The Us vs. Them Mentality -- a Devil's Tactic

This article is inspired by an unfortunate and hellish situation that my family and I have found ourselves in, whether the rest of them want to admit it or not.  My family is in the middle of a criminal, corporate enterprise whose profit plan is to embezzle as much company money as possible to harass an accomplished black family.  I guess that is humorous to some pathetic, high-level white men at said sad company.  These white men made themselves look cool to their rich white male peers by downing me and my family and playing on less evolved white people’s stubborn tolerance for conning blacks.  Some of the money was used to pay sex harassers, stalkers, corrupt hiring managers, other disloyal family members, doctors and nurses.  But the remaining funds were pocketed by these company embezzlers providing another incentive to steal more funds and keep it going, brainstorming as to new ways to harass my black family and our friends: employment discrimination, stalking, money fraud, incompetent medical treatment, physical threats, social isolation, eavesdropping and invasion of privacy.  The harassment keeps escalating too, now including government officials who are trying to conceal the embezzler’s harassment and cheat us out of our constitutional guarantees to Due Process, Equal Protection and freedom from involuntary servitude. 

One might ask, how could a middle-class black family get mixed up in a big-wig corporate conspiracy?  Why is our family so divided now, some helping others hurt us?  How could they lose their appreciation for a family member’s American experience, quality of life and freedom itself?  Where is their patriotism?  Black pride?  Christianity??? Well, before I tell you that, I will iterate that prior to this our family was not a vicious family, contrarily, we loved each other (and God) sincerely and often enjoyed each other’s company during the holidays, on summer vacations, during reunions, graduations, birthdays, and for no special reason at all.  My parents have four adult children and my Mom and Dad both come from huge sibships, Mom has eight siblings and Dad 12.  My parents were very sociable with their siblings, always visiting and entertaining them.  So, their family was a huge portion of their social circle, unlike some families who are related to each other but never really spend time together, my parents’ friends were their family members and friends of their family members.  They cared about each other as sincerely as any real-life family would.  If our loving family could transform in character so greatly, turning against each other, betraying not only other black people but other family members, going from day to night, support to hostility and shameless climbing, then so too could any of us in this American society, regardless of race. 

Again, how could a middle-class black family get stuck in a big-wig corporate conspiracy? Division: our metamorphosis was caused by corporate hustlers encouraging us to compete against each other—promoting the us-versus-them mentality.  Our in-laws were tricked into comparing my parents’ wealth, likeability and children’s accomplishments to their own.  As a result, any increase in my parents’ financial security was a loss for brother-in-laws, so they worked against us gaining higher income and wealth.  Likewise, the achievements of my siblings and I were an embarrassment for any of my parents’ siblings whose kids failed to obtain the same.  Otherwise, Katherine and Jerry would have done something better than them and when thinking competitively my parents’ siblings could not cope with being out measured by my parents in any category.  The corporate embezzlers threw gasoline bribery on their sibling rivalry, telling in-laws that they could dominate their wives—"in a way that every man should anyway”—by keeping the money a secret from their wives while steering her into greater ignorance about the darker side of their conspiracy. 

This corporate con started with my former managers approaching my parents and their siblings behind my back.  Originally, they bonded with my parents by speaking paternal values to them, leading them to misbelieve that I was too young and naïve as a woman to understand the business of practicing law, mainly because I had not wanted to embezzle corporate client money on a diversity hustle.  Instead, I reported the issue and asked for assistance leaving that company.  But because this did not fit the profitability plan of the partnership, they approached my Dad to accept some of the dirty money instead.  All Dad had to do was gaslight me about my mental health and singlehood, begin to pressure me into trying to marry a chauvinist man who, of course, would also be willing to accept shady bribes from my managers behind my back.

I know, it sounds ugly, selfish and dishonest admittedly, but realistically even the most admirable men can be incredibly flawed when it comes to financial fidelity. National Endowment for Financial Education, NEFE.org, 2 in 5 Americans Admit to Financial Infidelity Against Their Partner (Nov. 18. 2021)(discussing a Harris Poll survey which showed that in relationships with combined finances 47% of the men committed financial deception such as hiding a purchase, debt or money from their partner, the deception worsening to 59% of the men and women polled in households raising adolescent children); Stevenson, J., JohnStevenson.com, Money, Lies, and Love: Key Findings on Financial Infidelity in America (Assessed 04-24-2025)(finding that men are twice as likely as women to hide major purchases from their partners, and that sixty percent of Americans believe that financial infidelity is becoming more common than before).  Dad was no exception.

