This looks like a grammar nightmare, but it is a map of our interrelational thinking.
Not all of it, but the part we seem to use quite a bit, enough to come up in many political and religious discussions.
We all start out in the We category. We enter this life as part of the human race. We are people, we belong together, we communicate if we wish and we depend on each other in one way or another. But then we notice that some are more Us than others…. we have all sorts of criteria for the Us, some we are born with and some that we acquire along the way.
Then we notice the Thems. The Them is a group that is different from Us. Sometimes we appreciate the difference. Sometimes we don’t, enough to hate it.
If we hate it enough, we feel that we have to justify that hate…. we must also find ourselves a way out of the dilemma that comes from hating something that has vestiges of the We. The We that we identify with, that draws our sympathetic responses.
So we objectify. There is something within us that is made capable of completely hating an object in a way we can’t hate a recognizable person. And an object is something that can be a terrible thing, an icon of what is evil. We can hate an object….. so the Them , if hated and feared enough is changed into an It.
We no longer identify ourselves with the It. It is not an Other sort like Us. It is dispensible, even jusitfiably destroyable.
Todays lesson is over.