IT often occurs to me that the term ‘dīvide et imperāis’ (divide and rule), first coined by Philip of Macedonia in the Fourth Century BCE, is only ever applied in a purely one-dimensional fashion. Indeed, whilst it rightly describes how a ruler might set his enemies at one another’s throats in order to conquer them more effectively, we rarely consider the possibility that ‘divide and rule’ is also a way for the ruling elite to administer its own power. By appearing to divide its organs of government into two or more parts, therefore, it has been possible for the clandestine forces behind the scenes to convey the misleading impression that power itself is not concentrated at a single point. In fact we are even expected to believe that power lies solely in the hands of bought-and-paid-for politicians like Trump, Macron, Zelensky and Putin and thus the illusion is best achieved through so-called parliamentary democracy.

Furthermore, if we return to the more common usage of the phrase ‘divide and rule’ we find that it works in two very distinct ways. The first, as we have seen, involves the division of one’s most dangerous opponents into two specific camps – which, in the West, we may refer to as Far Left and Far Right – whilst the second method, and one that is often greatly overlooked, is something that originates from outside government itself. What I mean by this, is that whilst things are very carefully arranged at the uppermost levels, down at the grass roots ordinary people unwittingly practise their own variety of ‘divide and rule’, or at least help to bring about its destructive consequences, by participating in the entire counter-productive charade. Inevitably, given that no one side has a monopoly on ideological truth or organisational sanity, they end up weakening themselves.

Although the machinations of government remain less than sympathetic to our plight, we can do far more to help ourselves and not everything is as black and white as it seems. Since when has ecology been ‘left-wing’, for example, or territorial defence ‘right-wing’? Once we break things into party-political chunks, in accordance with those things we either like or dislike, we create a rupture between the Self and the Shadow and the harmony of the human psyche – which, in line with the process of individuation, is always seeking a reconciliation between ‘opposites’ – is tragically fractured.