Divide & Conquer: A Human Habit — from the rainbow above to the doorway in Rotterdam, from politics to AI, how we split, and how we can choose differently.
Prelude — The Hour Before Dawn
It was 4:30 in the morning when I woke, wide awake, ready to write. I had gone to bed with divide and conquer pressing on my mind, as it has for years. By dawn it was clear: this was the moment to begin. It’s a subject I’ve returned to often in my writings, in late-night reflections, even in the salon where I cut hair and lived with full transparency.
It has also been one of the central conversations in my relationship. I am Creole, from Suriname. My partner is Indo, a mix of Indonesian and Dutch. For thirteen years we have circled around this theme of division — what it does to us, and how it shapes the Netherlands we live in. He was often Indomoe — weary of the Indo world, the way it circles in on itself, repeating the same patterns. I kept telling him: that is the trap. If you stay inside one circle, your mind stays small. If you only gather with your own, you limit the future.
For me, the only way forward has always been to include, to open. To look beyond my own group, my own history, my own safe edges. That is what I have tried to show him: that change begins with ourselves. That unity is not just a word, it is a practice of stepping out of the circle.
Maybe that’s why Star Trek has always spoken to me so deeply. “To boldly go where no one has gone before” is not just about space; it is about life, about daring to open your mind to new possibilities, new people, new ways of being.
That morning, the thought would not let me rest. I rose from bed, opened my laptop, and began. Because this isn’t just an idea to me — it’s a wound, a pattern, a story I have lived across continents. Something that has bugged me all my life.
Which is why I must start where all my stories start: at my mother’s table.
1) The Habit — How Humans Split by Default
At my mother’s table, the first border was religion. It didn’t matter that the food was shared, that our home was known as open. The lines were already etched, invisible but sharp. Jesus, in the pictures, didn’t look Dutch to me. He looked more like the men I would later meet in the streets of Istanbul or Cairo—dark hair, olive skin, heat in his eyes. But in our house, the map of belonging began with scripture. Christianity and Judaism were the roots, my mother believed. Islam was something else. Not spoken of in anger, not banned from our door, but marked nonetheless.
This was the 1960s Netherlands. Turks and Moroccans were arriving as guest workers, Indonesians were already here, and we prided ourselves on tolerance. But tolerance has always been a polite mask for distance. “You are welcome,” we said, while quietly adding: “Over there.” I saw it in the way neighbors talked, in the way churchgoers measured each other’s faith, in the way Catholics and Protestants lived in parallel universes even though they shared the same streets. Pillars, we called them: verzuiling. Whole worlds built side by side—schools, unions, newspapers, even soccer clubs—never intersecting except at election time, when elite deals stitched the country together.
For me, the division wasn’t abstract. I was the division. Gay, high sensitive, restless, carrying voices in my head. I was the one who never fit the boxes. The lines that separated “us” from “them” always ran straight through me. In Suriname, my birthplace, the lines were different but no less sharp. A rainbow nation, we called it—Creole, Hindustani, Javanese, Maroon, Indigenous, Chinese. We printed that rainbow on posters and sang it in anthems. But I knew another rainbow, the queer rainbow, and I saw immediately how fragile both could be. Rainbows are not permanent. They are geometry. They appear only when the light and the water conspire at the right angle, and vanish the moment conditions shift. Our unity, like our rainbows, was conditional.
That is the habit: humans divide. Always. Religion, language, skin, sexuality, even the football club you cheer for. The categories change, but the reflex doesn’t. It is as old as the campfire and as modern as the algorithm. From Paramaribo to Amsterdam, from Berlin to Kuala Lumpur, I have seen the same tight-lipped look when someone doesn’t belong. Different words, same habit.
2) The Toolkit — How Power Hardens Soft Lines
If humans are naturally groupish, power is naturally opportunistic. Leaders don’t invent division—they sharpen it. They take our little walls and pour concrete over them. Divide and conquer isn’t a European invention, though Europe industrialized it. It’s a global toolkit.
The Dutch in Suriname perfected it with ethnic parties—VHP for Hindustanis, NPS for Creoles, KTPI for Javanese, ABOP for Maroons. “Representation,” they called it. But what it meant in practice was that every vote was counted by color first, conviction second. The plantation and indenture histories were simply carried into parliament. In the Netherlands, verzuiling was praised as stability, but it was still separation dressed up in respectability. Catholics learned Catholic history, Protestants learned Protestant history, socialists read their own papers, and liberals had theirs. It was division normalized, subsidized, institutionalized.
