The dangerous “we”

People need belonging.

Family, city, language, profession, club and country give connections, traditions and the ability to act together. Without a “we” it would be hard to build anything larger than a lean-to.

But every “we” draws a line.

Sometimes it is harmless: supporters enjoy their team’s win. Sometimes it turns someone else’s misfortune into pleasure, and someone else’s life into an acceptable price for one’s own symbol.

Warning signs of group identity:

• the group’s success is taken as a personal achievement;
• criticism is treated as betrayal;
• an act is judged by who did it;
• “our people” are permitted what is condemned in “outsiders”;
• a person is offered a sacrifice the organisers do not make themselves;
• the group demands an ever larger share of the personality.

Belonging is not necessarily manipulation. A country can be “ours” not because we own it, but because we take part in its language, laws, memory and future. A company can be “ours” for the employees who put years into it, even if the shares belong to other people.

The word conveys not only ownership but connection.

So the point is not to ban the pronoun. It is more useful to ask:

What exactly unites us?

What obligations follow from it?

Who makes decisions on the group’s behalf?

Who gets the benefit?

Who bears the sacrifices?

Can I criticise my own side and still remain one of them?

A healthy “we” allows internal disagreement. A group that demands you give up the ability to judge wants not solidarity but a lease on your mind.

The pronoun is conveniently tested by the direction of the sacrifice. The phrase “we all need to push a bit harder now” sounds the same from an employee and from the owner, but it means different things: one is putting in Saturdays, the other expectations. This is not necessarily deception, as long as both parts are named out loud and both sides know what they get if it works. It is tested with one question: what happens to each of the speakers if pushing harder does not help after all.

What is worrying is not the “we” itself but the asymmetry it covers. Where the benefit is declared shared while the costs somehow remain personal, the pronoun is performing not a unifying function but an accounting one.