They Not Like Us
For this article, I drew heavily from Chapter 11 of Robert Sapolsky’s epic Behave. I highly recommend reading the book in full.
In 2015, I came across a clip of Michael League, bandleader of jazz fusion band Snarky Puppy, effusively praising Kendrick Lamar. What did a jazz dude see in a relatively unknown rapper1? I thought. Then, I listened to Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and I understood.
Fast forward to this year, when Kendrick gathered a group of West Coast musicians together and delivered a show titled The Pop Out on Juneteenth, a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. At the end of the show, Kendrick busted out his Drake diss track/summer party anthem Not Like Us, and repeated it another 4 times. Kendrick had been openly feuding with Drake for several months prior to the show, and his message, as self-declared biggest Drake hater, could have focused on his personal vendetta. Yes, he did that, and more.
To close the show, he welcomed the musicians and audience onto the stage for a group photo, including members from two Los Angeles-native gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, intractable enemies engaged in a lethal decades-long gang war. Kendrick had transformed his personal vendetta into a show of peace and West Coast unity. This was remarkable enough that Snoop Dogg took a jaunt from smoking joints to declare Kendrick King of the West.
Today, we examine the dark arts by which Kendrick ascended the throne—the invocation of Us vs. Them.
Us vs. Them
Us/Them-ing is rampant in social animals, from chimpanzees, to wolves, social birds, and humans. The process is rapid and automatic, with two interlinked parts—favourable responses toward Us, and unfavourable responses toward Them. In humans, these Us/Them dichotomies operate in complex ways:
Us/Them can be evoked in arbitrary groups. Flip a coin to randomly assign people into two groups, and folks will favour others in their group. These types of groupings, minimal group paradigms, have been replicated in countless studies with similar results, a emphatic demonstration of the universality of Us/Them-ing.
Us/Them can be evoked by arbitrary stimuli. Humans have a wonderful capacity for assigning meaning to the most random stuff, endowing them with rich symbolism and deep meaning. Flags are a powerful example of this—rectangular coloured pieces of cloth that represent something sacred for many2.
We each belong to multiple Us-es. I am Singaporean, Chinese, a father, a behaviour scientist, Lord of the Rings nerd, and deeply love the mountains. I listen to Bach, Snarky Puppy, and Kendrick Lamar. Each is a category by which I can relate to another individual as an Us, or a Them.
Our Us/Them categories are fluid. We simultaneously share as many commonalities as differences with the next person. Sometimes, we find the most obscure bit of commonality with a Them (They rear isopods too!) which instantly transforms Them into an Us.
We often try to conceal our Us/Them-ing. Two things are true in large-scale cooperative societies—we all engage in Us/Them-ing and we mostly pretend that we don’t. A functional large society requires cooperation with those we view as Thems, and cultural norms reflect this, exerting pressure on the individual to deny overt Us/Them-ing.
Our evaluation of Us/Them dichotomies can vary wildly. Some us/them dichotomies are completely inconsequential. Yeah, they are vegetarian, cool. Others are tethered to core beliefs. THEY ARE EATING THE DOGS AND CATS!!
Kendrick’s Dark Arts
These processes are woven into all human interactions. We only need to pause for a moment to reflect on any of our interactions to realise how these processes operate on our behaviours, often inconspicuously. They certainly featured heavily when Kendrick brought the West Coast together, Bloods, Crips, and all.
Kendrick preached peace, love, and unity repeatedly throughout the show (points 2, 3, 4), and invoked West Coast symbolism and its legends (points 2, 3, 4). He put members of the feuding gangs together on the same stage (point 1), enlisting their cooperation for a group photo (point 5). To Kendrick’s credit, his consistency in promoting this vision of Us probably lent him a legitimacy that went a long way.
However, above all, I believe there is one process by which Kendrick effectively used to unite the West Coast (we’re straying into the forbidden arts territory here):
There is no Us without Them. I repeat, there is no Us without Them.
Strong altruistic tendencies toward Us are often accompanied by strong hostilities toward Them, termed parochial altruism. Converging evidence suggests our vast albeit selective (hence parochial) capacity for cooperation with Us folks co-evolved with intergroup conflict. A summary of this evidence is presented in an article by economist Samuel Bowles, aptly titled Being human: Conflict: Altruism's midwife.
