple way to identify who you are and are not based on geography. Then there's religion, which allows you to know who you are based on the dogmas and symbols you share with others. There's profession, which allows you to identify with others based on economic activity. There's class which measures who you are mostly by the results of your--and your ancestors'--economic efforts. There's activities such as sports, games, art that afford opportunity to define your group based on what you do during your leisure time.

When you are a member of the group, you will feel instinctively that this group is better than any other. This belief of yours is utterly flimsy and transparently self serving almost every moment you feel it during the entire course of your life. It is based on the need of primates to propagate their genes and it has almost nothing to do with the reasons we tell ourselves our group is better. It is based on the same kind of perspective that we use to persuade ourselves that we are better than the individuals we meet, even members of our own group.

The Us/Them response works beautifully as long as you are just a band of monkeys squabbling over fruit and grubs in a tropical forest. As soon as your band is threatened by an outside foe, you close ranks and act in unison until that enemy is overcome. You know exactly who your enemies are and who your friends are without having to think about it at all. As primates we have extensive emotional, mental and even physical infrastructure that causes us to adopt the Us/Them perspective to a degree that usually matches how threatened we feel. For example at a sporting event where actual threat level is low, we will respond to our opponents with usually good natured teasing. Even then, the Us/Them response often becomes more extreme than the actual threat level. Witness all the incidences of fans rioting. During war, when we come to feel that our actual survival and the survival of our children are at stake, any level of atrocity can easily either be accepted outright or rationalized or denied.

When we do it it is a necessary evil. When they do it it is an atrocity. When we kill them it is a necessity of war. We are good. They are evil. We are human beings. They are monsters. When they kill us it is foul murder. Their leaders are tyrants who are leading a bloodlustng population to slaughter us for criminal and insane reasons. Our leaders are just, wise, and above all able to defend us; equal to the task and we are the aggreived parties in the war, even if it was we who started it. Havn't you all heard the same from individual people about their conflicts with other individuals?

There is no place for this in the repertoire of anybody who is seeking to be more of a human being and less than a monkey. There is no religion, nation, passion, grievance, or mandate that allows for the Us/Them response anymore.

Us/Them is obsolete. We have made it obsolete. The day the first atomic detonation took place it became a deadly atavism because that was the day we started being able to make ourselves extinct if we use it.

If you want to know how someone actually values you, pay very close attention to their Us/Them response. If they clearly believe that they belong to one or more group(s) that are better than one or more groups, they almost certainly believe they are better than you and everybody else they encounter.

Almost every human being I've ever met is completely at the mercy of their Us/Them response. This results in you and I being very easily manipulated by any authority figure who needs to bolster their power.

If you think that you have rooted this out of yourself with less than constant vigilance and analysis of your emotional reactions for many years you are fooling yourself. I'm not sure that people can entirely stop their instinctive Us/Them reactions, but I'm sure we can be aware of them and not let them make our decisions for us.