Factions will always be a necessity, it need not be something that is regressive. It seems like a general psychological law that no individual can sustain a persistent suspicion of all the ideas, motives, values, etc., of the people they interact with. We are factional to our loved ones, community members, and that benefit of the doubt, that reluctance to grill them or question them is what makes them part of our faction. You can mostly tell who someone thinks is not in their faction by how often they put someone else under the microscope. Socrates might be a fictional-ish example of why it is a general psychological law. Even if Socrates and his loyal friends were fine with the constant questioning, some even loved him for it and wept at the thought of this activity being gone from their lives, his just intentions translated into that factional grilling of the city, to which people did not take kindly to. Socrates himself was factional to the city and knew as well that he did not want to leave, so he stayed through it all, proving that it is only a general psychological law at best, not a necessity. Even if Socrates could sustain the factionless-factional relation to the city and his community, it was a superhuman feat, which is why the Socratic ideal may be just an ideal.