Rebellious Thoughts #46 - 🤘 Are you "Us" or "Them"?

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game. YEW!

Let’s get into today’s:

The concept of Us and Them has fascinated me for years.
Let me share and see if it gets you thinking too!

I was young when I first realised that supporters of two sworn enemy football teams like Boca Juniors and River Plate, became best friends when they were supporting Argentina play against another country.

I was never able to articulate this observation, or even begin to understand how it happened or what it meant but I knew it was interesting.

As I got older and more experienced I saw this play at work, in friendship groups, at the club and I would often and instinctively use it to galvanise support in the classroom with mates.

About a decade ago I grabbed what I think is one of the most incredible books ever written - Behave by Robert Sapolsky - and read an entire chapter dedicated to the concept of Us and Them.

I finally found what I had instinctively observed.

Let me use some of his and some of my words to explain this incredibly powerful concept.

Perhaps you can start using it and recognising it more often.
Hopefully, you too buy the book and read it… its’s amazing.

The way in which “Us and Them” is implanted in our heads from a very young age is subtle and more often than not unintentional.

When a teacher says in kindergarten “Good morning boys and girls”… without realising it, we have just divided the world that way.

The teacher could have said “good morning kids that have lost teeth and kids that haven’t”.

Sapolsky in his book explains that studies have also shown that parents generally are terrible at preventing racial Us/Them-ing, responding to challenging situations kids present with general statements like “it’s wonderful that everyone can be friends” or “Barney is purple and we love Barney” - hahaha! (Sapolsky is funny as well as very clever)

Us makes Us feel awesome.

Oxytocin which is often called the love hormone should be also called the hate hormone, as it helps you love Us more but equally hate Them more.

We inflate the core values of Us, we are righter, wiser, smarter than Them.
We know what the gods want, we know what the economy needs, we fight wars because we are right and they are wrong. Our food is better, our music makes more sense, our people are more deserving. We are more cooperative, responsible, trusting, generous, empathetic, forgiving towards Us than Them.

Sometimes you help Us by directly helping Us. Sometimes by hurting Them.

This is often seen in corporations operating in really competitive markets.

Sometimes we confuse a scenario in which we can all do better with a zero sum game scenario where only one wins and the rest lose.

So watching Them lose is as rewarding as watching Us win.

Eg: War seen as a zero sum game is problematic because causing as much damage to Them feels the same as Us winning… which historically has not been… well sadly… a good thing.

To accommodate our mental models we think of special Thems that are different to all the other Thems.

Say a celebrity or a friend of a friend or even someone in the family…
“I don’t like Them, but this one in particular is different to Them”. Haha

Groups when acting together tend to exacerbate these features by being more competitive or aggressive towards each other than if it was two individuals.

Something you notice in corporations: when the grapevine suggests two groups are completely at odds with each other but when individuals from one group talk to individuals from the other, both wonder why the problem seems so big.

So back to the original point, this Us and Them is impacted early and it’s automatic.

You have heard me say before many times that we operate subconsciously most of the time with short and sporadic lapses of consciousness… the stereotyping you do, the biases you have, the Them-ing you do is subterranean… takes a lot of effort and energy-hungry consciousness to beat it - but remember automatic doesn’t mean inevitable.

We are of course members of multiple Us and Them groups, some subsidiaries of each other. We wear different jerseys and participate in different alliances regularly. You can even manipulate situations in which two groups arguing a point become aligned just by simply creating a common enemy larger than the point they were arguing about (regularly a negotiating or diplomatic strategy).

… If malicious aliens from another planet invaded us, we would quickly galvanise as humankind and all wars on Earth would stop.
We would put all our effort into protecting Us…but if another universe attacked our universe, all of a sudden the malicious Aliens would be our comrades as we defend our universe’s dark matter… and so on and so on… like a Romanesco broccoli.

Love

Gus

P.S. WE FINALLY HAVE A DATE.

September 3rd.

“What’s that date for?!?” you may ask….

We just set the date for the first Rebellious Thought Session!
a series of FREE monthly talks where I’ll free flow, share radical ideas and more!

If you want to be part of it SIGN UP HERE! (we already have over 70 people in the waiting list!!)

Oh.. also… what do you prefer? More brekky like 7am / 8am or more lunchtime like 12 pm or 1pm?

P.S.S. Wonder what I even do in “real life”?

1/ Co-founder and Director at Neu21.
We combine creativity, innovation and insight to create unstoppable organisations and products customers love. Book a Discovery call to learn how we can help your organisation

2/ I coach 7 & 8 figure professionals and help them take it to the next level. Book a 1-1 Coaching session with Gus

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