Them
We all have a Them.
According to an old Arab Bedouin saying:
I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.
Whether it’s “my brother”, “my cousins”, “the world”, there is inevitably a Them.
We build worlds of Us and Them.
Robert Sapolsky, in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, examines the biopsychology and culture driving our relentless bisection of the world into Us and Them. From cultural world-views to neural transmitters, evolution has programmed us humans to sort the world into Us and Them.
Take oxytocin, the darling hormone of pop psychology. Oxytocin has been hyped by some as the joy juice of bonding. Evidence supports this. A 2003 study showed that oxytocin levels correlate with human-dog bonding. Correlation is not causality, but there is widespread evidence of associations between oxytocin and pro-social behavior.
Cortisol, by contrast, has been popularized, accurately, as a hormone that (among many other things) controls fear, and governs fight-or-flight. Some pop psychology has turned Oxytocin into an Us and Cortisol into a Them.
There’s a catch. Oxytocin does correlate with pro-social behavior … within your group. It drives you to favor everyone and everything you associate with “Us”, over everyone and everything you regard as “Them”. Oxytocin is conditional.
Consider some random real world examples of Us and Them, taken to extremes:
- The 116th United States Congress
- The Crusades
- Slavery and Jim Crow
- The Holocaust
- The Trail of Tears
Pain and suffering directly resulting from human addiction to Us and Them in a single day, in an hour, maybe a single second, is beyond measure.
One can think of a bell curve describing the degree to which people suffer from their addiction to Us and Them. At the tapered extremes:
- Dividers: Adolph Hitler, Elijah Muhammad, Fred Phelps.
- Unifiers: Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Buddha.
The rest of us fall somewhere in the middle, depending perhaps on our level of consciousness.
It’s fascinating that we live in a world that was for a time shared by Fred Phelps and Martin Luther King. Why do some people live wholly in a world of Us and Them, leaving a wake of destruction, and others manage to transcend the drive to bisect, striving to clean up the mess?
As you wrestle with your own predilection for Us and Them (as I do with mine, 24x7x365, plus Leap Days), some things to consider.
- Own it. It’s counter-productive to pretend that you don’t divide the world into Us and Them. We are biologically driven to do this. Few people have the discipline to transcend these urges. Denial only serves to obscure culpability, and make it more likely you will bisect the world.
- Don’t blame yourself or others for the urge to divide the world into Us vs. Them. It’s baked into Us and it’s baked into Them. We are entirely responsible for our behavior (i.e., not acting out our Us vs. Them worldview), but we can’t control our thoughts.
- Recognize that dividing the world into Us and Them can feel unbelievably good. Vilifying Them is usually accompanied by a huge chemical rush of self-righteousness. Bonding with Us is an instinctive drive that brings profound pleasure.
- Though it feels really good, dividing the world into Us and Them doesn’t bring peace. It doesn’t bring joy. It’s just a temporary chemical rush until your next fix. It’s ultimately a petty existence built on an arbitrarily constructed world. A lot of evolutionarily successful human behavior doesn’t make sense in modern contexts.
- Mindfulness is a powerful tool. As Viktor Frankl wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We can choose to acknowledge what may be a powerful urge to divide into Us and Them, and choose to not react to that urge. Mohandas Gandhi had the same hormones and neurotransmitters coursing through his body as everyone else. He faced far more provocative stimuli than most people. He made choices.
- We all fall off the wagon. Repeatedly. It’s hard. It’s expected.
- You have the right to hold and espouse your beliefs. When asked “What do you think of Western civilization?” Gandhi is said to have replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” You can oppose a bigot like Fred Phelps, and everything he stands for, with absolute resolve, without turning him into a Them.
