Us vs. Them Mentality Quotes

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil.

The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, not persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone somewhere saying something stupid—but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it’s the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We’re tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies... if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

Regrettably, many religious traditions exacerbate our innate proclivity to divide the world into two clearly demarcated camps, and in doing so, this fans the flames of intolerance and hate.

Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes.

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies...

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.

I tend to support and get behind issues instead of candidates, because of the whole 'Super Bowl' generalization of our world - You're on this side, I'm on that side; you're a Republican, I'm a Democrat; you're country music, I'm rock music.

I feel like my friends are in a cult because we're like, 'No outsiders!

Trump makes no pretense about being the commander in chief of all of the country, being president of all of the people, including the people who voted against him. He is, in effect, a tribal chieftain who has declared war on half of the country.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

It's so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that's what is dangerous.

People are always afraid of the unknown - and banding together against the Thing That Is Different From Us is a time-honoured tradition for rallying the masses.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.

The dangerous glorification of the nation state, and the baiting of minorities that goes along with it, releases an anti-democratic energy.

We make artificial divisions everywhere: Democrats and Republicans, black and white, millennials and baby boomers. Even those of us who are against building walls find ourselves pointing accusing fingers at those wall-builders.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

Organized hatred needs a single target to serve political mobilization, so no distractions can be allowed.

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen.

Right now, politics follows the rules of talk radio - using conflict, tension, fear, and resentment to find new recruits.