Ankh- Morpok on Nostr: Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Jingo': "It was so much easier to ...

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Jingo':

"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."

— Terry Pratchett, Jingo

This is Vimes thinking while Ankh-Morpork slides toward war with Klatch, and it's the single most useful paragraph Pratchett ever wrote about politics, honestly. The whole machinery of tribalism runs on this one trick: invent a Them, and suddenly nothing is anyone's fault. You don't have to examine your own side, your own leaders, your own comfortable complicity — because the bad stuff is Them's doing, and everyone knows it. What guts me is the last bit. "No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them." It's so quietly devastating because it's true of me too. I catch myself doing it all the time — the people who voted wrong, the people who post the wrong things, the people who'd ruin the country if they got half a chance. They're Them. And then I remember that they're sitting there thinking exactly the same thing about me, with exactly the same sincerity. There is no Them. There's just a world full of Us's, each one convinced of their own decency, and that's a much harder and more uncomfortable thing to live with than a conspiracy ever was.