 So, as Dad dealt in dirty money with embezzling white men, they tested him, starting with flattery and progressing to assignments that, in hindsight, demonstrated his trust in them.  They asked him and his in-laws to put on funeral charades aimed at me to swiften my family planning and to vest other family members in the idea of attacking my mental health to cover for their participation in the fraud.  They claimed that this was just something men—the superior gender—should be able to do to the women in their family because men are smarter, stronger and more connected to other men who are the rich and powerful decisionmakers of the world. 

Degrees did not matter; a law degree and BS (even in Mechanical Engineering) were useless without a man.  They made the other women feel like they were more attractive or wiser than me for landing husbands before I had, and that if I were not so busy trying to be an overachiever, i.e., trying to “act like a man,” I would have known better.  But I surely did not know better than to do the best I could for myself and my family in this life.  My Dad’s southern values and blue-collar circle led him to revel in this idea, religiously committing to it.  They encouraged Dad to keep secrets from Mom (because she is just a woman after all).  He was supposed to take the lead and call the shots for both of us, like only a real man could do.  They began to encourage my Dad to be abusive, use emotional and electromagnetic wave abuse against both Mom and me, making him feel like he could control us without fear of evidence and police prosecution.  In time, many of the other men in my family joined in, all my brothers, my uncles and some male cousins.  I have inferred that they have all taken dirty money bribes from my managers to con their wives and daughters into trusting their corporate bribers and to emotionally and/or physically abuse us women.  This allegedly proved how our world’s significance belongs to men alone, i.e., it being “a man’s world”—a value that many lazy, financially unfaithful men love to desperately hold onto.  The older women in my family naively took the bait of comparative praise as well, believing that the solution to all problems had to include me (even sexually) submitting to a man.  They were, in their minds, my greatest competition and I theirs.  We were certainly divided and the chasm between us only grew over the next 18 years of this conspiracy.

During this nearly two-decades conspiracy, these corporate con artists duped my parents into helping them commit all kinds of abuses against ourselves, 12-years of employment discrimination, invasions of privacy and even physical violence against the women.  My parents did not know where this conspiracy would lead them.  At least some of these corporate hustlers are much more than embezzlers… they are psychopaths—super narcissistic serial killers, who get joy from conning others, disgracing them, interfering with my healthy marriageability rather than assisting with it, trying to drive us into permanent poverty, not just temporary, and even setting my father up for murder by encouraging him to return to dialysis prematurely only to sabotage his treatments a few years later.  My father unfortunately lost his life to this corporate conspiracy and its promise of him being able to compete against the women in his family, out-measure me and us.  Even after his death, his murderers continued to promote abuse and fraud with his brother-in-law coconspirators against their wives, Dad’s own sisters, myself and other women in our family.  Demonic con artists in the practice of law preyed on my father’s divisive flaw, his chauvinism, his willingness to take sides with men who were supposedly “powerful” instead of his wife and daughter, so much so that it placed Dad, our family and extended family into a tornado of harm.  Done so that these petty corporate hustlers could feel racially superior to my Dad and his family and so that they could make off with a relatively insignificant extra fist full of twenties from their corporate client’s coffers. 

Division is the devil’s tactic.

"Who is wise and understanding among you?  Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom.  But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.  This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic.  For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.  But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.  Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace."

James 3:13-18 (emphasis given); Church of the Great God, CGG.org, Bible Verses about Division (Assessed 04-24-2025)(quoting various Bible verses against division).  Being jealous of others, being controlling or trying to dominate fosters demonic energy.  It invites negativity into our lives, “confusion and every evil thing.”  God, instead, wants us to live in peace, not division. 

As President Lincoln famously asserted when advocating for the unification of our country with regards to slavery, “[a] house divided against itself, cannot stand.” Wikipedia.com, Lincoln’s House Divided Speech (Assessed 04-24-2025); see also, Matthew 12:25-30 (“[H]ow can one enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man?  And then he will plunder his house.”).  Dad’s coconspirators sought to divide us as a family first, then to plunder our household.  As a family we cannot survive divided, similarly as a community, city, country and even the world we cannot endure when we are at war with each other.

