Here we seem to deal with a psychological “threshold phenomenon.” There is a measure of enmity between social elements which becomes ineffectual if they experience a common pressure: it then yields to external, if not internal, unification. But if the original aversion surpasses a certain limit, a common oppression has the opposite effect. This has two reasons. The first is that once there is a dominating resentment in a certain direction, any irritation, no matter from what source it may come, only intensifies the general irritation and, contrary to all rational expectation, flows into the already existing river bed and thereby enlarges it. The second, even more important reason is that common suffering, though pressing the suffering elements closer together, reveals all the more strikingly their inner distance and irreconcilability, precisely by virtue of this enforced intimacy. Where unification, however it be created, cannot overcome a given antagonism, it does not preserve this antagonism at its former stage, but intensifies it. In all fields, contrast becomes sharper and more conscious in the measure in which the parties concerned come closer together.

XREF: Connects to social psychology research on intergroup conflict and contact theory — Sherif's Robbers Cave experiments and the common-ingroup identity model.

XREF: Simmel's sociation logic connects to theories of in-group/out-group formation and the psychology of forced proximity.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 336