A house divided cannot stand.
Matthew 12:22.
With election season approaching on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, political rhetoric will increasingly favor certain themes, and even certain words, in an attempt to entrance and ensnare the public. In the UK, where the government quite blatantly uses NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) both internally and when addressing the voter, modern classics such as “sustainability”, “diversity is our greatest strength”, and “growth” will be on display alongside old favorites such as “tough choices”, “British/American values”, “not who we are,” and other greatest hits.
As for sheer rhetoric, politicians will once again employ a trusted phrase to assure the listener of the veracity of what they are claiming, and it is quite elegant in its Cartesian simplicity; “Let’s be absolutely clear about this”. They often back this up with another epistemological surety as they inform us what “the reality is”. There is a whole rhetorical lexicon dusted off by the political class at election time. Horace would have a field day.
But this season there is a new debutante, not “division”, but its clumsy cognates “divisive” and “divisiveness”. The word “divisive” falls uneasily on English ears when pronounced by an American English speaker. All three instances of the letter i are pronounced short, as in “thin”. A British speaker would pronounce the middle i long, as in “wide”; “Div-eye-sive”. To the English ear, “divisive” in an American accent sounds like a Russian surname.
The phrase “divide and conquer” (divide et impere) is familiar, variously ascribed to Philip II of Macedon and Julius Caesar, and reiterated (and programmatized) by Niccolò Macchiavelli. Merriam-Webster includes the following definition of divisiveness: “To make a group of people disagree and fight with one another so that they will not join together against one”.
This seems a straightforward diversionary tactic; If you are a deeply unpopular government and the people you govern are fighting one another, then they are not fighting you. Thus, Israel v Palestine, the vaccinated v “anti-vaxxers”, Black Lives Matter v “systemic racism/White privilege” (Whites, essentially), transgender activists v “transphobia”, those who urge caution over immigration v the “refugees welcome” lobby; the list of divided combatants is ever-growing, and that suits beleaguered governments on both sides of the herring-pond.
Yuri Bezmenov, the 1980s Soviet defector who described the methods used by Communist regimes to subvert a country from within, does not thematize division, but it still plays its gruesome part in proceedings. Bezmenov worked for Novesti while in the USSR, the Party’s media arm. From the transcript of one of his interviews, Bezmenov describes how, during a key part of his first stage of subversion (demoralization), division is shown as both deliberate and ruthlessly consequential:
Most of the activity of the department was to compile a huge volume of information on individuals who were influential in influencing public opinion. Publishers, editors, journalists, actors, educationalists, professors of political science, Members of Parliament, representatives of business circles. Most of those people were divided roughly into two groups. Those who were told the Soviet foreign policy, they would be promoted to the positions of power through media and public opinion manipulation. Those who refuse the Soviet influence in their country would be character-assassinated, or executed physically contra-revolution.
A guaranteed job for life and use of the Party stores in perpetuity, or a bullet in the head. That is a very clear statement of division which certainly serves pour encourager les autres.
Now, of course, we are not dealing with raw, undiluted Marxism, but with the deadlier ideology of cultural Marxism—the Soviets never tried to replace the people the Russians they didn’t kill by importing Africans, etc.). Bezmenov’s division according to political adherence/acquiescence is updated by Jordan Peterson in an article in The Daily Telegraph concerning pro-Hamas demonstrations. Mutatis mutandis, his snapshot of the new societal division can be overlaid on top of Bezmenov’s with minimal mismatch. Peterson replaces “oppressor” and “oppressed” with “victimizer” and “victim” — misleading terminology to describe life’s successful people (and nations) as against those who have been unsuccessful:
A rigid moral claim accompanies this act of starkly black-and-white comparison: there are … only two forms of acceptable and laudable moral conduct or reputation. If you are a victim, or an ‘ally’, you are with no further effort goodness incarnate. This is supposed, on ‘philosophical’ grounds, to be self-evident, following as it does so deservedly in the wake of your loudly trumpeted compassion. If you are a victimizer, however, look the hell out: you are evil incarnate, and inescapably so: a predatory parasite, rightly subject to the most brutal of treatment. Indeed, the terrible treatment you thereby experience does nothing but redound to the credit of your so-Godly-and-compassionate persecutors.
Now, at least for the time being, it is merely your job or career which can be assassinated if you come down on the wrong side of the great divide.
Language is a key battleground in the battle to divide a populace, and society is further sub-divided by its bifurcation into discursive and disruptive. Broadly speaking, this is the current division between free-speech absolutists and censors. The battle between the two camps can be clearly seen in Right-of-center political content providers on YouTube. For most, each video is a walk between the raindrops, with algorithms roaming the informational perimeter fence like guard-dogs. Phrases and words must be avoided, along with certain images and the mere mention of taboo subjects.
Engineered divisiveness in the media is present even at the typographical level. In July 2020, Associated Press (AP) issued an edict to the effect that they would now be capitalizing “black” across their publications. AP being more or less the Alpha fish in the media complex, many other publishers fell into line. The word “white” was not accorded this upper-case honor, despite it being at least as valid as a descriptor of a historical race:
“After a review and period of consultation, we found, at this time, less support for capitalizing white. White people generally do not share the same history, or the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color”.
White people certainly do not share the same history as Blacks, having preferred to build successful societies rather than floundering, savage messes. As for White people not having the experience of being discriminated against because of their skin color, that is changing, and changing fast. And what does discrimination have to do with accurate labeling anyway?
But the corralling of language by the Left which shows that its drive to division does not always create a simple binary, an ideological 1/0. Language as a delivery system for information has been further sub-divided by the politico-big tech complex into mis-, dis-, and malinformation. It is not certain which of these was employed by noted orator Kamala Harris when she claimed recently that the Republicans were “seeking to divide our country in the most crude and profound way”. Crude and profound. Harris has certainly put the “moronic” in “oxymoronic”. And clearly she is projecting: Democrats are the masters of division.