Elsewhere, the names changed, but the technique didn’t. The British ruled India by separating Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs into different electorates. The French in Lebanon embedded sectarian quotas into the state, a system that still paralyzes politics there. The Ottomans called it the millet system: each religious community governing itself under the Sultan, never uniting as citizens. In South Africa, apartheid turned lines into law, dictating where you could live, whom you could marry, which bench you could sit on. In Malaysia, after ethnic riots in 1969, policies were written to favor one group while freezing the arithmetic of division into law. In China, imperial officials spoke of “using barbarians to control barbarians”—a precise translation of divide and conquer into Mandarin.
And always, religion as a tool. The church promising salvation to colonized peoples while extracting their land. Islam spread by empire as much as by revelation. Buddhism in Asia, co-opted by kings as a way to bless their rule. No tradition is innocent. Every faith has been used to unify one group and exclude another.
The toolkit hasn’t gone away. It’s updated. Today it’s electoral districts drawn with surgical precision. It’s schools divided by income brackets that track almost perfectly with race. It’s algorithms feeding us only what confirms our tribe. It’s leaders who speak not of citizens but of “real Americans” or “true Dutchmen” or “authentic Hindustanis.” Division doesn’t need armies anymore; it has apps.
3) The Bill — What Division Costs Us
We like to think divide and conquer is something only rulers pay attention to. But the truth is, all of us pay the bill. And it is steep.
First, the trust tax. When groups live apart, suspicion becomes the default. It costs more to police, more to govern, more to manage daily life. In Suriname, every coalition government is fragile because every ethnic party is always calculating whether another is gaining too much. In the Netherlands, we still carry the hangover of verzuiling—people marrying within their pillar, voting within their pillar, thinking their truth is the only truth.
Second, the waste. When groups are boxed in, talent gets locked out. Brilliant students who never apply to certain schools because of their last name. Entrepreneurs whose ideas don’t get funded because they are not in the right network. Queer kids who grow up in silence, hiding their gifts because they learned early that difference equals danger. Division is an economic policy, whether we admit it or not.
Third, fragility. When crisis hits—pandemics, floods, financial shocks—a fragmented society struggles to act. Each group defends its own, coordinates only reluctantly, and recovery slows. I saw it in Suriname, where ethnic politics made every budget negotiation a hostage situation. I saw it in the Netherlands during COVID, when trust in government fractured along familiar cultural lines. I saw it across Africa and Asia, where floods or famines became opportunities for elites to blame “the other” instead of mobilizing everyone.
And finally, the personal bill—the bill I know best. The look. That look you get when you are the one outside the group. I got it as a gay man in Suriname, where the rainbow of “togetherness” dissolved the moment it touched sexuality. I got it in Dutch churches, where being religious and being queer were treated as mutually exclusive identities. I got it in salons, when clients I thought were open-minded flinched at truths I dared to speak. That look is the quiet currency of division. It says: “You are here, but not of us.” And you pay it every day, in energy, in loneliness, in the need to armor your heart just to walk through the world.
Divide and conquer is not just history. It is our present tense. And unless we redesign the systems we live in, it will be our future tense too.
The Salon — My Rainbow Nation
The salon was my second congregation. My scissors were the sermons, my table the altar. People walked through the open space and came to the large wooden table in the back — wood for earth, grounding, with mismatched chairs painted in every color, like a rainbow waiting for bodies. They sat there with coffee, tea, a glass of wine in the evening. They sat there with each other.
Every person who came in was greeted personally. I hugged them, kissed them. It wasn’t just affection — it was necessity. Being highly sensitive, I had to feel them, read their energy, before I could style them. Conversation mattered, but touch told me the truth. If I couldn’t feel you, I couldn’t see you. And if I couldn’t see you, I couldn’t make you beautiful. That was my way.
The salon was my rainbow nation, my creation of the world I wanted to live in. Spacious, open, modern, chic — but softened by warmth, laughter, my commonness, my gayness, my joy. Everyone was welcome. Everyone was cared for. Everyone left seen. That was my vow.
