Senator Bob Dole’s famous line, “My opponent is not my enemy” referenced the President during his concession speech in 1996 after he lost to rival Bill Clinton. On stage, they played the role of enemies, sparring and jabbing at each other, but behind closed doors, such ancient grudge broke into new mutiny. Foe became friends, and the two men who sat opposed on different sides of the political arena realized that they were more alike than apart.
However, Dole’s admission that Clinton wasn’t the enemy was frantically forgotten and societally short-lived. Politics returned to its habitual labeling of the opponent as the villain, someone to rally and win against. But why do we have this obsession? Why do we need to position ourselves against each other? And are there not bigger things we must fight against?
When anatomically modern humans first reared their heads out of that one tree in Sub-Saharan Africa (trust me on this), we only had one thing on our collective mind: survival. To ensure our own survival, we needed to win. Win against nature, against our food (that was probably running away from us), and against each other. This was the first debate of human society.
me vs. you
The initial problem of building a society from scratch is selfishness. Should I sacrifice what I won to ensure your survival? The answer back then was most likely “No.” It was a dog-eat-dog world, after all. But for those of you perhaps a little less narcissistic, you may’ve squared off a corner of your hunt’s carcass to share with your neighbor.
This was the very first human relationship. It establishes a sense of trust; by sacrificing just a small part of my earnings/possessions, I can begin a relationship of reciprocity with another, and ensure that they would do the same if the roles were reversed. Out of all Homo species, we sapiens were seemingly the only ones to do it, and that’s the anthropologist’s favorite reason as to why we won the great battle of the Homos (my label, not theirs).
Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo habilis were all seemingly too stupid to realize that making friends was a good thing, and thus consequently died out, taking their incredibly prominent brow bones with them (amen).
But make enough friends and soon enough you’ll have formed a group. However, those friends will have their own groups, and soon enough you’ll be face-to-face with our second social-philosophical debate.
me vs. we
A community depends on a united body, and that requires real sacrifice. This was, according to our very first Homo sapiens ancestors, easier said than done (via what we can gather from a few very juvenile and not very artistic cave drawings).
The philosophical debate of independence vs. interdependence became the trending existential question. We had (and cough some of us still do cough) a limited theory of mind, which meant that we weren’t yet able to grasp concepts that we could neither hold in our gaze nor our hands. Consequently, without any concept of religion or spirituality to bind us, community was defined geographically. The question morphed from, “What do I owe you?” to, “What do we owe each other?”
And so, how do we satisfy our community’s requirements, and even more fundamentally, what are they? Politicians would argue it’s to perform our civil duties or comply with Hobbes’ Social Contract (ie: we should all act morally according to Scanlon’s Contractualism).
Perhaps on a more primitive basis, is it to secure the survival and Maslow’s needs of our fellow men? Is it to learn, to foster knowledge, to ensure we keep evolving and avoid repeating the mistakes of our parents? Or simply (and rather brutally), is it just to keep our lineage growing? Is our entire purpose to reproduce? Anthropology would say it is (but anthropologists are super awesome people and would never say that because we are so awesome and liberal).
us vs. them
Once you’ve completed all the steps and managed to answer the questions – even with an edible in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, something I couldn’t do – you’re ready for the third stage. Welcome to the Competition.
Now, we’re all neatly (?) organized into groups that are very equal and fair (?); how do we make sure our group survives in an environment where neither group can do so comfortably? We fight. But in order to fight for something, we have to want to. So how do the higher-ups ensure that we do?
How much you identify with your social group is based on three factors: categorization, identification, and comparison. Social theorists Henri Tajfel and John Turner identified categorization first, where an individual differentiates their group from others by using specific terminology and pronouns. We see a lot of weaponization of “us”/“we” (the ingroup) and “them” (the outgroup) in calls to arms and rally cries as a result. You feel part of something, and such a feeling is enough to drive some people to give their lives.
Identification is the adoption of traits and behaviors that unite a group. These can be linguistic patterns, accents, clothes (including merchandise), and even interests, and they can be subconscious, conscious, or perhaps forced. However, the comparison aspect of the Social Identity Theory is what’s crucial. Here, people compare their groups to others to boost their self-esteem, or even just to define themselves. Take, for example, friendship groups. Do you truly know if you’re in a friendship group until someone points out that you are? I’d argue not. Is “us” socially defined, and dependent on or imposed by others?
Some opposites are loaded, and some are simple relationship dichotomies. Republicans vs. Democrats, adults vs. children, doers vs. thinkers, religious vs. atheist, academics vs. creatives, scientists vs. flat-earthers, you vs. us, or fundamentally, us vs. our competitors. We are linguistically coded to oppose each other in the very process of defining ourselves.
what’s next?
If you manage to build a peaceful society with no opposition or metaphorical threat, then first of all, kudos to you, but second, I’m sure you’re asking what the next step is. But is this third step not inescapable?
This brings me to the title of this article and the question of whether this threat of alien life we often see in sci-fi (and briefly during those Area 51 hearings where professionals did in fact confirm the existence of “non-human” DNA in UFO crash sites that the U.S. Government had been covering up for just a few decades that we somehow all moved on too quickly from) matters at all. Are we so obsessed with making enemies out of each other that the threat of alien life will merely be a tremor on society’s surface?
I hypothesize that, if and only if we make peace with each other, this Us vs. Them will remain steadfast. It’s the “them” that shifts over to other groups. Aliens could be included in this, but it’s more likely to become climate change or “nature.” It’s only these kinds of existential threats that force these divisions of Homo sapiens to unite for the first time in human history. Connection and community are theoretically no longer geographically bound, and so through a particularly naïve lens, one could argue that we can come together if we need to.
putting philosophy into practice
Such competition, opposition, and villainization bleed through the global powers. In the international arena, numbers are power. The more people you have who are healthy (both physically and of mind), the more you can convince them to fight for you. But people aren’t going to fight for just anyone. They need to fight for themselves. Consequently, you need an enemy.
Such vilification of the competitor can be seen in all levels of the political arena. You see it most evidently in U.S. attack advertisements, but even the very nature of the two-party system pits half the country against the other.
President Trump takes this one step further. He’s known for ostracizing great swathes of an innocent population based on uncontrollable factors like skin color or place of birth. However, this time his current obsession is within his own country. He’s recently labeled Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff each the “enemy from within,” continuing his obsession with broadcasting the U.S. as being at the brink of devastation and destruction. Consequently, he’s turned voters into violent militia.
Now the U.S., among many other countries grappling with large militaries and even larger populations, remains infatuated with and embroiled within the Us vs. Them dichotomy. Other countries still struggle with Me vs. We, but that’s not to say it’s a hierarchy. A nation is not better than another because it has “graduated” debates; it’s simply facing different problems.
Arguably, we are all, as individuals, grappling with the three dichotomies. It’s whether the state/government chooses to recognize its problems that determine what band it finds itself in. But when it comes to aliens, climate change, or pollution, we’ll all have to step up. If we don’t, no one will win.