Across the human record, the inclusion of an adversary in group identity narratives is so consistent that the exceptions are themselves instructive. The Hebrew Bible defines a people through Egypt, Amalek, Philistia, and Babylon. Greek identity crystallized against Persia in Herodotus. Roman identity required Carthage so completely that Cato closed every speech with Carthago delenda est. Norse cosmology runs on Aesir against the Jotnar. Vedic literature opposes devas and asuras. Zoroastrianism gives perhaps the most architecturally pure version, an entire metaphysics built on Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu. Aztec cosmology required perpetual cosmic war. The Iroquois Confederacy formed against external pressure and remembered itself through the Huron. Confucian China oriented around the hua-yi distinction, civilized against barbarian. Mainstream Sunni and Shia traditions each carry the other inside as constitutive. Modern nationalisms cannot be told without the neighbor against whom they consolidated. Marxism requires the bourgeoisie. Fascism requires the Jew, the Bolshevik, the decadent. Liberal democracy required first fascism, then communism, then terrorism, and now whichever populism is named that week. Corporate identity follows the same pattern, Coke against Pepsi, Apple against Microsoft, Boeing against Airbus. Sports rivalries become civic identity. Academic schools constitute themselves against opposed schools. The cases where you have to look hardest for the adversary, certain strands of Buddhism, Bahá'í, some Quaker meetings, turn out on inspection to carry the world or worldliness or war or hierarchy as the constitutive other.
What happens when the adversary disappears is not a return to positive values. It is the rapid generation of internal adversaries. The post-Cold War United States is the cleanest modern test case. The triumphalism of 1991 gave way within a decade to a search for new enemies, the war on terror filling the role briefly, but the deeper pattern was the inward turn that produced what we now call the culture wars, with each tribe inside the country reconstituting the other tribe as existential threat. Post-apartheid South Africa lost the unifying enemy of white minority rule and watched the ANC fragment, internal corruption metastasize, and xenophobic violence against other Africans surface with a speed that surprised observers who expected reconciliation to settle into stable positive identity. The Catholic Church after Constantine, having gone in three centuries from persecuted minority to imperial religion, immediately exploded into Arianism, Donatism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, the great Christological controversies that consumed the next several centuries. Christianity needed enemies and, lacking them externally, generated them internally with extraordinary creativity. The French Revolution, having defeated the monarchy, turned in within five years to consume Girondins, then Hébertists, then Dantonists, then Robespierre himself. The Bolsheviks, having defeated the Whites, spent the next twenty years finding kulaks, wreckers, Trotskyists, cosmopolitans, doctors. The Chinese Communists after 1949 produced the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap, the Cultural Revolution, each requiring fresh enemies. The Iranian Revolution turned within months on its leftist allies. The temperance movement, having achieved Prohibition, simply collapsed, having no further reason to exist. The anti-slavery societies dissolved after abolition. The suffrage movement fragmented after 1920.
The speed at which internal enemies emerge is the part most people underestimate. It is often not years but months, and in some cases the internal enemy is being generated even before the external one is fully defeated. The Bolsheviks were factionalizing during the civil war. The early Christians were producing Marcionites and Montanists while still being fed to lions. The form the internal enemy takes is fairly stable across cultures. Most often it is doctrinal deviance, named as heresy in religious idiom and as revisionism, deviationism, or counter-revolutionary tendency in political idiom. Second is insufficient commitment, the lukewarm, the fence-sitter, the Laodicean, the fellow traveler whose loyalty is not pure enough. Third is pollution or impurity, sometimes racial, sometimes sexual, sometimes ideological, the contaminating element that must be cleansed. Fourth is bad faith, the collaborator, the secret enemy, the one whose outward conformity hides inner betrayal. Fifth is generational, the children of the revolution who are betraying it, or the old guard who are obstructing it. These categories are the same whether the group is the Donatist church in fourth-century North Africa, the Soviet Communist Party in 1937, the Maoist Red Guards in 1966, or a contemporary online ideological community in 2024.