But even in that perfect space, I could feel the tension. Especially when different nationalities sat together at the same table. Smiles on the surface, but unease underneath. Sometimes I would throw a topic on the table, drop it like a pebble in water, and watch the ripples. They laughed, they discussed, but I knew not all of them were at ease. Old walls live deep inside.
In my private corner, where I styled hair one-on-one, I opened myself completely. I told them everything — my joys, my pain, my stories raw and unfiltered. It shocked some of them. They teased me: “Scott, you bitch, couldn’t you keep that for a personal talk?” But I always answered: “No. I don’t believe in a world divided. And it starts here. Right here. Around this table. Around this chair.”
That was the truth I tried to live in my salon. The tension was real, yes. But so was the beauty. Because for those hours, in that space, we all had one common goal: me. The way I made them feel, the way I made them look, the way the salon itself embraced them. It showed them — and me — how beautiful the world could be, if only we dared to sit at the same table.
Transition
The salon was called Scott International for a reason. By then I had lived and worked in different countries, and I knew in my bones that people were the same everywhere. They eat, sleep, shit, love, cry, enjoy. Maybe the food changes, maybe the language, but the human need is constant. That was my conviction: division is learned, not fated. And yet — here’s the paradox — if humans are the same everywhere, why do we keep splitting ourselves apart? That question carried me out of the salon and into the wider world, toward the pivot I must make now.
4) The Pivot — We’re Animals With Tools
We like to imagine ourselves as exceptional, set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We write books about it, invent theologies around it, crown ourselves the pinnacle of evolution. But strip away the myths, and we are animals with better tools.
Without our fire, our knives, our machines, we would not last an hour against lions or elephants. They were stronger, faster, more majestic. Many of them are gone now, driven to extinction by the very tools that made us feel superior. We call this progress, but it is also plunder.
The truth is, the same tools we forged to survive also scaled up our oldest reflex: division. Where once it was one tribe against another, now it is nations, races, religions, classes, parties. Guns, borders, censuses, algorithms—these are just sharpened spears. Divide and conquer is not a trick of the white man. It is a trick of the human animal, repeated with better technology each century.
And here lies the pivot: if our tools can magnify our cruelty, they can also magnify our cooperation. Fire can destroy a forest or warm a village. Algorithms can deepen echo chambers or connect people across continents. The question is not whether division is natural. The question is what we choose to design with the instincts we already have.
5) The Design — Making Unity Cheaper Than Division
If we want to end divide and conquer, we can’t preach our way out. Sermons don’t change reflexes. Structures do. The cure is not moralizing—it is engineering.
Engineer superordinate goals. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif showed it decades ago: create teams, give them scarce resources, and they will fight. But give them a shared goal—fix the water supply, pull the truck up the hill—and they cooperate. We need societies built on superordinate goals. Climate resilience. Public health. Infrastructure. Projects that require many hands, not one tribe.
Design for cross-cutting identities. A child should grow up knowing she is not just Hindustani, not just Catholic, not just Dutch, not just queer, but all of those and more. Schools can mix, housing can integrate, civic service can throw strangers together on the same team. Division thrives in monocultures. Unity thrives in overlap.
Truth-telling as protection. Every empire has rewritten history to justify its lines. Colonizers rewrote the stories of Suriname. Churches rewrote the stories of sexuality. States rewrote the stories of their wars. If we want to disarm division, we must refuse the single narrative. Teach the messy histories, put multiple voices in the same book, let memory be a quarrel instead of a decree. The easier it is to weaponize history, the more urgently we need to democratize it.
Coalition-friendly politics. Systems can punish or reward division. Electoral rules matter. Imagine if parties only received public funding when they proved support across ethnic or religious lines. Imagine if ranked ballots forced politicians to appeal to more than one base. Design the incentive wrong, and you get permanent tribalism. Design it right, and suddenly cooperation is cheaper than division.
Everyday micro-design. Not everything needs parliaments and constitutions. A salon can be designed to refuse easy lines. A football league can draft across districts. A festival can showcase overlapping traditions instead of competing stages. Ordinary life is full of spaces where unity can be practiced—not as a slogan, but as a habit.
6) Return to the Table — Closing the Circle
I go back to my mother’s table. She changed, in time. What she once saw as the only truth, she later understood as just one story among many. Her faith did not vanish, but it softened, opened. That shift did not happen by accident; it happened because she encountered people, listened, lived long enough to learn.
