People's Problem: divide et impera
Table of Contents
It’s said divide and conquer is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Certainly, it haven’t gone out of style.
Tradition attributes the origin of the motto to Philip II of Macedon: Greek: διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε diaírei kài basíleue, in Ancient Greek, meaning “divide and rule”.
Divide and rule policy (Latin: divide et impera), or divide and conquer, in politics and sociology is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.
- Quotes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule
The fallacious concept: minorities
A partition of objects into groups is one of the possible ways of subdividing the objects into groups ().
The rules are: the order in which objects are assigned to a group does not matter; each object can be assigned to only one group.
- Source: Partitions into groups, Marco Taboga, PhD.
For every class, or set, given that there are $n$ distinct elements, one can form a huge number of possible partitions with them (Known as Bell Numbers). Here is a short table mapping for each group formed of $n$ people, how many partitions (subgroups) can be formed.
n people | possible groups |
|---|---|
| 0 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 2 |
| 3 | 5 |
| 4 | 15 |
| 5 | 52 |
| 6 | 203 |
| 7 | 877 |
| 8 | 4140 |
| (…) | (…) |
Therefore, for the same group of people, let’s say, 8 of them, you could form 4140 possible subgroup-partition schemes! This concept is extremely important to be grasped. Because, these numbers are so astronomical and they signal the following: reasoning based on group-partitioning are essentially flawed, out of any context.
Any opinion can be held about groups, once we can form an astronomical quantity of them, and surely one of these possible partitioning will fit our biased description of reality.
Finally, at least half (this proportion increases as the $n$ increases) of all possible groupings are of minority-partitioning schemes.
Historical examples of contraditions minority-schemes
In 03 February 2022, today, it’s not outrageous to say that the
LGBTQ+-movement and the Black-movement are two of the greatest
minority-based movements there are. One, lead by group-thinking, might believe
that clashes or frictions between them to be exceptions. For, they both are
minority groups. Although, faced by the reality that, even when we deal with
small groups, there are no possible one, unifying, partition-rule that
characterize them. Therefore, all kinds of unaccounted behavior follow from
the great variate of subgroups possible in a group.
We know look at examples of unaccounted behaviors arising amongst minority groups. Movements, itself, that appear antagonist and improbable, if we depart from the minority-group hypothesis.