but people crave community and sometimes mistake cliques/cults for community.
For sure. There is a lot of this going on across many aspects of life. Like lonely people mistaking sex for intimacy, or flavour for nutrition. I reckon a lot of our world is made of inadequate substitutes.
If there is a true division, it's really the 0.1% versus the rest of us, but they spend absolutely incredible resources keeping us fighting and divided.
Yet, in the US at least, they keep getting voted into power as representative of the people. Inadequate substitutes.