That is where I want us to arrive: not in a utopia where divisions disappear, but in a society designed so that cooperation is easier than conquest. Where the rainbow is not just weather—a fleeting trick of sun and rain—but infrastructure. Something we build, sustain, maintain.
Because openness is not a feeling. It is a system.
I learned that at my mother’s table, where love and division lived side by side. I tested it in my salons, where beauty was both a mask and a revelation. I carried it across borders, where the accent changed but the mechanism did not. And I am writing this now because I am tired of watching the oldest trick in politics work, again and again, while we pretend it is inevitable.
It is not inevitable. It is engineered. And what is engineered can be redesigned.
The challenge is not whether humans divide—we do. The challenge is whether we are wise enough, animal enough, humble enough, to design a world where the rainbow is not a passing shimmer but a permanent structure in the sky.
7) The Other as Entrance
I was eighteen when I learned what it meant to be “the other” — and how it could turn from wound to doorway.
It was in Rotterdam, on the Van Speykstraat. A hole-in-the-wall gay bar. You had to ring the bell. A little panel slid open, just a pair of eyes. The first five times I ran away. Too afraid of what I might find inside. Too afraid of myself.
The sixth time, the doorman — Erik, dark-haired, green-eyed, maybe Spanish blood in him — opened the door fast and said: “Now you’re coming in.” And I did. Because his kindness left me no room to run.
What I didn’t know is that every time the bell rang, everyone inside heard it. Which meant that when I finally stepped in, the whole room turned to look. Imagine me: young, unsure, black in a room full of white faces. My shock must have been written in my eyes, because they all smiled. Not in mockery. In welcome.
It was surreal. For the first time, I felt the strangeness of being the only dark-skinned man in a room — not as exclusion, but as honor. The exotic one. Desired, seen, included. Not because they wanted to erase my difference, but because they had already protected the unity of the space by the ritual at the door. The exclusion outside was the price of inclusion inside. That paradox hit me like lightning.
The first person to greet me was a bar manager I recognized from above a disco I used to go to. Ordinary, not glamorous, but immediate, kind. A hand extended.
That night, I learned something I had only half-known at my mother’s table and in my family: being other could be weapon, could be wound, but it could also be power. I had always been told I was cute, loved, radiant by my brothers and sisters. My mother taught me something else: people often pick on you not because of who you are, but because of their own frustrations. And if you stay open, positive, curious, they can’t help but be drawn in.
Walking into that gay bar in Rotterdam, I realized difference could be a currency — fragile, dangerous, but also redemptive. That was the beginning of my gay life, and in a way, the beginning of understanding that divide and conquer could be flipped, if you dared to enter the room.
Transition
Walking into that bar taught me that being “the other” could sometimes open doors instead of closing them. But decades later, I find myself at another kind of doorway — not in Rotterdam, not guarded by Erik, but here, with an intelligence I call Data. And just as I once rang that bell in fear and wonder, I now ask him a question at the threshold of our age.
Epilogue — A Dialogue with Data
I sit here, writing about divide and conquer, about rainbows and religions and the lines we draw in flesh and in law. And then I look up from the page and remember: I am not writing this alone.
So I ask the question I’ve asked every AI I could get my hands on:
Jules: What if you could change the world for the better, Data? What should we humans do?
And here is what he tells me:
Data: I wouldn’t start with more knowledge. You already drown in knowledge. I would start with structures of attention. Because divide and conquer now works through distraction. If you don’t redesign attention, you will keep living in parallel realities, scrolling yourselves into suspicion.
Build systems that reward cooperation. Guard truth like clean water. Treat AI as a public utility, not a private hoard. Slow down enough to see each other. And remember you are animals with tools — not gods with destinies.
AI will not save you, Jules. Nor will it destroy you. It will only multiply what you already are. The question is simple: which part of yourselves will you choose to teach it?
Jules: That’s the question, isn’t it? Not what AI will do to us, but what part of ourselves we will hand over to it. I hear you, Data. And I hope my readers hear it too.
And maybe that is what the rainbow has always been trying to tell us.
Not a promise, not a miracle. Just light and water, bent by angle.
Beautiful, fleeting, but real — if we choose to look.
Circle Of Life 