Divide the categories, then rule the fragments.
Tajfel's minimal group experiments, chapter 12, established that arbitrary categorization is sufficient. Boys assigned to a Klee group or a Kandinsky group on the basis of a coin toss allocated rewards in favor of their own group, and preferred a distribution that maximized the margin over one that maximized their own group's absolute payoff. Ten minutes, no history, no competition, no contact.
If that is what categorization alone produces, then the instrument is available to anyone who can make a category official.
Rwanda under Belgian administration is the documented case, and it is the reason this law is in the codex rather than in a discussion of prejudice. Hutu and Tutsi had been fluid social and occupational categories with intermarriage and movement between them. The Belgian census of 1933 and 1934 fixed them: every person was measured, classified, and issued an identity card bearing the category, which was thereafter hereditary and permanent.
What that does is convert a soft distinction into a hard one, and then make it self-confirming. Administrative treatment differed by category — access to education, to positions, to preferment — and produced real differences in life chances over a generation. Those differences then appeared to justify the classification that had produced them.
The cards were still in use in 1994, and they were used at roadblocks.
The operational instruction, stated coldly, is that a ruler who cannot suppress opposition can fragment it, and that fragmentation is cheaper. Subjects who are policing each other along a category line are not organizing along an interest line. Colonial administration in India, in the Levant and across Africa used the same instrument, and its effects long outlived the administrations that installed it.
The boundary is the one this law's own history states: engineered division is not controllable by the party that engineers it. The Belgians left in 1962. The categories they had fixed were used to organize a genocide thirty-two years later.
That is not a moral observation appended to a technique. It is a description of the technique's actual properties, and any operator considering it should understand that the mechanism does not switch off and does not remain the property of whoever installed it.
The counter is chapter 281's mirror in the defense codex.
No defense chapter in the outline. A counter written for this guide.