Divisionism

Divisionism is a doctrine and social practice built on the production of Identical Replicas: adherents cut small pieces from their own flesh and grow exact copies in embryo jelly. Although presented as a moderate position between the other political tendencies, Divisionism turns the prospect of companionship into a system of bodily multiplication whose unresolved limits provoke paranoia, violence, and failed regulation.

Doctrine and the Replica Process

Divisionists define their position through literal division: a person produces replicas from their own tissue, cultivating them in embryo jelly. The process raises a basic political and personal question in the account: whether each replica is an independent person capable of developing different characteristics. The answer offered is doubtful. Replicas must periodically recharge with the Mother Cell, a requirement treated by Divisionists as an article of faith and a source of fear that replicas might revolt.

The long-term prospect is not simply a growing population of duplicates. If division continues without restraint, the process might culminate in one replica of one sex, embodied in millions of separate bodies. Some Divisionists believe that this end can be avoided, and defend producing a few more copies so they will not be lonely while travelling. Yet they also call for strict control over the division of people they consider undesirable. Since every replica except one’s own can eventually be classed as an undesirable, the proposed moderation carries a built-in struggle over whose multiplication is legitimate.

Proliferation and Its Extremes

The account gives the prospect of uncontrolled reproduction a concrete example in a Caid described as a product of generations of recessive genes. This figure, whose physical description is presented in grotesque terms, has accumulated 20,000 Identical Replicas. He no longer has to conceal their production or disguise them as plumbers and delivery workers. Instead, he celebrates their visibility and their resemblance to himself, imagining that they will multiply and inherit the earth. His case turns the Divisionist aspiration to make copies into an openly declared claim to territory and future dominance.

Other practices reveal how far the movement’s reproductive culture extends beyond sanctioned production. Citizens disguise replicas with dye, distortion, and body or face molds to prevent them being identified and destroyed. Some seek supernatural intervention: a professional witch is summoned to make Sheik Aracknid’s replica cultures permanently sterile. Dr. Benway dismisses the attempt and predicts that Frederick’s ataxia will eliminate the replicas instead, invoking his neurological studies as authority. The episode places occult countermeasures, medical language, and replica proliferation in the same unstable field of attempted control.

Fear, Policing, and Social Violence

There is no reliable method for detecting a disguised replica, even though every Divisionist is said to possess a supposedly infallible technique. That uncertainty makes the population hysterically suspicious. A citizen voicing a liberal opinion may be challenged as a disguised replica, and fear of replicas identified with Black people—even when those copies are blond and blue-eyed—has emptied entire regions. The account thus presents replica identification not as neutral detection but as a vehicle for racialized accusation and political intimidation.

The resulting conflict is both private and public. Barroom fights cause staggering casualties, and citizens repeatedly accuse others of placing a hex on their replica cultures. Divisionists also devise numerous supposed methods of destroying the Mother Cell, or Protoplasm Daddy, by torturing or killing a captured replica. The authorities have effectively abandoned efforts to control murder and the unlicensed production of replicas, though they still conduct raids before elections, destroying large replica cultures in mountainous regions where producers operate like illicit distillers. Regulation persists as intermittent repression rather than a workable system.

Sexual rules add another contradiction to this social order. Sex with a replica is strictly forbidden yet almost universally practiced; some bars openly accommodate people who consort with their replicas, while hotel detectives check rooms for them. The movement is also described as latent or overtly homosexual, and older men discourage boys from relationships with women by claiming that replicas will not grow if they do so. The contrast between prohibition and widespread practice makes the replica both an object of desire and a target of public discipline.

Political Position and Significance

Divisionism occupies a middle position among the political tendencies, but this apparent moderation does not make it socially settled. Divisionists are portrayed as unable to attain either the Senders’ self-righteous assurance or the Liquefactionists’ relaxed depravity; the political groupings, moreover, overlap rather than remaining separate. Divisionism’s distinctive problem is the tension between multiplying the self and fearing the consequences of multiplication: each adherent may seek copies for companionship, yet the doctrine supplies no secure boundary between acceptable and threatening replicas.

The Coordinate Factualist bulletin rejects the supposed easy solution of filling the planet with desirable replicas. It questions whether desirable copies exist at all, treating the attempt to bypass process and change as a potential threat even when the replicas are intelligent and genetically perfect. In this counter-position, identical reproduction is not a harmless route to improvement: it risks replacing change and individuality with a fixed likeness. Divisionism’s comic grotesquerie therefore carries a darker political implication. A project that promises company through sameness generates suspicion, coercive classification, and violence, while its own dependence on the Mother Cell leaves the independence of each copy unresolved.