In “Us and Them”, a chapter of The Politics of Experience, Laing asks how people come to experience themselves as a group. His answer concerns shared expectations, reciprocal recognition and the ways an imagined “them” can help sustain a “we”. The chapter connects intimate relationships with wider questions about conformity, loyalty and collective violence.
A group is sustained through people’s actions
Laing challenges the habit of treating a group as though it were a larger individual with a mind and purposes of its own. People act, interpret and organise; the collective acquires its reality through those activities. Describing it as a separate organism can conceal the human processes that sustain it. [1]
Laing locates a group’s power in the actions and arrangements of its members:
The group cannot become an entity separate from men, but men can form circles to encircle other men.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of Experience, p. 81 [1]
This is not a claim that institutions or collective consequences are imaginary in the sense of harmless or nonexistent. Laing’s question concerns how a social reality is made and maintained. A belief can organise conduct and acquire considerable power even when no single person acknowledges responsibility for sustaining it.
The distinction also prevents an easy moral division between authentic individuals and necessarily oppressive groups. The chapter examines several forms of association. A household, crowd, organisation and friendship do not all possess the same structure. [1]
Agreement and believed agreement
People can agree without knowing that they agree, or disagree while assuming that everyone shares the same view. Laing separates actual positions from each person’s understanding of the others’ positions. A further level concerns whether people realise how they themselves are understood. [1]
As an invented example, imagine a committee whose members privately dislike an annual event but each assumes the others value it. Everyone votes to retain it to avoid disappointing the group. The decision does not reveal the preference of any one member straightforwardly. It arises through beliefs about the others’ preferences.
Such an example illustrates a logical possibility rather than proving what happens in a particular committee. Establishing the pattern requires evidence from the participants. The phrase “everyone thinks” should prompt investigation of who actually said what and how the shared impression developed.
From separate people to a shared “we”
For a “we” to become established, it is insufficient that I privately include you and another person with myself. You must also experience the association, and we must have some recognition of one another’s membership. Laing describes layers of reciprocal understanding through which each person carries a sense of the others’ participation. [1]
Thinking of several people as “we” is only a beginning; the other people’s perspectives also matter:
However, this private act of synthesis is not in itself a group.
R. D. Laing — The Politics of Experience, p. 71 [1]
He calls a group a nexus when this reciprocal internalisation is its principal source of unity, rather than a common object or formal institutional structure. The term identifies a particular mode of association. It should not be used indiscriminately for every collection of people. [1]
The group’s continuity then depends on people continuing to experience and act in terms of belonging. A changed understanding can be disruptive even before someone physically leaves. This is one connection with Laing’s account of the internalised family, although the group chapter has a wider social and political scope.
When loyalty becomes a condition of belonging
Laing’s most severe analysis concerns a nexus that demands preservation of the shared understanding. Members may pressure one another to maintain it through indebtedness, guilt, threatened exclusion or violence. Leaving can be represented as betrayal because it unsettles the identity the others maintain together. [1]
Concern can become an obligation to produce the expected feeling. Someone is required not only to receive a gift but to be pleased, or not only to hear another’s disappointment but to alter their conduct because of it. Laing examines how affection and sacrifice can become means of enforcing a debt. [1]
His language is deliberately forceful. It does not establish that reciprocal concern is always coercive. The relevant distinction is whether a relationship permits independent responses and disagreement, or makes belonging conditional on preserving a prescribed emotional arrangement.
How “them” can help produce “us”
Laing distinguishes a group constituted through its members’ shared experience from a category imposed on people by outsiders. An observer can imagine a unified “them” without establishing that the people so classified share that identity or purpose. Acting on the classification can nevertheless produce real consequences. [1]
An external enemy can also reinforce internal unity. In the chapter’s account of a threatened nexus, danger may be maintained or invented to justify continuing dependence and loyalty. The interpretation calls for investigation; it is not a reason to assume that every reported danger is fabricated. [1]
Laing develops the political stakes through examples of racial classification, nationalism and Cold War antagonism. He argues that collective action can be organised by shaping how people experience those categories. The rhetoric belongs to the book’s historical moment, while the underlying question remains how descriptions of others become reasons for acting towards them. [1]
The argument and its limits
Shared experience does not exhaust the explanation of a group. Material resources, formal authority, institutions and actual threats also matter. Laing’s chapter offers a philosophical and phenomenological analysis, rather than a comparative empirical study demonstrating one mechanism behind all collective behaviour.
Its contribution is to make collective identities available for examination: who experiences this “we”, who is included in “them”, how is agreement established, and what happens to someone who dissents? For the philosophical background, see Reason and Violence. For the book’s broader argument, see The Politics of Experience explained.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Penguin Books, 1970 reprint.Cited: chapter 4, pp. 65, 71–72, 76; p. 81; chapter 4, pp. 81–83; chapter 4, pp. 65–68; chapter 4, pp. 71–72; p. 71; chapter 4, p. 72; chapter 4, pp. 73–75; chapter 4, pp. 75–76; chapter 4, p. 76; chapter 4, pp. 73–74; chapter 4, pp. 78–80.