Maybe I'm off here but I keep coming back to what happens during a siege.
At first, those who made it to safety behind the walls are content to just breathe, then get to work to prepare for the assault: strengthen then build more walls...arm everyone, including children: any 17-year-old will do.
A common enemy has that effect.
Next, the hierarchy becomes further entrenched and enforced...there can be no change of leadership during a siege...'why hello President Bush Jr. and hello Iran's national hero, Qasem Soleimani, President Trump needs you.
Then the Powerful rest behind the inner walls of The Keep: talk about irony as 'they' do keep all the best food, luxury items, best soldiers and of course more space for themselves and their own.
Think gated communities with well-armed security guards. Best to keep the 'great unwashed', the expendables, at an arm's length.
And no one knows about the offshore stash of wealth or the escape route, except of course the Powerful.
Despite the inequity, almost everyone gets a piece of the pie...they're not starving...yet.
And because they've been told it's better 'in here' than 'out there' amidst the barbarian horde, the hoi polloi will man and woman the walls, putting up with the degradation and endless hours spent to protect and feed their families.
While so busy they really don't have the time to think about the situation they're in, that they're being diverted.
Think the constant startling distracting boom of media propaganda, which is in reality inculcating a type of non-rational fear based tribal conformity.
It's like someone decided that 'Lord of the Flies' will be the decades long paradigm for this castle's Survivor episode.
Eventually, those on the walls start to turn on each other. It starts in little ways: bickering over food, labour and hours spent ...a lot of divisive whataboutisms and how come she gets this and I have to clean out the latrines?
They soon start to label offenders...slackers, miscreants or shirkers, eventually seeing them as being just as loathsome as the 'others' outside the walls.
Think labelling any dissent as being phobic, any contrarian idea as being radical or any lack of strict conformity as being due to the colour of one's skin.
Stricter punishments are demanded with ever increasing shrill calls for a good old public flogging or banishment or execution...that's one way to 'silence' or cancel them...why they're traitors they shout into their echo chambers.
Those in The Keep?
Why they're more than happy to accommodate the bloodletting and will of course reward the loyal and their 'special forces' with more food and privileges.
Eventually as more and more people are left with less and less food and comfort, so great is their lack of morale...their lack of optimism, that they are less interested in patrolling the walls and more interested in witnessing some entertaining forms of punishment.
Finally, just before these 'lesser beings' figure out there's more than enough food in The Keep, they then realize that they haven't really seen their leadership in a while.
A real traitor emerges, he lets the Powerful escape to somewhere nice, with everything that couldn't be bolted down, and then he opens the gate and lets the Barbarians in.
Instead of manning the walls, instead of seeing human beings as 'us' and not as 'them', we are content to be amused by the plight of the unfortunate, who just happen to be on the parapets with us.
It is the Zeitgeist of our times...to fight with each other, with an electronic bararity usually reserved for those suffering under a siege...and more's the pity that we don't stop and think:
'Who's making us do this to each other?'