Successful leaders, examined across the record, maintain or generate external threats with a consistency that approaches a structural requirement of the role. Augustus narrated his rule as defense against barbarians and chaos. Napoleon required continuous war, much of it defensible as response to coalitions against him, but the structural need is visible regardless. Lincoln had a genuine adversary, which is precisely why he serves as the comparison case for leaders who manufactured theirs. Hitler theorized the requirement explicitly, as did his jurist Carl Schmitt, who made the friend-enemy distinction the constitutive moment of the political. Stalin produced enemies on a five-year cycle. Mao made enemy-production a permanent campaign infrastructure. The Castro government held together for sixty years substantially through the American blockade as identity stabilizer. The Kim dynasty exists at this point primarily as a function of the threat narrative around it. Erdoğan rotated through enemies, military, Gülenists, Kurds, depending on which destabilization served. Putin moved from oligarchs to NATO to fifth columnists. The pattern holds at the scale of the corporation as well, where the burning platform speech and the designated competitor are foundational tools of CEO leadership. The narration is almost always defensive. We did not seek this conflict, they leave us no choice, this is about justice or values or survival. The function is cohesion maintenance, attention direction, dissent suppression, and legitimation of authority that would otherwise have to justify itself on positive grounds. The gap between narration and function is itself one of the most reliable signals.
Coalitional psychology predicts all of this with uncomfortable precision. The deep evolutionary claim, developed in different forms by Tooby and Cosmides, by Boyer, by Bowles, by Wrangham, is that humans are an obligately coalitional species whose Pleistocene survival depended on group membership and whose cognitive architecture includes specialized machinery for tracking coalition markers, detecting defection, punishing free riders, and orienting toward out-group threat. Choi and Bowles modeled the joint evolution of in-group altruism and out-group hostility and found that neither stably evolves without the other. Terror management research finds that mortality salience reliably increases in-group cohesion and out-group derogation. The prediction is that groups should require an other to function, that the loss of an external other should produce coalition fission and internal enemy generation, that costly signals of commitment should be required to maintain membership, and that the policing of these signals should intensify in proportion to the absence of external threat. The historical record does not just confirm these predictions, it confirms them at a level of consistency that is itself a finding. Cultures with no contact with each other, separated by oceans and millennia, produce the same patterns.
The strongest counterexample, examined honestly, fails. The candidates are real and worth taking seriously. Quakers maintain a peace testimony and equality witness, but Quaker history includes the Hicksite split, the Orthodox-Gurneyite split, the Conservative-Liberal divisions, and a constitutive opposition to war, hierarchy, and established religion that functions as a structural other. Bahá'í explicitly emphasizes unity and inclusion, but the faith has been stabilized in part by persecution in Iran and opposition from Islamic authorities, and where this external pressure is absent the community shows the more ordinary fragmentation patterns. Mennonites and Amish maintain positive community values to a remarkable degree, but their separation from the world makes the world itself the adversary, and the boundary work required to maintain that separation is the central social activity. Effective Altruism tried explicitly to organize around positive values, calculation, and impact, and fragmented within a decade through internal factional warfare, the FTX collapse, and the AI safety versus global health split. Intentional communities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brook Farm, Oneida, the kibbutzim in their socialist phase, the Bruderhof, generally last one to three generations before either fragmenting, secularizing, or, in the rarer stable cases, intensifying their boundary against the world. Scientific institutions claim to organize around truth-seeking but exhibit the standard coalitional dynamics, school against school, methodology against methodology, the policing of credential and commitment, and the maintenance of clear adversaries from creationists to anti-vaxxers to the previous paradigm. The Olympic movement narrates internationalism but is engineered around national rivalry. The Red Cross is a positive-values institution that exists because of war and disaster. Even small kinship-based societies, where one might expect mutual dependence to suffice for cohesion, turn out in the ethnographic record to be embedded in raid and feud relations with neighboring groups.
The honest summary is that no group of any meaningful size has demonstrated cohesion around positive values alone, sustained across generations, in the absence of either an external adversary or the structural use of an internal one. The cases that come closest either turn out on inspection to carry an adversary in less obvious form, or fragment within a generation or two, or remain small enough that they have not yet been tested by the conditions that reveal the pattern. This is what coalitional psychology predicts. The fact that the prediction is so well confirmed is itself the finding the framework is built to register.