[4] Literature suggests that the number of fatalities[clarification needed] nearly doubled between the years 1914 to 1964 as a result of further group conflict.
[6] Social psychology, specifically the discontinuity effect of inter-group conflict, suggests that "groups are generally even more competitive and aggressive than individuals".
[7] Two main sources of intergroup conflict have been identified: "competition for valued material resources, according to realistic conflict theory, or for social rewards like respect and esteem...as described by relative deprivation theory"[8] Group conflict can easily enter an escalating spiral of hostility marked by polarisation of views into black and white, with comparable actions viewed in diametrically opposite ways: "we offer concessions, but they attempt to lure us with ploys.
[10] Thus "in politics, for example, everyone can get an extraordinarily comforting feeling of mutual support from their group by focusing on an enemy".
[11] Freud described a similarly quasi-benign version, whereby "it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other – like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance...[as] a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier".
[34] Neville Symington also saw narcissism as a key element in group conflict, singling out "organizations so riven by narcissistic currents that...little creative work was done".
[35] Such settings provide an opening for "many egoistic instinct-feelings - as the desire to dominate and humiliate your fellow, the love of conflict - your courage and power against mine - the satisfaction of being the object of jealousy, the pleasures derived from the exercise of cunning, deceit and concealment".
In a "restorative" form, paranoid-schizoid "splitting" can be transformed through scapegoating dynamics to produce reparative ("depressive") intragroup relations.
[39] He saw the violence directed at the group scapegoat as "absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community...a deliberate act of collective substitution".
[40] His view parallels the Freudian approach, rooted in Totem and Taboo, which considers that "transgression... is at the origin of a higher complexity, something to which the realm of civilization owes its development".
[41] Freud saw violence as standing at the root of the social bond – "what prevails is no longer the violence of an individual but that of a community"[42] – and thus "politics made out of delinquency...the social contract establishes corporate virtue as an asylum for individual sin".
[43] Girard concluded therefore that regression and 'the dissolution of differences encourages the proliferation of the double bind...spells the disintegration of social institutions',[44] to reveal the group conflict latent at their core.