What is Division Good For?

Whatever you think about the recent elections in the United States, it's clear that the division Americans on all sides are feeling is worsening and getting more bitter. It used to be that no side would admit to wanting division; now, that the  Woke cult/Radical Leftists are feeling freer to be honest about what their real agenda is, it's becoming clear that they are fairly committed to stoking and deepening division (don't let their use of words like "collaboration" and "partnership" fool you; one of these days, I'll likely be creating a Woke dictionary).

But there are actually some good reasons for division. You've likely heard some of the most common explanations of the constant division (rather than efforts to heal the division, like this group I just recently got involved in): whoever profits off of keeping the divisions we see destroying our society is not us, no matter what side of the spectrum you're on. The conclusions I often see from this are:

1) "Thus, the divisions are manufactured and we all really want the same thing." The attempt at homogenization is admirable, but it's not helpful: it's both wrong and dangerous. The divisions are real, and that's why believing they're not is dangerous. As it has been said, the greatest trick the devil ever played is getting people to believe he doesn't exist.

2) "Divisions profit the elite. Follow the money." It's no longer about the money. The people pulling the strings in this looney-tunes world have more of it than they probably even know. This is about control. And that means that is spiritual. We do not fight against flesh and blood but the powers and principalities and rulers of this age. One of the rules of this age (meaning the time of Jesus until His Second Coming) is a Spirit of Division.**

Now, I'm not going to argue that the level of division we're seeing in our society is good. Not at all. People self-righteously cancelling relationships because of who another person voted for in the name of self-care or as part of their political is hypocritical and destabilizing (personally and societally), not to mention ineffectual. Isolation/loneliness, which is at an all-time high, is worse for you than smoking. But we have to be very careful about the "solution" to division--otherwise, we are going to end up with socialism.

I hear (and used to make!) the argument all the time that "true" socialism/communism has not been true. Even in the face of mass starvation, poverty and government-committed genocide throughout history that we see of socialist regimes, the Radical Left will double down and insist that Soviet Russia, Marxism (which started in Germany and is now called Wokism in America today), The Cultural Revolution, the first two decades of the 1900s in America, were "not real socialism." The Left loves to twist definitions to serve their own agenda, so I'm not going to argue about whether their claim is correct. What I am going to argue is that it's hypocritical and unrealistic. It's hypocritical because we technically haven't tried "real" capitalism, either, so who's to say that would automatically be worse than "true" socialism/communism? And it's unrealistic because humans/human nature. It's unfair and intellectually dishonest to build any argument on an assumption you cannot prove: we are not going to get an "ideal" version of socialism/communism or anything else.

That's why division is not "solved" by unity. It's not solved by cancelling/ stonewalling others, either. It's "solved" through ongoing dialogue. The Radical Left claims that "the fight" (for social justice--aka vengeance) "is for a lifetime;" they should be up for lifelong commitments (so long as they're not marriage! Heaven forbid!). We do not cast out a Spirit of Division and move on with our day. We do not gather the politically correct quota of men, women, each race and gender and language and ability level to holding hands, sing kumbaya and levitate the Pentagon until we are all One. We commit to remaining in relationship with those we disagree with. We talk - daily - with people we know don't see the world the way we do. Division, insofar as it healthily individuates one being from another, staves off the dehumanization of socialism/communism. And in that way, it's actually kind of a good thing.