QC

There's some kind of awful toxoplasmosis life cycle thing going on with trauma and ideology. Trauma begets ideologies to make sense of it, and those ideologies form communities in which everyone is actually actively reinforcing each other's trauma, I think in several ways. Oof.

IFS talks about polarized parts; extreme parts pushing in opposite directions because each part correctly believes that if it's not extreme then the other part's extremeness will lead the person to ruin. (e.g. extreme workaholist vs. extreme slacker parts)

It explicitly notes that this generalizes to the interpersonal and intergroup level; a person may develop an extreme part polarized against another's extreme part. In effect two individuals are polarized against each other. Go up a level, and you get polarized groups.

On the individual level, polarization is solved by a mutually trusted Self acting to mediate between the polarized parts and providing leadership. On the interpersonal level, a mutually trusted person can likewise mediate.