Breaking the Chains of Us vs. Them: A Call for Radical Self-Accountability

Susan
Feb 22, 2025
4 min read

I’m sick to death of people—men versus women, white people fixating on Black people, Black people fixating on white people, Republicans obsessing over Democrats, and vice versa. It’s always one against the other. Every debate, every news cycle, every algorithm is designed to keep us at each other’s throats. And for what? To keep us distracted from the only thing we can actually change—ourselves.

This relentless “us versus them” mentality is a trap. It’s a convenient excuse to avoid accountability, to push blame outward instead of looking inward. But here’s the hard truth: The collective isn’t going to change until individuals do. No political movement, religious revival, or cultural shift will fix a society full of people who refuse to take responsibility for their own humanity.

The Illusion of the Collective Fix

The world doesn’t change because a group of people voted a certain way. It doesn’t change because hashtags trended or protests happened. Those things can shake the system, sure, but they don’t fix what’s broken at the core. Real change starts when individual human beings take radical accountability for how they think, act, behave, and most importantly, how they treat themselves and others.

Søren Kierkegaard warned us long ago about the dangers of losing ourselves in the collective. He argued that true selfhood comes from personal responsibility, not blind allegiance to any group. Yet here we are, centuries later, still outsourcing our identities to politics, race, religion, and social movements, rather than asking the harder question: Who am I outside of all that noise?

Chris Hayes nailed it when he said, “We must use every tool and strategy imaginable to wrest back our will, to create a world in which we point our attention where we—the willful, conscious ‘we’—want it to go.” But most of us don’t want to wrest back anything. We’d rather be told who the enemy is, who to blame, and what side to take. It’s easier that way.

Secular Humanism and the Road to Authenticity

What if, instead of worrying about what “they” are doing, we focused on what we are doing? What if we stopped defining ourselves by opposition and started defining ourselves by our own ethical code?

Secular humanism offers a path out of the noise. It rejects religious dogma and political tribalism in favor of something simple but radical: human accountability. It tells us that morality isn’t about allegiance to a group; it’s about how we, as individuals, choose to live our lives.

The American Humanist Association’s “Ten Commitments” lay it out: critical thinking, empathy, humility, ethical development, responsibility, altruism, peace, social justice, service, and environmental stewardship. None of these values require a political party or a racial identity. They require only one thing—radical self-accountability.

And yet, we resist this. We don’t want to be accountable; we want to be right. We want to believe we are morally superior because of who we vote for, what books we read, or what protests we attend. But none of that makes us good people. What makes us good people is how we live when no one is watching.

Breaking Free from the Cycle

Here’s the reality:

If you want a world with less racism, be a person who doesn’t tolerate racism—not just in others, but in yourself.
If you want a world with more kindness, be kind. Not just to people who agree with you. Not just when it’s convenient. But as a fundamental, unwavering principle of who you are.
If you want a world with more justice, be just. That means holding yourself accountable before you hold anyone else accountable.

This isn’t about ignoring systemic issues. It’s about recognizing that systems are built and sustained by individuals. Change the individuals, and the system has no choice but to follow.

L.A. Paul talks about transformative experiences—moments that fundamentally shift who we are. This is one of those moments. The choice before us is clear: We can stay locked in an endless cycle of blame, division, and self-righteous outrage, or we can choose to be better humans.

It’s that simple. And that hard.

The world isn’t going to change until we do. So what are you waiting for?