The true enemy
Violence, hatred, and division are not the path to the transformation we seek. Divide et impera, divide and rule, is an ancient strategy, one that finds fertile ground whenever we forget the humanity we share. We begin to see enemies in the neighbor, the friend, the family member, and we stop questioning the structures and interests that actually compromise life itself, and what we have in common.
But this strategy works for only one reason: it finds, in each of us, a division that was already there, unresolved. It does not create the fracture — it only externalizes it. Psychoanalysis gave this movement a name: projection. What we cannot hold within looks for a face outside: repressed aggression, the oppression we once suffered and never worked through, our own desire to dominate that we do not recognize in ourselves. Almost always, the intensity with which we hate a trait in the other betrays an unsettled account with that very trait. The enemy out there is usually the part within that we refuse to see. This is what the conflict in the streets reveals: the reflection of an inner division not yet crossed within each of us.
When a divergence of ideas becomes a justification for violence, intimidation, silencing, or death, we need to stop and discern: at what point did the defense of an idea come to be worth more than the very human life it was meant to serve?
Politics should organize collective life, not authorize the destruction of those who think differently.
The invisible machinery
Regardless of our convictions, the vast majority of us want the same things: work, safety, health, education, freedom, respect, and the possibility of building a better future. We diverge on the paths and the priorities, and that is precisely why we need to preserve the capacity to dialogue, to question, and to discern. And perhaps the hardest invitation is to discern the very system we inherited. Divide et impera was imposed centuries ago as the engine of life in society, and we keep treating the dispute as if it were the game itself, when it is only the distraction. What we see on the surface is performance: two sides, two crowds, the clash staged every day so that attention never reaches down to the machinery that sustains it. And that machinery does not show itself. Those who truly command do not take the stage, those who profit from chaos have no need to appear, and this is not carelessness, it is by design. While we are busy with one another, the chaos endures; and the chaos is functional, because it is what keeps the machine turning, far beyond the performance of the partisan puppets on either side.
But what if, beneath this strategy, there were also a question being asked of us, as individuals and as a society? What if this same division were, in some way, a measure? A way of revealing how far a society has matured to hold difference without breaking apart?
Not to justify the violence this system produces. But to recognize what it may reveal: that we still confuse disagreement with enmity, and opinion with essence. And only an essential maturity — one that recognizes, beneath every opinion, the same essence — could cross this imposed dichotomy. Not by choosing a side, but by no longer fitting within it.
Because we are one species. Rich in its expressions and, even so, identical in what matters most: the same values, the same needs, the same desire to live with dignity. Perhaps a more mature consciousness is all it takes for differences of opinion to stop being mistaken for who we truly are.
This is not about ignoring or relativizing injustice, nor pretending that every choice produces the same consequences. It is about not letting our convictions be hijacked to the point that we lose the capacity to recognize the humanity of the other. Fighting extremism cannot mean reproducing its logic. If we answer hatred with more hatred, intolerance with more intolerance, dehumanization with the dehumanization of the adversary, we keep feeding the very mechanism we want to overcome.
This does not demand passivity in the face of violence or authoritarianism. It demands firmness, responsibility, and commitment to democratic principles. It is possible to set limits, hold abusers accountable, and defend rights without making the destruction of the other the goal. An electoral victory may be an important political response to a moment, but no victory, on its own, dissolves the structures that feed on polarization, nor guarantees the deep transformation we need. Voting for someone does not mean wholesale adherence to their project either: often it is only a choice among the alternatives perceived as possible in that moment.
Collective change does not depend only on who holds power. It also shows itself in how we educate, consume, work, relate, and react to what challenges us. This is where individual transformation stops being an abstraction and becomes a concrete responsibility. It is not enough to speak of consciousness while we feed hostility in our relationships. It is not enough to defend peace while we celebrate the humiliation of those we consider adversaries. It is not enough to want a fairer world without examining how we contribute, every day, to injustice, exclusion, and indifference.
The evolution of consciousness needs to find expression in life: in the discernment that comes before judgment, in the courage to recognize our own mistakes, in the capacity to hold differences without giving up dignity, and in the willingness to protect life, firmly, even when that requires revisiting our own certainties.
Finding North
Because awakening is not fighting against the other, nor against the forces that move us: culture, fear, belonging, inherited certainties. Awakening is finding a North. And when there is a North, those same forces stop being a prison and become a current in favor of the path.
That is why all real change begins from the inside out. Not because the world out there does not matter, but because it is inner imbalance that, multiplied by millions, spills into chaos in the streets. A person at peace with their own contradictions does not need an enemy to feel whole, and it is this peace that quiets the noise, and that reveals itself to the world. The outer only finds balance when it stops being fed by our inner imbalance.
And the silent power of this disarms divide et impera: it only has force over those already divided within. A whole person cannot be split in half to serve either side. It is a matter of coherence. This is the only ground no system can reach, and the only place where no one can act on our behalf. Recovering one's own inner unity is the most radical act there is: it does not topple those in command, but it withdraws from the machinery precisely what it feeds on.
Perhaps one of the greatest traps of polarization is convincing us that we must choose between belonging to a group and thinking for ourselves. But no ideology should demand the abandonment of discernment, just as no conviction should make us indifferent to another's humanity.
We do not need to agree on everything to recognize what must be protected. We need a society capable of disagreeing without destroying itself, of holding accountable without dehumanizing, of transforming without making violence the price of change. Because true progress does not lie in defeating an adversary. It lies in ceasing to reproduce, within us and in the structures we build, what keeps humanity bound to the same cycles.
The crossing
This prison has many names, and it may be the oldest story we tell ourselves. Plato drew it as the cave: men chained before shadows, convinced the wall is the true reality, until one turns, crosses the way out, and returns to say there was light. Our time re-staged it as the Matrix: a constructed reality one must disconnect from to see what was always there. Joseph Campbell recognized it in nearly every culture and called it the hero's journey: to depart, cross the threshold, face the ordeal, and return transformed, bringing something back to those who stayed. And long before any theory, Jesus was already pointing inward, saying that the Kingdom was not in some distant place, but here, among us and within us.
Always the same movement, and none of these crossings is made by defeating an enemy outside. All of them are made by awakening: recognizing the illusion, crossing through it, and returning with new eyes to the same world. This is the invitation that keeps returning with each generation, in new clothing, and that perhaps only now, divided as we are, we are ready to hear.
We arrive at the point: who is the true enemy? And perhaps the most honest answer is also the simplest: there never was one. There is only a fracture within. And the fracture itself is not an enemy: every wound carries information, and it is often what deepens us and makes us more whole, when we have the courage to look at it honestly instead of projecting it onto the other. What divides us is not having it; it is not recognizing it. Left in the dark, it externalizes itself, becoming fuel for the machinery of division.
That is why the freest gesture is not to choose better within the game. It is to stop being the piece the game needs. Not to stop playing, but to play without being captured by the game, without surrendering one's own essence to the logic that divides. Division begins within — and it is within that it comes undone. Whoever reaches integrity needs to defeat no one. They simply give back to the world one less person to be divided.