Where we are all more or less the same, the need to manufacture difference, to create and stigmatize “others,” may become a temptation, one easily susceptible to political exploitation. The psycho-sociological, possibly even biological mechanisms of mimetic rivalry, aggression, and a death drive, visible in larger groups and nations, may well first emerge in small disaffected factions and cells that can seem to constitute themselves out of the blue, parting ways with the familial, parental, and religious-cultural environments into which they had heretofore blended, gray on gray.
Hent De Vries's introduction to Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World
Already an incredibly interesting book.