Multiculturalism is applied divisiveness. It was sold as a tableau of many colors, a wonderful 1980s Benetton advert, young, vibrant and above all diverse people smiling and happy in one another’s company.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses use similar artwork in their promotional literature. But multiculturalism turned out to be just that, a multiplicity of cultures, with all the friction and spillover and internecine warfare it brings in its wake. Multiculturalism is not mums of differing hue chatting easily with their best friends at the school gates. Multiculturalism is Roma gypsies picking pockets on the Champs-Élysées, Muslim rape gangs in England, grenade attacks and gang-related crime in Stockholm. These pestilential sub-divisions spread from the central blast of multiculturalism like cutter bombs.
A simple test may be applied to any media story; Does its subject matter seek to divide or unify the citizenry? It will almost always be the former. Unity of the populace is anathema to the current Western juntas. The corrosive machineries of division are operative at all levels of society as identity politics seeks to replace a meritocracy (e.g., by appointing a completely underqualified plagiarist as Harvard president0) judged by merit alone with one dependent on ethnicity, sexual preference or, most dangerously, mere personal whim concerning one’s identity. Identity politics is not a simple process of categorization, it is a marketing fair with dozens of stalls offering hundreds of deals.
More, division seems to be intentional, a driving motive of governmental legislation. In the UK, more and more police time is devoted to online policing, with the criteria for criminality being sourced directly from identity politics, and less time serving the community, which was the original purpose of the police force. Hiring policies, even in the private sector, are increasingly divisive, with Whiteness being a natural and suspect sign of difference and otherness. The word “divisive” or a cognate is unavoidable if British political, commercial, and social environments are under discussion. Recently, the CEO of a British insurance company announced that top-level appointments to the company would have to be approved by her personally where the applicant was White. The company defended this position with standard meaningless technocratic verbiage, but the decision was partly the subject of a report commissioned to assess this new form of racial discrimination. The findings are unsurprising, as Fortune reports: “The findings concluded that although well-meaning, diversity policies can backfire and create a resentful and divided workforce”.
Can I suggest that we are living, by design, in a schizocracy? It’s my own coinage, as far as I can see, but the “schizo-” part will look familiar. “Schizophrenia” is an ancient Greek portmanteau word, although it was first coined by Eugen Bleuler, Jung’s mentor. Schizein is a verb meaning to split or cleave in two. It’s the sort of result you get from a log-splitting axe. Phrenos is the head. Schizophrenia; the head split into two. Schizophrenia is popularly portrayed as the “split personality”, Norman Bates in Psycho or Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It seems clear from popular clinical evidence that the two disassociated personalities do not work in tandem. They are opposed, combative, cleaved, a house divided.
And this is where we are, a clinically maintained state of constant low-level civil war, constantly forced to divide others between friend and foe just as our friends and foes are doing. And what our foes are doing is of interest in another way. When seeking to divide, the political Left are guilty of another term gaining in popularity: projection.
We are in an age in which certain technical intellectual concepts have been coopted and given a role in political and cultural discourse. “Deconstruction” is one. The term originated with Jacques Derrida and is a complex metaphysical operator with multiple philosophical tributaries and technical uses. For the politico-media complex, it sounds jazzier to deconstruct something than plain old understand it.
Another of these low-rent intellectual accessories is “projection”, a Freudian concept turned to use as a sociological diagnosis. This reaction to themselves being guilty of what they are accusing the Right of — divisiveness — has become a hallmark of the Left, and when you have seen and heard the social justice league in action, you witness the weakness of their personalities, both individual and collective. They are of the psychological cast described in this potted prognosis of projection from Psychology Today:
“People tend to project because they have a trait or desire that is too difficult to acknowledge. Rather than confronting it, they cast it away and onto someone else. This functions to preserve their self-esteem, making difficult emotions more tolerable. It’s easier to attack or witness wrongdoing in another person than confront that possibility in one’s behavior. How a person acts towards the target of projection might reflect how they really feel about themselves”.
As for any divisions within the two arms of the great political divide, identity vs meritocracy, the former tolerates no division in thought or opinion. Several celebrities who have uttered heresies (usually concerning gender) have found just to what extent the Left require intellectual — if it can be so called -— lockstep. The divisions on the Right — and the dividing line is generally race — are entirely self-inflicted, and the Right are failing to learn the simple lesson that if we don’t all hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately. Internecine fighting helps no one but your enemy. When Orwell arrived in Spain to take up arms against Franco, as recorded in Homage to Catalonia, he was appalled less by the state of the rebel army than by the internecine squabbling between its various factions.
The one place where there should be division, Parliament, has no such thing. In the UK, the only two parties with realistic chances of forming next year’s government are Labour and the Conservatives and, thanks in part to the homogenizing effect of technocracy, they are essentially two wings of the same party, differing in policy on nothing of import.
So, a house divided against itself — a schizocracy — must fall — unless one side wins (likely the identity addicted left) and establishes an authoritarian regime that simply destroys its opponents. That this division is instituted and maintained by those responsible, by mandate, for the house itself shows that Western governments feel that their fealty is owed to the corporate-globalist complex rather than the people who voted for them to be their representatives. How long will the masses tolerate this state of affairs? Britain is a country in a very serious period of decline, and governments of the near future may have to work doubly hard to keep in place a division, or series of sub-divisions, among the populace whose mutual antagonism will keep them from marching on parliament with pitchforks and blazing torches. The world is increasingly re-wilding, and the ruling class must hope that division as a policy decision is a tiger they can ride.