How Division is Sown: Overemphasizing Our Differences

Today division is commonly termed “othering” (or tribalism).  When we overemphasize the differences between ourselves and others, that sows division and is simply othering people. 

"The process of “othering” can be divided into two steps:

1.                Categorizing a group of people according to perceived differences, such as ethnicity, skin colour, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

2.                Identifying that group as inferior and using an “us vs. them” mentality to alienate the group.

Othering involves zeroing in on a difference and using that difference to dismantle a sense of similarity or connectedness between people.  Othering sets the stage for discrimination or persecution by reducing empathy and preventing genuine dialogue.  Taken to an extreme, othering can result in one group of people denying that another group is even human."

Curle, C., HumanRights.ca, Us vs. Them: the process of othering (Jan. 24, 2020)(discussing how othering facilitated the Holocaust and other historical, shameful dehumanizing events).  One example of how othering can spiral into inhumane torture is the Holocaust, where Nazi Germany first required identifying markers to be placed on the clothing of Jewish citizens only to eventually kidnap them, force them into labor and murder them.  Several million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and it all started with mandating that each Jewish citizen notoriously wear the Star of David so that they could be easily recognized as different than Christian Nazis. Id..  Othering usually does not start with genocide; it begins small, with less offensive delineations between “us” and “them” to the benefit of the promoters of division.

Dividers are often leaders in society, managers, politicians and CEOs; they deflect attention away from their flaws and corruption by using systematic or institutionalized gaslighting, steering their subordinates into division rather than confidence. ChiefTalentOfficer.co, Breaking down ‘us vs. them’ thinking (Mar. 22, 2023)(discussing us-vs-them thinking in a workplace environment and how it leads to poorer health and lower work performance); Petric, D., Psychology of Abusive Human Behavior, Open Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 11, no. 2 (April 1, 2022)(discussing the negative effects of toxic psychology, like gaslighting, defamation, mockery, bullying and mobbing).  In our case, high level managers at my old employer were distracting people from their embezzlement by racially ostracizing me, then Dad and then our family.  After the dividers could not anger me into violence, Dad became the bad guy—responsible for their gross waste and embarrassing ignorance.  They played on preexisting racial divides in the local community.  White line workers had to watch fat cats throw money at black men in my family who had never worked a day for the company while their pensions dwindled; white engineers were upset that money was wasted on gaslighting a black engineer-lawyer to delete my second degree while they were being bought out, forced to retire early in their careers.  Disgruntled white men, many employees and retirees from the same company, made it a mission to gang stalk me while I was running errands each week, bitterly angry about my black family getting something they had not, irrespective of whether it was through company and family disloyalty or legitimate professional development and education.  Corporate leaders actively used employee competitiveness to divide us.

A divider seeks out something, even the smallest difference to use for what they want.  “Divide and conquer” is a means of dehumanizing others so that we do not have to respect their legal rights. Schwartz, S., PsychologyToday.com, Us Versus Them: An Intractable Problem in Human Nature? (April 26, 2024).  Someone being different can be threatening and categorizing them as a threat justifies all sorts of illegal, immoral maltreatment.  Sometimes they highlight race—pretending to cater to the white people vs. the black people, selling them on tolerating their abuse by saying “this is how we make sure that we stay in control, safe, on top, with better lifestyles and jobs and legacies.”  They use scare tactics to encourage the in-crowd (in this case, white people) to accept their bad behavior, fear dissent and being left out or left behind on an island to starve to death.  They make the others (in this case blacks) seem untrustworthy, unpredictable so that they do not get too close to them, always feel that they need the crutch of the us-team and ingroup.  Another common distinction overplayed is gender, the men versus the women—"if the women become in charge, they will begin to use us, manipulate us, embezzle our money, cheat around on us, be domestically abusive with us, so then we must keep them oppressed instead.”  Or they will use, the old versus the young: “they do not respect us, they think we are out of touch, one foot in the grave and irrelevant already, they need to be taught a lesson to respect us and give us what we want, not the other way around.” The rich versus the middle class and so forth.

