Posts Tagged: us-and-them thinking

“We Are All One of Us”

On January 7, 2023 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

I heard someone say the other day that a certain politician only thought in terms of blaming “them”. I do not think that this politician is alone. Indeed, he has tapped into a deep vein of human stupidity.

Thinking in terms of us and them categories is as ancient as the human race. In fact, it may not even be peculiar to homo sapiens. Wolves are not kind to other wolves who are not in their pack.

However, the fact that something is ancient or widespread doesn’t make it either inevitable or right. Perhaps we should all think about how to move beyond our us versus them thinking. But how could we do that? I don’t know, but I have some suspicions. And where knowledge is lacking, suspicion must do.

Maybe the first thing I can do is to ask a simple question: What am I getting out of my us-and-them categories. This simple question has at least two simple answers, neither of which I like.

One of the things that I get out of us versus them thinking is an easy sense of belonging. What I mean by this is that, if there is an outside group, there is also an inside group. And if we are not part of the outsiders, we must be insiders. We belong!

There is nothing wrong with wanting to belong. We are each unique beings, but we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves. It is the word “easy” in the phrase “an easy sense of belonging” that is the problem. Anything that is too easy is almost certainly not a healthy thing. Like the second piece of apple pie, easy belonging is only easy in the short term.

Something else that us-them thinking does for me is that it gives me someone besides myself to blame. Having someone else to blame is great fun because it exempts me from the profoundly uncomfortable process of acknowledging my own problems and doing something about them. If the problem is “out there”, I can complain about my chosen “them” rather than change myself. In other words, us and them is a form of laziness—or, at least, it is an excuse for laziness.

After I’ve done the difficult task of wrestling with the question of what I get out of my us-and-them-ism, I can get down to the really serious question. Which is what? I suppose that this question has many forms, but I would phrase it this way: Is there really any such thing as us and them?

The answer is, at one and the same time, an emphatic “Yes!” and an equally emphatic “No!”

Yes, we are all unique individuals, and we are part of unique configurations. Whether that configuration is a family, a race, a religion, a socio-economic class, or something else, us-and-them categories are real. To deny this flies in the face of the facts.

Yet the answer is also “No!” Here is the truth: We are all born. We all some basic needs: air to breathe, water, food, shelter, companionship, a sense of purpose and significance. We all eventually die. To say that we have nothing in common is to reveal that we are not simply blind, but also fools.

So, whenever we are tempted to fall into the us-versus-them trap, we had better get back to the basics: breathing, eating, and such. After all, we are all one of us.

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