When People Sort Themselves

Under pressure, people sort. They sort by the things they inherited from their families and their places — religion, region, language, history. It is not, mostly, a political choice. It is defensive. When the shared world feels as though it cannot protect them, people reach for the older worlds that used to.

You see it in small things first. What people wear. Who they marry. Which streets they move to. Which streets they leave. Which schools they choose. Which stories they tell their children about what kind of country this is.

Over time, the small things become big things. The streets sort. The schools sort. The friendships sort. Not completely. There are always exceptions. There are always people who refuse the sorting, and we will come back to them later. But enough sort that the texture of daily life changes.

People begin to describe their country as two countries, or three, sharing the same map. The descriptions are not entirely wrong.

This has happened before, many times. The historians who study such things will tell you the pattern is well known. Northern Ireland had two countries in one for thirty years. Lebanon has been three or four for generations. Yugoslavia was six, peacefully, for decades, then not peacefully for eighteen months, then a set of separate countries that had to be built in blood.

What we are going into is not new in its pattern. It is new in its scale, and in the speed of the online tribes, and in the fact that it is happening in countries that considered themselves past this kind of thing. But the shape is known. The people who have read the long histories are not, I think, surprised.

When the sorting is this deep, the state, which was built to rule one country, finds itself trying to rule several. This turns out to be much harder than ruling one. The state reaches for new tools.

Before we come to the state's tools, two other things move first. The money. Then the people.