the.com/factionalism
When the team sport of ideas turns into a blood sport of identities.
means The tendency of a group to splinter into internal cliques whose loyalty to their own faction outweighs loyalty to the whole.
from Traces to Latin 'factio' — a doing or a making, from 'facere' (to do/make) — which came to mean a political party or faction, the 'made' or 'done' group you belonged to. By the 17th–18th centuries 'factionalism' had formed in English to name the disease of a body split into warring factions, rather than the factions themselves.
- origin
- from Latin factio, meaning a group that does things
- irony
- factions often agree on more than they admit
- mechanism
- thrives on loyalty tests, not actual arguments
- danger
- makes being right less important than being us