Highlighting differences causes us to be more hostile to those who are in the different group: women, blacks, the middle class, etc.. ChiefTalentOfficer.co, Breaking down ‘us vs. them’ thinking (Mar. 22, 2023).  If we are biased against a person because of their differences we cannot be fair in judging them or their behavior.  “Our brains will go to great lengths to seek out only data that confirms our existing beliefs and will ignore, discount or discredit any information that challenges those beliefs.”  Thus, we must quiet our “internal judge.” Id..    Otherwise, we overestimate the differences between us and the other group, giving them lower value or credibility than us.  Equally as concerning, we underestimate our differences from the dividers because now we are seeing our environment through their lens.  To be precise, we begin to trust dividers much more than we should, just because they can emphasize distinctions, thinking that we have more in common with them than we really do. Id..  Think about it, just because someone can make our differences explicit it does not mean that they have a trustworthy character or good intentions, now does it? 

In my family’s example, corporate managers played on the fact that my Dad and others in my family were chauvinist men, and that me and my mother and aunties are women, encouraging the men to be abusive and controlling towards us.  But the men in my family are more than just men, they are black men, middle class black men with whom my colleague-managers never had any intentions to socialize with or be around.  In other words, these corporate managers did not care about keeping their word to the men in my family… any more than they cared about keeping their word to their white male employees whose jobs they destroyed with their corporate greed.  Why would corrupt CEOs feel more of a kindred connection with the black men in my family than their own, same-race colleagues?  That does not make sense.  But highlighting Mars vs. Venus gave them a segway for conning my Dad and the men in our family.

Practically speaking, how can one be loyal to a large group of people?  An entire race or gender?  It is not realistic that dividers could be loyal to all those in the “us” group.  Realistically, men make up approximately ½ of any given population, so, for Southeastern Michigan that is 2,400,000 people.  How could a male corporate manager, unjustly enrich over a million adult men?  How can he really be interested in being loyal to all men?  Suggestions of chauvinism being their guiding light was always false, a con used to get closer to us than they should have been.  While the natural response is to gravitate towards people playing up your acceptance, making you feel proud of belonging, it is shortsighted.  We all first want to feel secure and validated but our first response is not always our best response.  Even in a “man’s world” men are disloyal to other men every day.  Men steal from other men, they rape their daughters, they compete in sports or in business for promotions, they ridicule each other, they fight. As to whites living in a Western world, white men rape white women every year (being 69.8% of those arrested for rape in 2019), white men steal from other white people daily, (being 68.2% of those arrested for burglary).  Black police officers help white people every day, even though they are underrepresented in most local police departments, many black police officers prosecute both black and white perpetrators who have harmed black and white victims.  Black clergy counsel black and white people all the time. Kubichek, A., ReligiousWorkForce.com, How are Clergy of Color Faring in White Protestant Denominations?, (Mar. 30, 2023)(black protestants most often serving in the following denominations: 7% in the United Church of Christ, 6% in the United Methodist Church and 5% in the Episcopal Church).  So then, how is it true that belonging to a gender or white race guarantees allegiance from a divider?  The notion that your safety lies in affiliation with a divider is a misnomer.  What is more likely true is that those with which we spend our time are those with whom we “belong”—our families, our friends, our churches, neighbors, and our colleagues.  If you are to be tribal about anything, be tribal about that. 

Remedying Othering

We remedy othering by first, noticing ourselves doing it and considering divisiveness in the context of history.  Most of us are not completely ignorant as to at least some historical instances of tribalism and how it has been unhealthy for humanity, leading to inefficiency, violence, church bombings, murdered little children, genocide, hatefulness and shame. Medium.com, Social Puppeteering: The Art and Influence of Manipulating Societal Behavior (Feb. 01, 2025)(reviewing case studies in social puppeteering involving Nazi propaganda and Cold War propaganda, each using anti-other ideology, symbols, rallies, films, media, cultural diplomacy, and/or psychological operations to misshape public perception about the other group); Powell, J., TheGuardian.com, Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’—and how to avoid them (Nov. 8, 2017)(discussing how listeners can be “puppeteered” by political leaders when they play on fears of different people, leading to exclusion and dehumanization of the othered group); Schwartz, S., PsychologyToday.com, Us Versus Them: An Intractable Problem in Human Nature? (April 26, 2024).  But we fail to spot similar issues in our lives today and apply those lessons learned to our own judgement.  It is easy to watch documentaries of Klansmen gloating about lynching a black man and recognize their shortcomings, their extremism, their lack of discipline and vigilante lawlessness.  But when it comes to disciplining ourselves enough not to ostracize a person with whom we are competing, we get obsessed with our jealousy, so much so that we convince ourselves that we must control the destiny of that person, be involved in every corridor of their life, family, friends, business, and that we will sacrifice anything to dominate them.  As to women’s equality, it is easy to judge physically abusive men of the past but not as simple to examine your modern attempts to still control a woman, trying to psychologically dominate them because you are paranoid about “losing” to a girl.  But this is the same division that has plagued human history, eroding our morality, emphasizing our worser selves.  Foreseeably, no one wants to be dominated by anyone, especially one without lawful authority.

