The “US” Versus “Them” Problem

Right off the bat I need to acknowledge that virtually none of what follows here is original – at best it is a distillation of the thoughts of many that accumulated and eventually forced themselves out of memory and into the forebrain.  That process has been driven by the rather common human need to make sense of the incomprehensible mess we seem to have gotten ourselves into as a species and wondering what   our options are to escape it.

In the film “Jurassic Park”, chaotician Ian Malcolm argues that “If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is. ... Life will find a way.”

Humanity (I am trying to avoid using any such term as homo sapiens, which seems a permanent walking oxymoron, or the Human Race, because look where that kind of thinking and language has gotten us) seems increasingly challenged by the problem of even agreeing on what problems challenge it.  A great deal of the trouble arises from the persistence of ‘it’s them or us’ thinking at all socio-political levels.

Of course, in its deepest roots, “them or us” began as “him or me” – when the first two single cell organisms encountered each other, and each worked through a short question sheet – possibly headed by ‘can I eat it?’ – but at some point included the question of ‘what is this that is not ‘me’?  but usually concluded with ‘It’s him or me’ and there was again only a lone single cell (albeit perhaps bigger) single cell.

Eventually, enough experience with ‘him or me’ gave rise to the realization that if I can get more ‘me’s’ together then it won’t be ‘him or me’ but it will be ‘him or us’ – and I have a much better chance of coming out successfully on the other end if I am among the ‘us’.  It didn’t take long for ‘him’ to figure out what ‘me’ had figured out and so ‘him or me’ became ‘them or us’.

This launched the still ongoing discussion of defining who is ‘them’ and who is ‘us’.  History, political science, anthropology, etc. all pretty much agree on the succeeding conversations about ‘us’ moving up from family, to clan, to tribe, hamlet, village, town, city, nation, empire, and so on.  The technology available today has somewhat complicated the conversation of ‘us or them’ by introducing new criteria to the identification process – are you ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Star Trek’ [with no serious room set aside for ‘Galaxy Quest’ or ‘1999’]; are you Budweiser or burgundy or bourbon? are you baseball or football [aka soccer, introducing another criterion]?  Introducing such criteria into the conversation sometimes renders moot the answer to what family, clan, tribe, hamlet, village, town, etc. you are because the answers to these new questions have already placed ‘us’ or ‘them’ beyond the pale of recognizable human life forms.

I also agree with the idea that our world is now the equivalent of a planetary petri dish in the back corner of the rack.  Any intelligence out there capable of intergalactic/interstellar travel only approaches us in the equivalent of full PPE gear – essentially just checking to see if it’s time to scrape this petri dish clean and start over.

Which leads me to share my observation that whatever aspirations we, us, or them have for expanding humanity beyond this third rock from the sun are themselves moot until we get past the ‘them or us’ problem.  Humanity’s progress to date, whether measured by technology, economics, territory occupied, etc., has generally been linked to successfully expanding the ‘us’.  One sad option too often adopted has been to increase the ‘us’ by reducing the number of ‘them’.  History tells us how many times in how many ways humanity has done this, but it is worth noting that modern science has also discovered in our DNA traces of multiple human ancestry including both Neanderthal and Denisovan and now possibly others.  So obviously, multiple ancestors over time looked at ‘them’ and acted on the primordial desire to go from ‘me’ to ‘us’ by the most natural pathway.  Wow, we just ended up at “make love not war”.  Can’t get any more Boomer than that.