We’ve all had conversations about sports with people who start referring to “us.”
You want to stop and congratulate them on making the team and ask what position they play. It invariably turns out they are not part of the team. They just sit on their backsides drinking beer, screaming “go team.”
Professional sports are multimillion-dollar country clubs that don’t admit the likes of us. When the team we pull for wins, we don’t get million-dollar contracts, championship rings or supermodels. We just get fatter, drunker and poorer.
The “us” pronoun has become popular when talking about politics as well. But we don’t belong to these multimillion-dollar country clubs either. When the party we vote for wins, we don’t get lobbyist cash, golf junkets to Scotland, interns or dinned at exclusive Georgetown restaurants. We just get ignored until the next election.
Whenever there is an “us,” there is invariably a “them.” This type of reasoning turns politics into a binary choice. We stop thinking in terms of being a nation of people that are all in this together and start thinking about of us defeating them.
Binary thinking is inherently authoritarian. We’ve all seen relationships in which the husband and wife each try to win the marriage rather than build a life together. Such relationships are toxic just to be around. And heaven help the combatants.
Most of us have also seen binary thinking take over workplaces, be it managers versus workers, hard workers versus the lazy or one department against another. Instead of pulling together to produce a successful and enjoyable workplace, each side fights against the other while the company goes to pot and employees dread heading into work.
Now, we’re letting this binary thinking take over our nation.