Us and Them

Posted on 22 January 2010

As promised, I continue on my thoughts that ended Tuesday with the question: is a Them what makes an Us? I mean this on many levels, both from the question of the possibility at all of a single over-arching government to the very creation of social cliques. I am sure somewhere in here I’ll address writing too, cause I’m just predictable like that.

So, I’ll start high.  In many fairly popular sci-fi stories, it takes an alien invasion for the world to set aside its bickering and unify as a single force.  Granted, there are still cultures and other issues within, but a single government entity emerges to confront the new alien terror.  Which, as I will say many times in this post, is a Them for our Us.  And honestly, I think that is about the short of it.  Sentient life seems to have such a hard time getting along that it comes down needing something bigger and scarier to pull us together.  Heck, John Locke noticed this, although he believed that it would take a Behemoth, a massive military force that was able to hold the world at gunpoint, to actually make it behave most of the time.  Which, funny enough, has been the case in some Sci-Fi too.

But, let’s even look back at the beginnings of government.  Nomad tribes learned to farm and settle, then when other nomads came to take the crops, the settlers banded together for protection.  Of course, the biggest, meanest settler became the king, and bingo, government, us, and them.  Pack behavior from the get-go has probably been survival based, with Nature being the Them, but don’t quote me on that.  I’m hardly an anthropologist; I just play one on TV (I wish).

So, cliques.  And an aside, I hate that word, cause I use it quite often in speech, but it took me a full five minutes of going DUR to remember how to spell it and have it mean what I wanted it to mean.  Anyway, cliques, and in particular, kids on a playground.  I don’t know how well anyone here remembers elementary school, but there were two givens. Thursday was spaghetti day, and there was a group of kids who hated with your group of friends with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns.  They might not have been able to do anything about it, especially if your group was way larger or more popular, but they still did.  And more than likely your group had an animosity with some other group (or, sadly, occasionally just a single outcast type kid).  Why? Well, it isn’t just that kids are mean, which they are.

No, it is because an enemy draws us closer.  Hatred is, sadly, a very strong and universal emotion, perhaps moreso than love.  A mutual love of something can create some bonds, but a mutual hatred is like the duct tape and super glue of young friendships.  Perhaps the nature of hate is a good reason.  After all, to quote (shudder) Billy Shakespear, “In time, we come to hate what we often fear.”  And, to quote many people (although Carmine Falcone from Batman Begins is stuck in my head saying it) “You always fear what you don’t understand.”  And what is more universally true of any human than a lack of understanding?

Oh, and an aside of historical proof, both the unification of modern Italy and the unification of the German State required a vilification of an outsider to make it stick.

So, hatred bonds people together, even when they have great differences.  Get enough people together, and there will be great differences.  So, perhaps, there will always have to a “Them.”  To my psychology-savvy friends, please, give me proof otherwise (or anyone for that matter). Cause, honestly, that is a kind of depressing thought.

Oh, and writing.  All I really take from this is that you need to think long and hard if a single-government without external threat really makes sense at all, whether in a future-earth or a fantasy universe.  I, personally, find them odd (which is funny since I do want to write about one in a novel.  Least I have more to think about.)