Power gradients are not uniformly unifying. Individuals' motion along the gradient is a function of their respect for their neighbors. If an individual disrespects their neighbors, their local gradient points away from those neighbors, and will then drive the individual's beliefs away from their neighbors' beliefs. It may be helpful in hand-wavy terms to think of this disrespect as negating the gradient, thereby reversing its direction; from the perspective of the disrespecting individual, they are climbing up the gradient, and the object of their disrespect is the one who's direction is negative. This sort of anti-thetical symmetry in perspective is a common pattern we shall see over and over.
Once we introduce the concept of a global normal, the collection of individuals moving away from that normal constitute the counter-culture of that normal. A counter-culture can itself be more or less unified, on a spectrum from normalization to schizophrenia. Because the counter-culture is all reacting to the same global normal, it may tend towards a global anti-normal. However because normals are composed of many separate beliefs, the counter-culture may coalesce around rejection of different sections of the belief space, thereby splitting the counter-culture itself.
You may be wondering what the difference is between a counter-culture and a schizophrenic culture (in our example of a hill with two peaks, are not the two bi-polar peaks counter-cultures of each other?). The answer is whether the dimensions they differ over are dependent or independent →. When they are dependent, the two peaks are constructed in opposition to each other, and so have an antagonistic relationship that characterizes them as counter-cultures to each other. When they are independent, the two peaks essentially go their separate ways without interference in their beliefs, a relationship that characterizes them as being schizophrenic because of their (relative) mutual unintelligibility.