For a long time now, I’ve been trying to make my “Us” bigger – to include more people in it.
Seems to me that a lot of social ills stem from a small Us that brings an adversarial tone to interactions with the majority of people. If I can just see more people as part of my Us, it keeps the tone positive and helps me to feel at home – among “My Own” – more of the time.
And every human being has something in common with me, even if it’s just the fact that we’re human.
Where does this idea of Us and Them, of My Own vs. outsiders, come from? It seems ubiquitous, so it’s not culture-specific. Is it a carryover from the stage of life when children differentiate themselves from their parents, but taken too far? Do our minds slip into the thought pattern of the children’s game, “One of these things is not like the others …”? Is it hyper-individualism?
I appreciate the concept of otherness, written about by many noted thinkers including C.S. Lewis. And I’m not advocating that everyone is or should be the same – uniqueness is a precious gift.
But realizing that I have a choice of who belongs in my Us – that it’s not just automatic, that it can be flexible, and that nobody else can force my choice – has really opened up the world for me. It has actually helped me to delight in uniqueness, since more and more people are part of My Own and not adversaries.
What do you think? Should everyone try to expand their Us? What would happen if we did?
Originally posted July 1, 2009 on White Tree Ideas
from August 4, 2009
Answer: That, my friend, would be utopia…
from September 1, 2010
Eliminate all the me(s) and my(s) from the article and see where you end up. I think it will be a much better perspective, not an easy one but better.
from July 16, 2011
Thanks for the comment, Dan – though I’m not sure I understand what you mean. The only way to “eliminate me/my” from the post is to eliminate the self – to deny the validity of personhood. I respect that some folks’ cosmology recommends this; my own does not, so perhaps that’s my difficulty. In actual practice, I can only control my own sense of “Us,” not enforce an “Us” on someone else. But maybe that’s not what you had in mind?