Team: The New Age God

Perhaps one of the most ham-fisted forms of word magic is that stupid saying:

There is no I in TEAM

Despite the spelling there are a lot of I in any team; indeed there are as many I as there are individuals in a team, assuming your definition is similar to this-

a group of people collaborating to achieve a goal

Folks trying to achieve a goal, the same goal, quickly learn about division of labor. Each person has a certain skill set, certain innate attributes, certain weaknesses. In order to achieve the goal, we need to specialize; otherwise we might as well just stumble around toward the goal by ourselves. Unless you've drunk enough feminist kool-aid to make you blind, you'll notice this eventually, should you ever try to manage a house single-handedly- housework is important enough to dedicate a person to it! Unfortunately, if the woman isn't doing housework, she's likely not going to value it enough to actually respect her husband doing it while she goes off to the 'fulfilling' career, but I digress. The point is, starting from the family and working out, we desperately need division of labor to happen if we want anything but the most simplistic of goals to be achieved.

The folks trying to manipulate you via spelling are trying to sell you a New Age god, though, because their TEAM is something you believe in, and something they may sacrifice you to. They have TEAM building exercises and TEAM work, which are ritualistic in nature and all too often take the place of working toward actual goals and thereby building up one another. Often, when what you thought was a team becomes a TEAM, the very reason for it's existence, the original goal, is excised, and some intangible goal- carefully selected to be impossible to prove whether or not TEAM is now achieving it- is substituted in it's place. Meanwhile, we are all instructed not to notice all those I(ndividual)s being burned up to keep the TEAM 'alive.'

It's very similar to a pagan idol. Idols were made by human hands and even the pagans knew they had no life in them; it was the people praying, sacrificing, giving attention to the idols that people thought made idols strong. I suppose, once they were strong, the idols were supposed to be able to help folk, like parasites are sometimes said to prolong life. Look behind the curtain, and I suspect you'll see a bureaucrat in shaman's clothing, or a bureaucrat in bureaucrat's clothing repeating the 'there is no I in TEAM' mantra today.