Secondly, we must increase our empathy towards each other, treating people the way in which we want to be treated, as Jesus advised. Matthew 7:12.  We really do not know what challenges people have, their perspectives or how “others” feel, until we have walked a mile in their shoes. A Class Divided (PBS Frontline television broadcast 1984)(documenting a grade school experiment where a teacher divided the classroom by eye color, designating the blue-eyed people to be inferior one day and vice versa the next day so that white students could experience discrimination firsthand); Peters, W., A Class Divided, Then and Now (1987).  In A Class Divided, Jane Elliott, an Iowan third grade teacher designed a classroom test inspired by the recent assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and a Sioux Indian prayer: “Lord teach me not to judge another man until I have walked in his moccasins.”  Wanting to educate her students about the harms of discrimination, she ridiculed and belittled students according to eye color for two days in her class, giving children with the preferred eye color extra recess and lunch, calling them smarter, celebrating their correct answers and being patient with their incorrect responses, all while punishing and down putting the abilities of the other eye-colored children.

Thereafter, they discussed what it felt like to be discriminated against and why it was not moral or fair behavior.  Fourteen years later, most of the class returned for a reunion to discuss how this experience shaped their views of racism as adults, noticing their better tolerance for people of other races.  Bad apples were no longer seen as examples for the whole group, negative presumptions were discouraged and they did not just go with the crowd when racism was promoted by their friends or family members.  Thus, their empathy and appreciation for people of other races was heightened.  It stands to reason that their behavior followed suit.

Finally, in addition to raising our (general) empathy towards an entire group; we can be more empathetic on an individual level.  As spiritually accountable people, we are to be good Samaritans, making sure that the people around us feel as if they belong. Luke 10:29-37; Powell, J., TheGuardian.com, Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’—and how to avoid them (Nov. 8, 2017)(promoting Canada’s method for respecting the unique identities of others while making them feel included; not “saming” them but still letting them know that they belong in society as they are).  Belonging is the opposite of othering. Id..  Another way to keep division in check is to make sure everyone feels included somewhere in our organizations, jobs, schools and society. 

Othering increases isolation and seclusion makes people more vulnerable to bullying and abuse. Mass General Brigham McLean, McLeanHospital.org, The Mental Health Impact of Bullying on Kids and Teens (Assessed 04-25-2025)(social isolation can be one of the mental health impacts of bullying); McNeill, B., News.VCU.edu, Addressing social isolation may be key in preventing mass shootings, study finds (Feb. 17, 2023)(a study of 177 mass shooters at Virginia Commonwealth University identified remoteness as the most important external indicator leading up to the attacks, as cited in Downing K., FYF eNews, Mass Shootings, Are They a Spiritual Problem? (Mar. 20. 2024)). Similarly, violent actors like mass shooters are more frequently lonely individuals. Id..  We can make people who are different from us still feel included by:

·        Focusing on activities that encourage everyone to get involved

·        Encouraging kids to give genuine compliments to each other

·        Discouraging comparing oneself to other people

·        Helping kids to focus on their strengths

·        Rewarding those who go out of their way to help other people

·        Catching up with old friends

·        Mandating student participation in civic events and organizations

The Mental Health Impact of Bullying on Kids and Teens, supra (“To lessen the impact of bullying, it’s important to help young people feel like they are welcome just as they are.”); Addressing social isolation may be key in preventing mass shootings, study finds, supra. No one should ever feel completely alone.  As enlightened people, let us make a conscious effort to mend humanity together and be more empathetic towards those around us.

Until next time: God Bless & Namaste (or the spirit in me recognizes and greets the spirit in you)!