Crucially, increasing the threat posed by Them (perceived or not), can lead to increased in-group cooperation. We see an example of this in increased popular support for national leaders and their causes during periods of crisis or war. There is even a term for this phenomenon—the rally 'round the flag effect. For example, George Bush’s approval rating increased from 51% on September 10, 2001, to an unprecedented high of 90% a week later, post-September 11 attacks. More than increases in presidential approval ratings, the attacks also catalysed support for the subsequent War on Terror, the ramifications of which are still felt today.
It's not just me, I'm what the culture feelin'
Throughout Kendrick’s very public feud with Drake, he spared no pains to portray Drake as literally not like us. In calling him an imitator, scam artist, paedophile, and (most damning of all) coloniser, Kendrick transformed his personal war into a cultural war with Them.
What Now? Was John Lennon Wrong?
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
So, there’s no Us without Them. There’s no cooperation without conflict. Can the world ever live as one, or are we bound by our evolutionary legacy of Us/Them-ing?
Bowles seems to think we can escape that fate. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have had a long and bitter history of conflict, and the many ongoing conflicts today provide a stark reminder that their differences will not be resolved soon. Yet, there are many instances, past and present, where people of these faiths live together in highly tolerant, cooperative societies. Singapore today, with sizeable Christian and Muslim populations, ranks highly on religious tolerance. In the past millennium, the Ottoman Empire, while engaging in external conflict with Christian empires, was relatively tolerant (by the standards of its time) of the Christians and Jews within its own empire3.
Thus, as Bowles articulates, our legacy need not be our fate. To end, I leave you with a powerful lesson from one of the most famous psychology studies, the Robbers Cave Experiment4.
In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif involved 22 boys aged 11–12 in a field study conducted at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The boys were randomly assigned to one of two groups (a minimal group paradigm). First, they engaged in cooperative activities within their own groups, then competitive activities between groups. Soon, each group developed strong in-group favouritism, matched only in intensity by hostility toward the other group. There was name-calling, burning of flags (yup, flags again), and physical altercations between members of opposing groups. Effectively, Sherif had created an analogue virulent strain of the Us vs. Them-ing that plays out in the real world.
The final phase, and the validation of Sherif’s hypothesis, was to engineer reconciliation by setting up conditions which required cooperation between both groups, such as moving a stalled truck, and restoring their cut off water supply. As between-group cooperation, the distinction between Us and Them was blurred, and the boys began to develop friendships across group boundaries.
Concluding Thoughts
The Robbers Cave Experiment provides a clear demonstration that Us/Them boundaries can be shifted (point 4). More importantly, it demonstrates that we can achieve cooperation without conflict—neither the stalled truck and cut off water supply were Thems, but represented very real threats to the interests of the collective Us. What’s needed is a superordinate goal that requires the cooperation of the collective Us.
An amendment is in order:
There is no Us without
Thema collective goal.
Finally, recall our unique ability to tether meaning to arbitrary stimuli (point 2). We can frame the threats we face as Global Warming rather than Big Oil, Rising Healthcare Burden rather than Big Pharma, Poverty rather than the Man. This is not simply an exercise in semantics. Behind Big Oil, Big Pharma, and the Man exists not an amorphous evil, but individuals making their way through this tricky thing called Life, not unlike Us (point 3). If we are to have any hope of solving the many intractable problems we face, we need all of Us. This reframing is not an easy thing to do, we absolutely LOVE having a Them to blame. But damn if we don’t at least try in the spirit of Bowles, Lennon, and Lincoln.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave
to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be,
by the better angels of our nature.
“Relatively unknown” in comparison with his status today. With 17 Grammys and a Pulitzer prize to his name, Kendrick is now recognised as one of the greatest rappers of our time.
I’m reminded of this every year, come mid-July, as Singapore flags start appearing outside apartment windows everywhere in anticipation of National Day on August 9.
The Ottoman rulers allowed Christians and Jews certain freedoms as People of the Book, recognising some degree of Us-ness with Them.
The Robbers Cave Experiment involved subterfuge and manipulation, with high potential for causing psychological distress to the participants, who were unaware they were participating in a study. It would not be considered ethical by today’s standards.