'If You're Not With Us, You're Against Us.' Where Have We Heard That One Before?

There was Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. In “The Mob Song,” when the villagers close in on Belle and her father, “everyone’s favorite guy” casually drops a threat mid-song: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us!” 

A cartoon villain is hardly the first to utter those polarizing words. Countless others—real or fictional—have attempted to whittle down complex issues into a binary. There was Russian leader and thinker Vladimir Lenin, who once said, “It is with absolute frankness that we speak of this struggle of the proletariat; each man must choose between joining our side or the other side. Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue must end in fiasco.” 

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Benito Mussolini, leader of fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, often said in his speeches: “O con noi o contro di noi,” which translates to “You're either with us or against us.”

If you’ve read Joseph Heller’s modern classic Catch-22, two characters—Colonel Cathcart and his assistant Col. Korn—attempt to explain that fighting for their country is the same as fighting for the benefit of the two of them. “You're either for us or against your country,” Col. Cathcart tells the protagonist Yossarian. “It's as simple as that.”

And then of course there is perhaps the most famous person in recent history to say those words. Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil., then-President George W. Bush launched a massive “war on terror” that critics said did little to distinguish between fighting innocent civilians and actual terrorists. Bush’s position was clear when he said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Owing to this high-profile and what some would say heartless and uncaring stance, the phrase has since come to be known as the Bush Doctrine, which essentially endorses the legality of a preventive strike in order to stave off threats to the security of America and its allies.   

To be fair, the phrase isn’t exclusively used by despots and antagonists. In an essay, George Orwell, the author of 1984, said, "If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.”

And Jesus Christ himself was said to have exclaimed, “Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). A variation of this statement is also in Luke 9:50 and Mark 9:40: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Of course, only the most delusional can claim an association with Christ Himself for sharing the same political outlook. As in many other things, context is key. When we’re talking about things that are universally acknowledged to be heinous or despicable—things like child rape, sexual battery, large-scale corruption, genocide—there is little wiggle room and choosing a side is not only convenient it becomes imperative. Right and wrong are clearly defined and unmistakable. 

But for many other things, it’s not so simple. One cannot invoke “if you’re not with us you’re against us” as a tactic to force people to choose between two sides when, evidently, there exists more than just the two. There’s a term for this in philosophy called the false dilemma or false dichotomy—basically limiting the options to two absolute choices when there could be more.

The implication is that not agreeing with or choosing to go against whoever said the phrase is an automatic vote for the other side, and therefore brands them as adversaries. In many cases, this approach is reductive and frankly lazy and is often the recourse of the desperate and weak.

We as a species need to learn proper discourse; to learn to accept criticism and see disagreements not as an attack but as an opportunity to improve what we offer to the world. The impulse to go on defensive mode when we encounter opposition or even just slight hesitation to our position doesn’t do anybody any good and only serves to highlight our own uncertainties and insecurities. It needs to stop. And if you’re not with me on this, I don’t know what to tell you.