An Us that requires no Them

A line from the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” goes, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Evil thrives in the shadows. Just as I must disguise my intentions if I am to cheat you of your money, so also must rapacious corporations greenwash their stripmines as “carbon neutral”; so must politicians justify their wars of aggression as “humanitarian interventions”: so must totalitarians explain their repression as “keeping people safe.”

The kinder one is, the harder it is to accept malice as real. Psychopaths exploit the benefit-of-the-doubt that most people extend to others. Those of us who are not evil cannot easily understand evil.

Yet there is an opposite and equally true principle that is much more important a guide through our present crisis of civilization: The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he DOES exist.

That trick is pulling the world into a hell that we will never escape until we see through it.

Here is how it works. The Devil is the source of evil in the world. Evil deeds come from evil people. So, if evil is happening, let’s find the evil people responsible for it. Let’s destroy those evil people, so that good may prevail and evil cease to mar our world.

Who are the evil people? The Iranians! The Israelis! The corporate execs! The cadres of Antifa! MAGA extremists. The DNC. The people at the Koch Foundation. The Gates Foundation. The World Economic Forum. Russia. China. The military. The CIA. The left, the right, the immigrants, the anti-immigration voters.

Having convinced the world that he exists, the Devil watches in satisfaction as everyone mistakes for him anyone with whom they have a conflict of interest or opinion.

That is not to say that the above-mentioned people never commit evil deeds. But to attribute those deeds, automatically, to their innate evil is to create the Devil where he doesn’t otherwise exist. Once given life, the demonized other quite often fulfills one’s worst expectations.

Last week I was compelled to watch Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress. He laid out the conflict in West Asia in stark terms. A clash, he said, “not between civilizations, but between civilization and barbarism.” A clash between good and evil, the latter embodied by Iran and its allies. A clash, he said, that if America and Israel stand together, “We win and they lose.” Delivered to thunderous, adulatory applause, the thesis of the speech feels intuitive to those programmed to see the world in black and white, good and evil, us and them. They recognize the basic plot line, whether or not they agree with Netanyahu’s attribution of hero and villain.

The United States, perhaps more than any other large country, is habituated to that way of thinking, in which we are the world’s hero nation, champion of freedom and democracy, defending the world against tyranny. We are good; therefore any who oppose us are evil, or at least the dupes of evil. America is not the first to consider itself a hero nation, and it shares in common with the others a tendency toward becoming an anti-hero instead. Any entity, whether nation or individual, that has convinced itself of its moral or racial superiority has license to use any means to achieve its vaunted ends: tyranny in service of freedom, repression in service of democracy, war in service of peace, cruelty in service of human rights. Seeing the Devil everywhere but within, that nation becomes the Devil within. Its worst impulses, freed of the constraint of self-doubt, rise to the surface to wreak misery in the world.

As without, so within. Those same dark impulses released by the ideology of us-versus-them have spread through America’s domestic politics too. They are like cracks in a windshield. The windshield can hold together for a while as the cracks spread, until one day it becomes so fragile that the smallest pebble kicked up from the road will shatter it. And we are trailing a gravel truck right now, called the 2024 election.

The human species races now at breakneck speed into the most hazardous patch of highway we have faced at least since I was born. The near-term catastrophic scenarios all arise from us-versus-them thinking — a commonality that also offers a way through them. The most dangerous are (1) military escalation in West Asia, particularly the US neocon / Israeli plan of instigating war with Iran; (2) accidental (or non-accidental) release of another genetically-engineered bioweapon; (3) civil unrest following an indecisive election result in the United States; and, perhaps the most dangerous of all, (4) a consolidation of authoritarian power as a response to any of these or other environmental, technological, military, or epidemiological disruptions.

It should be obvious how the first three stem from us-versus-them thinking, but what about the fourth? The drive toward totalitarianism requires an internal or external threat of some kind — but not to frighten the population into submission. The threat is necessary in order to coalesce the population into the zealous us of fascism. That us requires a them to define it. The fear of the communist, the Jew, the virus-spreader, the “domestic extremist,” or the foreigner in our midst merely primes the pump of mass formation; the real fear is of being cast from society into the ranks of the out-group, the untouchables, the unmentionables.

That is the most primal fear of humans as social beings, and that is the cultural patterning we must change if we are going to come through the next four years with hope intact. The great theologian and anthropologist Rene Girard described the pattern in terms of sacrificial violence. In times of crisis, as internecine tensions between rival social factions threaten to tear society apart, society unites in murderous violence against a scapegoat individual or group, expiating its tensions and reestablishing cohesion. In such times, one must take care not to be identified as a member of the sacrificial group — not to be identified as a Jew, or a communist, or a witch, a Tutsi, an infidel, or whatever the mob has chosen as its target. You must not associate with the Devil, or his taint will infect you too. Even insufficient enthusiasm in persecuting the scapegoat will draw suspicion. Safest course is to outdo your neighbor in the vehemence of your denunciations.

This is the ancient social force that fascists have learned to ride to power. It is nothing new, and as long as we conform to its patterning, the human condition of war, oppression, and other forms of artificial misery will continue unabated. Ruthless, power-hungry people will exploit it, if it is there to be exploited. To achieve the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, we have to remove the fuel of division, war, and fascism by cultivating a different pattern in our social relations, a fundamentally different prism through which we recognize the world.

Who is us and who is them? Who are the good people and who are the bad people? Estimations of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness color everyday conversation to a degree that will shock anyone who begins listening for it. It can seem sometimes that social life is a constant negotiation of alliances in contention for the status of us. Did I tell you what my sister-in-law did? Can you believe it? Wasn’t that inexcusable. You and I wouldn’t do such a thing.

Gossip can serve a useful function as a form of social hygiene, making each person’s helpful and harmful behavior transparent to a community. But when the many dimensions of virtue and vice collapse into a good/bad binary, society is ripe for hijacking by politicians who can steer it toward fascism at home and war abroad. (The two always go together.) Our society is teetering on the edge of both, even if today’s fascism bears little outward resemblance to the ethnic/racial brand of the Nazis.

As America and its proxies flirt with catastrophic escalation of the wars in Ukraine and West Asia, the need to disrupt the underlying us-them pattern is urgent. All of us can do that in our daily affairs. No, this isn’t the “solution” I’m offering to the crisis of civilization — to retreat from politics into the personal, relational realm. But that realm is more “political” than most people realize, as it maintains a normative field of human behavior. Undoing this habit of perception there also weakens its hold in political life.

The alternative to the us of fascism is also an us, an us that requires no them. It starts with the recognition of what the Buddists call interbeing and the Zulus call ubuntu. I am part of you and you are part of me; we depend on each other existentially. Therefore we cannot rely on an other as a receptacle for our projections of evil, for that evil lives in some form within. What would politics look like if we understood that?

The age-old pattern of relieving social tensions through paroxysms of violence against an othered scapegoat poses humanity with the threat of nuclear war, among other existential threats. Together, these form an initiatory crisis for humanity, showing us the hell that awaits those who search for the Devil. They show us that in the end, what we do to the other we do to ourselves. Victims are recycled as perpetrators; perpetrators as victims; and none escape the nuclear fallout. Will we pass the initiatory test?

That question is not a request for a prediction. It is meant as a challenge.