Divide and It Governs Itself

An earlier article in this project named division along ethnic and regional lines as one of the reasons an unjust system persists. Worth returning to that idea here, specifically through the lens of how narrative and media actually manufacture and sustain that division in practice, rather than simply reflecting divisions that would exist anyway regardless of how a story gets told.

Manufactured division tends to follow a recognisable pattern. A real grievance — genuine, often well-founded — gets identified. That grievance is then attached, deliberately or through the incentives of a media environment built to reward outrage, to an entire group rather than to the specific individuals or structures actually responsible. A story about a specific corrupt official becomes a story about an entire community or region. A story about one bad actor becomes “people like them,” rather than “that particular person.” Once a grievance has been successfully attached to an entire group, actual accountability becomes harder to achieve, because the group being blamed will, understandably, defend itself as a whole against what now reads as a collective accusation, rather than allowing the specific, actually accountable individual to be addressed directly.

This process serves a specific function, whether or not any single person orchestrates it deliberately: a population busy defending itself against a rival group has far less energy left over to notice the structural conditions both groups actually share — the same weak oversight, the same captured institutions, the same economic patterns covered elsewhere in this project. Attention spent on the neighbour rarely gets spent on the shared structure above both of them.

A practical habit worth building: whenever a story blames an entire group for the actions of specific individuals, deliberately separate the two before reacting. Ask plainly: is this actually about an entire people, or about specific people who happen to share a group identity with millions of others who had nothing to do with it? This single act of separation — refusing to let a specific accusation quietly expand into a collective one — is one of the most direct, practical defences against exactly the kind of division this project keeps insisting benefits everyone except the people actually doing the dividing.