The We Tribe Versus The Me Tribe
The fence is here to stay
I cringe whenever someone laments that “we are so divided!” It’s as if mere “division” is the real problem. If only we would just forget about all these “politics,” come together, and sing Kumbaya, we could be okay again.
I used to think I was the only one losing my breakfast over legacy media pundits pontificating about us poor ignorant peasants attacking each other with pitchforks over things of no real importance. But I wasn’t. Over the last eight years of cascading traumas and crises, as we all split into two warring tribes, my tribe was figuring certain things out.
One of them was how to recognize each other — and how to recognize them. It’s not just the red hats, the big flags, and the assault rifles in the Dairy Queen. Everybody can see those members of the central cult, but they are not the entirety of MAGA. There are at least as many sympathizers who don’t look the part.
I call these sympathizers the Me tribe.
All Me’s may not be in MAGA, but there is significant overlap. Me’s can be found in every gender, every racial and ethnic identity group, and every economic stratum. Some are quite educated and intelligent. They may identify as libertarians, independents, or “none.”
It doesn’t matter what they call themselves though, as their voting pattern is betrayed by comments that slip out of their mouths:
- — Give me one reason why I should still be paying off my college loans while these spoilt brats come along and get it for free! Now my taxes have to pay for theirs too?
- — If they’re going to come here the least they can do is speak English! Why should I have to listen to that in my own country?
- — I’m going to get the biggest SUV they have, that way everybody will get out of my way!
- — I put a camera in the window. Now I’ll know if anybody’s kids step on my lawn!
- — Give me one good reason why my taxes should have to pay for their kids’ school lunches. Just how is that supposed to be my problem?
- — I have a right to breathe freely. If somebody is afraid my breath will kill them, they can see I’m not wearing a mask and stay the hell away from me!
All of these little remarks are windows to darkness. They come from a soul that does not reach out to the world, but only inward, that never looks beyond Me.
I have always gotten a warm, happy feeling when I hear about someone finding success or happiness. Likewise, I feel bad when I hear about someone experiencing a blow in life. It took a long time to realize that not everyone shared the same outlook. Some people enjoy seeing others fail and feel distress at others’ happiness.
This is the Me tribe.
Over time, I figured out the landscape of the Me’s and how their culture and psychology diverge from our We tribe assumptions. Here’s the picture I put together.
The Shadowland
Me people don’t see life as a collaborative, cooperative venture, where we all surrender some of our autonomy and resources into a common pool to survive and build nice things. For them, life is 100 percent nonstop competition. It’s a mountain to climb over the bones of others — a winner-take-all game that takes no prisoners. In this game, everyone is a potential enemy. Friendships are alliances of convenience and mutual benefit that last only as long as the benefit does. Adversaries and enemies abound.
Chief among them is the government, which is always “stealing” their money with taxes and giving it to people at the bottom of the mountain. This is an injustice that burns like a branding iron in a Me person’s soul. It’s a zero-sum game. Anything someone else has is something no longer available to them. It’s as if a teacher is taking away their lunch and giving it to a kid in another class.
A Me person believes that others are always out to take something from them. Other people have somehow been handed an unearned advantage over them, or have cheated, or stolen something that should have been theirs, and are about to do it again. They regard everyone with a degree of suspicion and resentment.
They are eternal victims and it’s not just over money. Anyone who has something they don’t can spark resentment in a Me person. Younger people, more attractive people, happier people, healthier people — all have somehow robbed the Me person of their youth, beauty, joy, and vitality by nefarious means cooked up by the government or the all-encompassing “they.”
I have even seen them turn their resentment against their own children.
This scapegoating satisfies a deep need in the Me person’s soul — a need to hate. Scapegoating is not just a necessity; it’s a bonding function among the Me’s. Getting together to trash someone or some group is a favorite form of socializing and cohesion. Anyone can become a target — immigrants, gays, someone with a new car, a promotion, or a new, desirable spouse.
Anybody and everybody besides themselves is an enemy.
No “healing” please
We are not just “divided” — we are exposed. The Me soul is one of entitlement, rights without responsibilities, unbridled selfishness, and grievance. MAGA demonstrated what happens when the Me’s not only take power but are given the green light to express and celebrate their values publically. We saw what Me’s did when freed from our laws and moral code. They bared themselves proudly as their whole selves.
We got a glimpse of what a Me society would look like. Everyone is out only for themselves. A cult leader defines reality. The carnage and destruction are blamed on others — usually us — for our attempts to warn or stop it.
No lie is too big to deflect blame.
Though all Me’s are not MAGAs, all MAGAs are probably Mes. There is no “healing” here. We will not accept Me morality as a legitimate component of We. And while our feel-good stories like A Christmas Carol and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are true and some souls really do leave the darkness for the light, they remain the exception rather than the rule.
Young Goodman Brown is also true.
A course forward
Our only comfort is knowing we aren’t alone in this. Me’s are not unique to our country. I imagine they could be up to half the world’s population, which is why human civilization has been so disastrous.
We are rightly focused on not letting them take back power. But we should also look at how older democracies handle themselves. What do they do with people who don’t care how many they kill with their breath because they “don’t like” wearing a mask? How would they handle people who broadcast lies about government disaster assistance organizations confiscating the homes of anyone who takes their support in a disaster? What would they do with people who accuse election workers of falsifying voting results and then terrorize them out of their homes? Would they let them just go home and leave it up to the victims to sue them in court?
It wasn’t just the Me’s and the MAGAs and the anything-for-a-buck legacy media that fueled the conflagration of the last decade. It was our own system’s hand-wringing denialism that continues to this day. While the whole world could see our president was in the pocket of the Kremlin and our congressmen were calling for sedition, our institutions and politicians were pretending everything was fine, there was nothing to see here.
Older democracies seem to have a more mature perspective on their populations and their governance reflects that. They don’t let insurrectionists run free to continue their insurrection for years before their court dates come up. Neither do they let them run for office, hold office, and take over elected chambers of government.
Like anyone else who is a danger to the public, they keep them in jail until trial.
Hopefully, our younger generations have learned from this experience and will take some pages from other democracies’ books. Our bad example should serve for something.
Grow up
We aren’t going to forgive and sing Kumbaya to the MAGAs or their fellow Me sympathizers. We won’t “seek to understand” people who relish the idea of seeing so many of us killed, imprisoned, or deported.
Notice how the call to forgive and understand is always levied to us, and never to them?
Our task is not to “come back together” but to acknowledge reality and learn how to live with the other across the divide. It’s nothing new. Other nations have been doing it for thousands of years.
