Homo Demens — the humans who chose the extinction, who looked at the Stranding and decided the correct response was to accelerate it rather than resist it. Higgs leads them because Higgs believes it most completely, because his personal loss has been metabolized into a philosophy of ending, because the baby doll in the pod is the origin of a worldview that has recruited enough people to constitute a faction. The separatists are not insane in the clinical sense. They have looked at the world and concluded that the world's ending is preferable to its continuation.

Sam and Higgs fight because they are the thesis and the antithesis of Death Stranding's argument — Sam who connects because connection is the only response to loss, Higgs who destroys because connection only gives you more to lose. The fight is the game's central question made physical: is the world worth reconnecting, or has the cost of caring about it already exceeded what caring can produce?