Legend says that in the early days of Rome, the city was made up of two races — the Romans and the Sabines.
The Sabines felt like second-class citizens, and hated the Romans.
The Romans didn’t trust the Sabines and worked hard to keep the Sabines down.
Tension threatened to tear the young city apart.
So the leading men of Rome — Romans and Sabines both — elected a new king in the hope of getting out of this crisis.
The new king’s name was Numa. He was a Sabine by birth. And he fixed the problem.
Numa eliminated Roman-Sabine strife. He united the two races into manageable citizens of Rome. He set the ground for what was the become the great Roman empire.
The question is how?
How do you take two groups that hate each other, and unite them into a cohesive, ruleable whole?
Well, here’s one thing Numa did:
He created new guilds based on occupation.
There was a guild for the musicians, one for goldsmiths, another for shoemakers. Each guild had special privileges, rituals, even their own unique patron god. And crucially, each guild cut across racial lines – each included both Romans and Sabines.
It worked.
This illustrates an idea from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. Writing about the idea of “divide to rule,” Hoffer had this to say:
“An effective division is one that fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies — racial, religious, or economic — vying with and suspicious of each other.”
Maybe you’re not sure exactly what this means. So let me give you another, more modern example.
Have you heard of Josh Wardle, the guy who made the viral game Wordle? Which, by the way, was so much fun to play until the failing New York Times ruined it?
Well, before making Wordle, Wardle worked at Reddit. And one project he had there was called Orangered vs Periwinkle.
As you might know, Reddit is a bunch of separate and sometimes antagonistic communities.
But on April Fool’s in 2013, every Reddit user was automatically assigned to one of two made-up teams. Team Orangered or team Periwinkle.
The outcome was a ton of engagement and activity on the site. New bonds being formed across subreddits. In Wardle’s words:
“Uniting people through difference is easy. Essentially what we did is we just put people on separate teams. And it turns out people are really really good at creating stuff when they say, ‘I’m part of this group, I’m not part of that group.'”
Wardle has a vision of using this “divide to unite” trick to stir creativity and create greater unity on a big scale.
But I’m not recommending anything like that to you. This email is not my call for the greater brotherhood of man, or for an ever-expanding union through the clever use of new divisions.
That’s because I believe that size is evil, or at least inhuman. After all, the Roman empire, like all other empires that came after it, crushed and destroyed to serve its own ends of growth. And Reddit is kind of a sewer on most days.
So I have no clear takeaway for you today. I just wanted to point out this curious technique of dividing to unite.
You will have to decide how you want to use it. Whether to unite people, hopefully in a good cause… or to be aware of it, so you can resit being co-opted into a new divisive group, because you don’t want to contribute to anybody else’s inhuman ends.
Not convinced?
Well, maybe you want to read more about my idea that size is evil. If so, take a look here: