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Page added on July 14, 2016
The Dawn of a New Dark Age
By Ian Morris
“The end of a world,” ABC News called Britain’s vote to leave the European Union on June 24. As if in agreement, the pound immediately racked up its biggest-ever one-day loss against the dollar. Over the next three days, the Dow Jones index fell 4.8 percent, London’s FTSE 100 lost 5.6 percent, and some $2 trillion in assets evaporated.
This is bad, and worse may yet follow. But is it the beginning of the end? One recent calculation put the total value of global assets in 2015 at $362 trillion, meaning that the world lost a little over half a cent on the dollar in late June. By July 8, however, the Dow Jones and FTSE 100 were in fact both back above their pre-referendum peaks, although the pound still languished at levels not seen since the 1980s. Within hours of the vote, the BBC was already assuring us that “it’s not the end of the world.”
In my most recent Global Affairs column, published a week before the Brexit vote, I leaned firmly in favor of a non-apocalyptic forecast. But a few days ago, Sebastian Stodolak, a journalist with the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, challenged me to think about how the Brexit compared with episodes in the past when civilization really did end. The more I’ve thought about it, the more interesting this approach seems to be.
There have been plenty of crises worse than this one in the past 100 years, but none of them ended the world. The Great Recession that erupted in 2008, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 1997-98 Asian and Russian financial meltdowns, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, the oil spikes of 1973 and 1979 — the list goes on, but civilization always survived. Even the material destruction of the world wars, which claimed close to 100 million lives, was largely put right.
The obvious implication seems to be that we should, as the British like to put it, keep calm and carry on. Terrible things happen, but even the worst can be contained. The larger global system rights itself relatively quickly. But this seems less true if we look back deeper into history, where we find examples of collapses from which no one would say that civilization “relatively quickly” righted itself. These periods raise some troubling questions for the 21st century.
Civilizations Collapse
The greatest of these end-of-everything moments was the fall of the Roman Empire. In the last three centuries B.C., Rome conquered the whole Mediterranean Basin; within another 100 years it ruled everywhere between the borders of Scotland and Iran. The empire linked together some 60 million people, one million of them in the city of Rome itself, and extended trade routes all across Eurasia. By the second century A.D., aristocrats in Korea could marvel at Roman glass vases while soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall spiced their food with Indian black pepper. Living standards within the empire probably rose by 50-100 percent between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200; and while this growth rate sounds glacially slow today, the world had never before seen anything like it.
In the third century, however, the empire broke up. A generation of war then pulled it back together, but by the fifth century its western half was shattered beyond repair. Trade routes collapsed, populations fell and cities returned to forest. In some of my books I have developed a quantitative index of social development for measuring societies’ capacity to master their environments, and on that metric, European development fell by one-third between 100 and 700, not regaining its first-century level until the 18th century. Edward Gibbon was quite right to say in 1776 that the fall of Rome was an “awful revolution … which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.”
But while the fall of Rome was the most awful revolution on record, it was not the only one. Another long-lived, if obscure, catastrophe began around 1900 B.C. in what is now Pakistan. For seven centuries, extraordinary cities with populations in the tens of thousands — Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and others — flourished in the Indus Valley. They were literate, built great monuments and traded with the Sumerian civilizations in what is now Iraq. Then, quite quickly, the Indus cities were abandoned, their script was forgotten (we still cannot read what it says) and their populations collapsed. More than 1,000 years then passed before complex civilizations in South Asia returned to the level of sophistication seen prior to 1900 B.C., and even then the main centers had shifted from the Indus to the Ganges Valley.
There is another well-known example from the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 B.C. Across the previous half-millennium a roughly triangular area with points in what are now Egypt, Greece and southwestern Iran had become increasingly interconnected. Egyptian pharaohs and kings of Babylon exchanged gold, scented wood and marriage partners, writing a voluminous correspondence and, when diplomacy failed, fielding armies of thousands of chariots. Then this world, too, abruptly fell apart. Its great cities burned, some of them forgotten until archaeologists returned to their ruins in the 20th century. Recovery was quicker than in the Indus Valley but still painfully slow; new cities arose in Assyria and perhaps Israel in the 10th century B.C., but Greece, out on the periphery, revived only around 700 B.C.
The New World had similar collapses and long eras of depression. When the Spanish conquistadors showed up after 1500, the Aztec and Inca empires were only just returning to the level of development attained by the great city of Teotihuacan before its fall around 750, or by the Classic Mayan city-states before their ninth-century decline. China, meanwhile, did not experience such prolonged breakdowns as India, the Mediterranean and Mesoamerica, but it certainly had plenty of shorter ones, with the longest extending from about 200 through 450. The ancient Middle East seems to have had the worst of both patterns, combining a long period of collapse after 1200 B.C. with multiple shorter breakdowns around 3100, 2200, 2000 and 1600 B.C.
In the past 30 or 40 years, many historians have refused to call these post-collapse periods “Dark Ages” because they feel that the label is judgmental and ignores the cultural accomplishments of societies such as Anglo-Saxon England or the Postclassic Maya. They often have a point; and yet it remains true that in every one of these cases, collapse brought sharply declining populations, life expectancies, long-distance connections, security, literacy and standards of living. “Dark Ages” strikes me as a pretty good name for these generations of poverty, ignorance and violence, even if none of them ended civilization permanently. This prompts an unavoidable question: Are the events of 2016 harbingers of a new dark age?
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse
The obvious way to answer this question is by looking at how the various Dark Ages began and asking whether similar conditions apply today. Strikingly, in every case where we have enough evidence, we see the same five causal factors, which I like to call the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The first, which is always prominent, is mass migration, on a scale that the societies of the time cannot control. Just how many immigrants it took to destabilize borderlands and spread violence across entire empires must have varied, although DNA seems to suggest that in the wrong circumstances even a group less than one-tenth the size of the host population could bring the roof crashing in.
The second factor, often coming on the back of the first, is disease. Long-distance mass movements sometimes merged what had previously been separate disease pools, producing new infections to which hardly anyone was immune. Steppe nomads migrating across thousands of kilometers were probably the main vector for the Black Death, which killed perhaps a quarter of the world’s population between 1350 and 1400.
The third force, regularly linked to the first two, is state failure. Collapsing borders and shrinking populations often bring down governments too, and as chaos spreads, even states that have not been directly hit by invasion and plague can be sucked into the whirlpool.
Fourth, and strongly linked to the first three forces, is the collapse of trade. When failing states can no longer protect merchants, long-distance exchange networks break down, bringing starvation and yet more rounds of migration, disease and violence. Many historians think that the tipping point in the fall of the Roman Empire came when the Vandals invaded North Africa and cut off grain shipments to Italy from what is now Tunisia in 439. The city of Rome lost three-quarters of its population across the next two decades, and in 476 the Western Empire was officially declared defunct.
The fifth factor, always present but never in a straightforward way, is climate change. Some great collapses, such as that in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 B.C., coincide with rising temperatures; others, such as the Roman and Han Chinese breakdowns in the early first millennium, coincide with global cooling. The direction of climate change seems to matter less than the fact that any big change puts stress on farming, which — when everything else is already going wrong — might be enough to push people over the edge.
Stratfor readers will not need me to tell them that strategists in our own age are deeply worried about most of these five factors. Immigration was a central concern in the Brexit debates and in the American presidential primaries. In 2009, the “New H1N1” influenza spread from southern China to four continents before it was recognized, and fears are mounting about the Zika virus; climate change is also bursting on the world with a fury not seen since the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. State failure and trade breakdown, however, currently seem less pressing, the former restricted to an “arc of instability” in Africa and Asia and the forces of anti-globalization still a specter rather than a reality. This is not fifth-century Europe.
Comparing the Brexit with genuine civilization-killing events provides some sensible perspective. Leaving the European Union was a really bad idea, but despite the signs that some of the Five Horsemen are saddling up, it is not the end of the world. In fact, we might take the comparative argument further still. So far I have been looking for factors that were present in all cases of collapse and then asking whether these conditions are also present today. But there is another way to think about the question, by asking whether the presence of these conditions guarantees the coming of a dark age. If we can identify episodes where most or all of the Five Horsemen rode but civilization did not collapse, we can perhaps pinpoint how we can keep the darkness at bay.
Disrupting the Downward Spiral
Fortunately, such cases are not hard to find. One, in China after 600, is particularly informative. The empire had recently been reunited by the Sui dynasty after a dark age, but Turkic invasions from the steppes, new epidemics, civil war, trade breakdowns and global cooling threatened its recovery. In 614 the Sui government collapsed and the worst seemed about to happen; but through a clever combination of diplomacy and war, the first two emperors of a new Tang dynasty, Gaozu and Taizong, stopped the population movements completely by 650. Freed from external threats and with plagues abating, they restored law and order and revived trade. They could do nothing about climate change, but the absence of the other Horsemen reduced it to a mere nuisance. By 700 China had entered a golden age, its economy booming so much that a million people were living at Chang’an.
This Chinese case, along with others such as Eurasia after the 14th-century Black Death and again after 1945, suggests a big lesson: If governments can kill off one or two of the Five Horsemen, even the most alarming situations can be turned around. The big question is whether we will be able to do this in the 21st century.
When we ask this, however, certainties evaporate. Looking back at earlier breakdowns, one of the recurrent features is the way that long-term processes of slow decline can abruptly spiral into disaster. In one of the earliest cases of collapse, the Middle East around 2200 B.C., even though the usual suspects — migration, crumbling trade networks, climate change — had been posing problems for more than a century, the surviving texts make it clear that no one expected imminent disaster. But then in the 2190s B.C., everything simply fell apart. People stopped paying taxes, armies melted away and bandits seized entire cities. “Who then was king? Who then was not king?” asks our main literary source. By 2150 B.C., the Akkadian Empire and Old Kingdom Egypt, the two biggest states in history up to that point, had ceased to exist.
In the best-case scenario, historians in the 22nd century might ask how ABC News and others among us could possibly have been so silly as to suggest that the Brexit meant the end of a world. In the worst-case scenario, they might ask instead how this apparently minor event triggered a descent into darkness across the following decade — the collapse of the European Union, tens of millions of migrants fleeing the Middle East, war in Eastern Europe, an influenza pandemic killing 200 million, the worst famines in history in Africa and Asia, and finally the ultimate horror: all-out nuclear annihilation.
It will take a lot of bad luck and poor judgment for the Brexit to lead to this outcome, but there has been no shortage of either in ages before our own. Stodolak’s suggestion that we compare recent events with others that really did bring civilizations down is a good one. History is dotted with genuine Dark Ages, some of them centuries long and bringing untold misery to millions of people. All seem to have been driven by the same five forces of migration, disease, state failure, trade breakdowns and climate change, at least three of which are present in the 2010s; and all seem to have taken almost everyone by surprise, as some unforeseen emergency turned long-term problems into a sudden collapse. For centuries now, humanity has managed to contain crises and head off the kind of breakdowns that ended the worlds of the Indus civilization, Roman Empire and Mayan city-states. But if the crowded, interconnected, urbanized and nuclear-armed world we have created does stagger into a new dark age, it will surely be the most terrible of all.
17 Comments on "The Dawn of a New Dark Age"
eugene on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 11:08 am
Don’t worry, all is well. Things have gone OK in the past. How the hell one can use the past to predict the future is beyond me. My simplest, silly opinion is “I’ve lived until now so I will continue to live in the future”. But in an age of great uncertainty, we are rife with predictions of all kinds with the most popular being greatly optimistic.
steve from virginia on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 11:16 am
Simple progress of the agricultural cycle, decade by decade. From forest – to fertile cropland – to exhausted and unproductive ‘real estate’ – back to forest.
What appears to extend the West’s turn on the stage is synthetic nitrates made from hydrocarbon fuels and mined phosphorus and potash. None of these last forever and they are also dependent upon industry … which itself is dependent upon ‘religion’, that is, debt.
As topsoil fertility is depleted what we call civilization will wane.
onlooker on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 12:00 pm
Interesting that this article highlights the social unraveling of civilization. This is in fact happening already. In fact a large portion of humanity is and has been living on the edge. Yet, what stands to bring world wide civilization to its knees is the combination of climate disturbances, environmental limits and malfunctions and energy disruptions and shortages. These factors combined with the social stand to create irresistible massive system failures within the political, economic and social spheres of humanity. In particular we seem to being doing irreversible damage to our biosphere which will make it pretty much impossible for most life forms to live in this “new” Earth.
JGav on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 12:19 pm
Steve – I’ll be responding to your post in a minute, but first a word on the article.
To begin with – Stratfor is not my favorite site by any stretch. But they do have contacts with ‘insiders,’ so what they write about is usually echoing something from elsewhere. Putting it all in terms of ‘Dark Ages’, however, reveals a short-cut style of thinking which pretends to use history in an explanatory way when, in fact, they use it to cover up history’s lessons. The Brexit will not be a trigger for any Endgame. Imperial over-reach and human hubris in general vis-à-vis Nature would be much better candidates for that role.
Sorry Steve … Yes, a “Waning” there will be. And I believe you are correct in pointing to resource depletion and a debt-based economic system as two of its engines. The questions then become: When will that waning be undeniably apparent to the ‘many,’ What Form(s) will it take and at What Pace will it procede? I don’t think anyone has the answers there for the time being but the simple fact we’re asking such questions today is enough to put people on edge,isn’t it. Don’t know about ‘crossing fingers’ and that sort of thing, so Ahhh! let’s just take a deep breath or two and continue along the path of studied awareness without panic as far as we can …
ghung on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 1:03 pm
From the article: “If governments can kill off one or two of the Five Horsemen, even the most alarming situations can be turned around.”
Not sure how that would work in a highly-interconnected global economy. How to unwind one’s country or group of countries from the global energy/finance/food/climate/migratory mess (as the UK seems to be trying) is beyond me. Few countries are immune to globalism in any respect, here in the 21st century, especially in a world with inter-continental missiles.
Apneaman on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 1:42 pm
JGav, I don’t take Stratfor all that seriously.
Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously
“The corporate research firm has branded itself as a CIA-like “global intelligence” firm, but only Julian Assange and some over-paying clients are fooled.”
“Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/stratfor-is-a-joke-and-so-is-wikileaks-for-taking-it-seriously/253681/
Apneaman on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 2:20 pm
Ian Morris is has a great deal of knowledge and is very accomplished, but like all humans he suffers from any number of the 250 plus cognitive biases. Comparing today’s AGW to yesteryear’s short lived regional climate changes or any current environmental issue from the past is naive and wishful thinking or outright denial of the current situation.
We are in uncharted waters and not just for the humans time on the planet, but in the history of life on this planet. Most seem incapable of grasping the scale of what we have done and what is in the pipe. It was our evolutionary programming that got us to this point (most of this change we triggered in the last few hundred years, so take pride). It’s also our evolutionary programming that causes most humans to disbelieve and downplay existential threats and almost no one is immune except for doomer freaks like me. The only useful part of Ian’s analysis is looking at how past societies have reacted to major threats and how they seem to go through cycles. Most of the same mistakes get repeated throughout the ages and this global civilization is making all of them. I guess it’s only useful as an academic exercise, since there is just as much inertia in the political/economic/cultural/social systems pushing us to hell as there is inertia in the physical systems.
Atmospheric CO2 Rocketed to 405.6 ppm Yesterday — A Level not Seen in 15 Million Years
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/02/05/co2-rockets-to-405-6-ppm-a-level-not-seen-in-15-million-years/
Current pace of environmental change is unprecedented in Earth’s history
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2016/january/pace-environment-change.html
The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-last-time-our-oceans-got-this-acidic-it-drove-earths-greatest-extinction
Anonymous on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 2:32 pm
LoL, Stratfor. A high-rent zio-propaganda mill that gets 99% of its ‘insider intel’, from google and yahoo.
Roman empire=Brexit ROFL. Drawing equivalency to those gives the word nonsense a bad name..
JuanP on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 3:37 pm
JGav “When will that waning be undeniably apparent to the ‘many,’ ”
JG, I have noticed a change in the past four or five years in how people react to my doomer comments. A decade ago if I commented that things were getting worse in the USA and that generations X, Y, and Z would have a harder life than their parents and grandparents, almost everyone would laugh at me and tell me I am crazy.
In the last couple of years when I make the same observations the majority agrees or keeps quiet, and only one or two people disagree with me. I think that the majority of the population living in the USA today agrees that things are getting worse and life is getting harder for most people, particularly the young. Of course, they can’t quite see yet how bad things will get and I leave it at that because I see no point in scaring people who can’t do much about it anyway.
I try to focus on encouraging good habits like growing food organically, fishing, spending time outdoors, living a more simple life, and spending less by making people see that life can be better by following a different path and that these activities can be fun, entertaining, relaxing, and healthy. I have found that people respond better when I focus on the positive aspects of these changes and ignore the scary ones.
Angry White Male on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 3:38 pm
There’s been a correlation, although not necessarily a causation, that one can infer that conflict breaks down mostly on ethno-religious lines when it is between large entities.
We’ve seen it happen periodically in Europe and Africa, and its currently happening in the middle east.
Now, I may sound like a real Nazi saying this, but, this line of thought is more based in human Universalism than any sort of racial supremacy. Once you figure out what causes distinct political entities to pop up in various forms that make the terms friend and foe relevant, you’ve got yourself the political theory of everything, but we don’t have that yet.
Now, if we were smart, we’d be aggressively controlling borders, staving off and hedging first against China and then, once peak oil starts hitting in force, hedging against local “minority” groups once the economy inevitably tanks and positions of these various entities inevitably become amplified, more extreme, and more practical due to changing demographics.
Instead, we fling open the door and let geopolitical problems that otherwise wouldn’t exist be transplanted into our own backyard.
Apneaman on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 7:16 pm
Angry White Male, who is this “we” you are referring to?
Apneaman on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 9:28 pm
More end times fun & games
Up to 80 dead in terrorist truck attack in Nice, France
Last updated Thursday, Jul. 14, 2016 10:12PM EDT
What We Know So Far
Up to 80 people are dead and more than 50 injured, officials say.
French President Francois Hollande calls it terrorism
Driver of truck is dead
Reports say gunfire exchanged after driver left truck
Guns and grenades were found inside the truck, a parliamentarian told BFM TV
What we don’t know: Incident described as criminal attack but it’s not clear if terrorism involved. Identity and motive of the driver uncertain.
An attacker killed up to 80 people and injured about 50 more when he drove a truck at high speed into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday, authorities said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/injuries-reported-after-truck-plows-into-crowd-in-nice-france/article30928400/
Apneaman on Thu, 14th Jul 2016 9:40 pm
Dissecting Our Rigged Economy
“In the last year or so there has been a spate of articles by liberal economists exploring the causes of and possible solutions to declining productivity and increasing inequality in the United States. Not only has economic growth been anemic, but what growth we’ve gotten has not been inclusive, which means the top earners continue to receive an outsized share of the income gains as they have for the past 35 years.
I’ll provide some links at the end of this post for those who want explore these issues further.
The basis of Bernie’s campaign was that the U.S. economy is rigged to favor top earners. Broadly speaking, that is correct, but what does “rigged” mean?”
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2016/07/dissecting-our-rigged-economy.html
Survival Acres on Fri, 15th Jul 2016 10:18 pm
“… and some $2 trillion in assets evaporated.”
No they didn’t. It was all bogus “money” (overvaluation) in the first place. The real “assets” are still there.
People seem to forget that the stock market is a pyramid scheme. Imagine this: how can a company, which has xx amount of money, real assets, employees, products and yearly revenue “suddenly” lose value in a stock market instant?
Did the assets disappear? Did the employees quit? Has their revenue stream suddenly gone down? No, of course not, on all these points (and every other point you could imagine).
The stock market is a fabrication — a “marketing ploy” to lure ‘investors’ into thinking they can profit without doing any work. With the millions of players now involved, this dynamic will create opportunities for over-valuation and sometimes undervaluation — and opportunities for manipulation.
The underlying companies real assets are still “there” and unless they’ve been gutted because of this opportunity for buyouts and manipulation, their intrinsic value remains. And it doesn’t change that much unless a real killer product comes to market (by them or a competitor).
The propaganda that surrounds the stock market manipulation scheme is intended to keep up this Ponzi theft from anyone who dares to ‘invest’. But for every so-called ‘winner’ there are a thousand losers, which makes the “market” one of the biggest theft organizations in existence.
It’s a scam and frankly, it should be abolished. But of course, it won’t. We’ll go on doing what we’ve always done and even bailing out the asshats that get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. Unmitigated GREED.
Davy on Sat, 16th Jul 2016 7:51 am
What does evaporate is the systematic. It is the confidence and trust that goes with wealth and economic activity that once lost leads to decay and deflation. We know that a normal and healthy business cycle must have decay and deflation. It is part of the process. A cycle does not go up without end. This evaporation is a breakdown of trust and confidence that is likely a self-fulfilling process now because we have repressed the process with central bank intervention that is nothing more than extend and pretend along with continued malinvestment in excess capacity and uneconomic investments. This cannot continue without end and when it ends the results will be dangerous because the system has been so damage.
Bad policy leads to gradual and continuous damage that once realized can be catastrophic. It appears that is our direction currently. We have extended and pretended tough decisions out beyond a normal adjustment process and now we are set to break hard and quick at some point. We are digging a hole without confronting the real problems of being in a hole. We are doing this likely because if we confront the real problems the system will collapse anyway.
My point has always been the longer we delay the inevitable the worse it will be systematically. This might not be the case individually. Many will lose everything and or die in collapse. If they maintain the status quo they maintain life. This is a tough decision and one I can’t claim to have an answer for. I can say in an abstract systematic way what appears right and wrong from a systematic point of view in regards to natural law.
We can reflect on real fundamentals and real values from centuries of human history and embracing honestly the scientific process. We can take that understanding and go to the next level which is realizing we are in a systematic paradigm shift of growth to decay of our human ecosystem. This is true of the natural ecosystem and climate because of our human ecosystem. With this understanding we can review science and history to understand the difference between growth and decay paradigms. With that understanding we can evaluate options and decisions forward systematically and in the macro.
On the individual level this differs because individually you must live existentially in the status quo and leave it abstractly. The action of living in the status quo and leaving it abstractly is a conflict with paradoxes and incongruities. You must live dual lives and that is very difficult. You must see that right is wrong and wrong is right. You must see the catch 22 of all of it all and acknowledge there is no getting out of this alive in regards to a status quo life. That is one big step mentally. If you are in denial anywhere along this process your ability to realize the truth can be compromised. You cannot selectively embrace the truth. To be honest most people cannot handle the truth and even those who can handle the truth can only handle it in an ephemeral way and within limits. A human organism is subject to decay like anything else. How long we can maintain clarity of the mind is subject to our environment. The same is true of our systematic social narrative.
Andre Daedone on Sat, 16th Jul 2016 9:51 am
Everything cycles as our planet travels through the galaxy. We are close to the center now and entering a new era. The question is, does everything get burned down as we move into this new era or can we waddle through it.
Apneaman on Sat, 16th Jul 2016 1:07 pm
Why It Is So Easy to Hate Each Other
“Sizing up other individuals as allies or adversaries has always been a human priority. In the prehistoric world in which we evolved, it was a fairly rare occurrence to encounter a person whom you or one of your relatives did not know personally. When such an event occurred, an advantage accrued to those who were cautious and suspicious around strangers and who quickly and decisively sized up who this stranger was in relation to themselves.
Hence, one of the oldest and most pernicious of human qualities is the ease with which we put people into categories.
First and foremost, we want to know whether a person shares genes, worldviews, and group allegiances with us or not. This sets in motion a series of mental steps that determine the degree of comfort, trust, and cooperation we will display toward the person in question.
Group identity fosters a sense of loyalty and sets up perceptual filters that exert powerful influences on us. Psychologists have identified a number of cognitive triggers that get pulled once we have decided whether someone is “One of Us” or not.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-ooze/201607/why-it-is-so-easy-hate-each-other