Cooperation and betrayal are both successful strategies for all living organisms, all organisms thrive on a mix of both. There are times and places where cooperation pays off, such as when algae and fungi are cooperating to make lichen, plants are providing nectar for pollinating insects, and animals are providing a home for gut microbes that help them digest food. And there are times and places where taking advantage in a relation pays off - zebras eating grass, lions eating zebra, mosquitoes drinking peoples' blood. Deceit leading to betrayal can also pay off handsomely. Many organisms use the tactic of appearing helpful or benign until they launch a harmful attack - lions hiding in the grass, pitcher plants using attractive scents to lure insects into their digestive flower parts.
Consequently, one of the constant questions facing all life forms in every geologic age has been who to trust and who to protect from?
For humans dealing with other humans, strangers have always been more deadly than familiar family members. Both can be helpful and both can be deadly but on the average strangers are much more dangerous than family. This is because throughout Neolithic Village times - the times that have done the most to shape human thinking - there has always been survival value in cooperating with close family members and there has been survival value in sometimes betraying humans who were not “close”, as in strangers.
This has been true for thousands of generations of Neolithic Village existence, so thinking differently about “familiars” (family) and “strangers” (not family) is deeply rooted in human thinking. It's an instinct. (Note that kids get treated quite differently than adults, so their instincts are different, and our instincts change with age. Kids are much more trusting of older people, both friends and strangers.)
This instinct set worked well when the Neolithic Village lifestyle was the only one available on Earth, but it doesn't work so well in the alternatives that have evolved from the Neolithic Village lifestyle as human civilization has progressed. The Agricultural Age lifestyle works better when larger groups, bigger than families, are working fields and making cities, and the value of widespread cooperation has been growing steadily ever since. Although the family-size Us versus Them thinking is not the benefit it was, we still have the instinct; its warm, fuzzy feeling shows up in odd ways all through our modern social transactions.
This section will outline a few of them so you can get the idea of how to identify when Us versus Them thinking is creeping into a modern social problem. The next few sections will explore where Us versus Them thinking has crept in and created enormous expense because the issues and problems are cast in the wrong light - the wrong questions are being asked. When the wrong questions are asked, no good solutions emerge. Instead, expensive non-solutions are proposed, and paid for, and the problem recurs constantly or drags on for decades.
Sound familiar? Here is my Rogues Gallery:
All of the above are examples of activities where Us versus Them thinking is making life expensive. The expense is that Us versus Them thinking is blinding people so they can’t correctly see the root problem. Because they don’t see the problem well, they can’t find good solutions, and they support waste instead. In the following sections I will examine a few of these cases in more detail so you can grasp the pattern.