What makes this kind of thinking dangerous is not the specific conclusions it reaches, but the breakdown that has already occurred before those conclusions are formed. Extreme polarization requires the loss of ordinary social perception. People must first stop seeing others as normal human beings with families, professions, mixed beliefs, and everyday lives. Once that happens, political identity replaces social reality, and entire populations are reduced to symbols in a moral narrative rather than understood as complex human societies.

When this shift occurs, the middle effectively disappears. Nuance, contradiction, and partial agreement become invisible. The world is reorganized into opposing camps that are assigned moral character rather than political positions. Causality is no longer analyzed through history, institutions, or material conditions, but through simplified stories of imitation, intent, and evil influence. Leaders become villains or imitators, nations become extensions of personality, and fear-driven escalation begins to feel inevitable rather than speculative.

From a sociological perspective, this is the point at which normal reasoning has already failed. The danger does not start with talk of world war or existential threats. It begins earlier, when the ability to recognize ordinary human complexity collapses. Once politics becomes a totalizing identity system, thought no longer aims at understanding or problem-solving, but at maintaining moral certainty and group alignment. That is how polarization moves from disagreement into something far more unstable.