This month, as the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary, the immortal phrase “we the people” appeared on parade banners, in commemorative essays, in speeches, and across celebrations. The phrase evokes the possibility that people across a diverse society can hold a meaningful identity in common. Even beyond the United States, in countries around the world, “we the people” is shorthand for the idea of the shared public good.
Still, at a time of deep polarization and political gridlock, those three words that form the opening of the preamble of the Constitution can feel more and more elusive as an everyday reality.
Looking at the state of societies globally, it’s now an open question:
Is “we the people” still possible?
Or are we more realistically consigned to a world of “us versus them”?
It’s easy to conclude that “us versus them” is one of the oldest features of human nature. We are group-forming beings. We sort, compare, and defend our own. This is part of how people have survived, organized, and defended themselves across history. The fact is that it’s easier to organize people when there’s an “other.”
Consider the challenge of climate mobilization. For a time, many climate campaigners tried to frame the climate crisis as requiring a “World War II–style mobilization.” The point was understandable—climate change is an existential threat that demands shared sacrifice, public investment, technological transformation, and a willingness to act beyond short-term self-interest.
Yet the analogy exposed something about group psychology. World War II mobilization was sustained by a literal human enemy. There was an opposing force people could name, see, fear, and fight. Climate change doesn’t present itself in the same way. It’s a systematic challenge where there’s no single villain whose defeat would solve the problem.
The psychology of “us versus them” can generate intensity, sacrifice, and solidarity in ways that appeals to the common good often struggle to match.
Social psychology confirms this. In Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group” experiments, people showed favouritism toward members of their own group even when the groups were assigned on trivial or arbitrary grounds. People don’t need much reason to form an “us.” And once there is an “us,” a “them” can quickly emerge, because group identity often gains strength through contrast.
The same longing for belonging that brings people into community can also be redirected into exclusion, fanaticism, and violence. When people feel unseen, humiliated, displaced, or powerless, a demagogue can offer a counterfeit form of belonging by giving them someone to blame.
I have come to think of this as the shadow side of belonging.
It looks like connection, and it may even feel like connection at first. It can offer a shared language, a shared enemy, and a shared sense of purpose. Yet this kind of belonging is hollow because it builds cohesion for some by denying dignity or respect to others. It offers people the feeling of being part of something larger, but only by narrowing the circle of moral concern.
Yet this isn’t the whole story of human nature.
Many of the problems that most require collective action—including climate, but also AI, inequality, loneliness, and democratic distrust—don’t come with a simple enemy. They require a broader and more mature form of belonging. They require something bigger than unity against an adversary. They require commitment to a shared future.
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And, thankfully, human beings also raise children together, mourn together, build institutions for public service, and make sacrifices for people we will never meet. Beyond tribalism, we are also wired for care, collaboration, mutual aid, and compassion.
The key psychological question is which identity becomes most salient. Are we primarily insiders and outsiders, winners and losers? Or can we also remember that we are neighbours, citizens, parents, workers, caregivers, and members of one human family?
Here’s the biggest reason for hope: Group boundaries are never fixed. They can narrow, but they can also widen. Under the right conditions, people can come to see former strangers as part of a larger “we.”
So how do we promote an ethos of “we the people” that’s grounded in genuine belonging?
First, we need to get beyond online sorting systems that profit from sorting people into opposing camps. Personalized feeds can expose us to different villains, different facts, and different moral realities. We need to create more shared attention in everyday life, through meeting places and shared practices like libraries, community meals, service projects, neighbourhood walks, sports leagues, rituals, and public spaces where people encounter one another as real human beings.
Second, we need to solve real problems together. People build trust when they work side by side cleaning up a park, rebuilding after a flood, mentoring young people, caring for elders, serving meals, planting trees, or deliberating over a local budget.
Third, we need to practice a psychology of the wider “we.” This is the perennial moral calling to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. It can begin with intellectual humility, like admitting, “I might be wrong.” It can mean asking, “What fear, wound, loyalty, or need might be underneath the troubling behaviour that I see?” It’s the ethic of seeking to understand. Understanding is not the same as condoning. It is the beginning of responding to the conditions that allow destructive forms of belonging to take hold.
Overall, we need to build belonging into the institutions that shape our lives. Schools, workplaces, media platforms, faith communities, governments, and businesses all help determine whether people feel respected, rooted, heard, and able to exercise agency. Belonging cannot depend solely on individual goodwill; it must also be supported by the systems through which we live together.
“We the people” has never been complete—in virtually any society I know of.
But the fact that “we the people” has been incomplete doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It means it’s a practice, a discipline, and a moral and psychological vision that we have to work to make real.