Polit Education
Brainwash your subjects into seeing things the way the government tells them to. (I.e., align their ethos to the government one.) Here it’s by policy, but it’s what negative divergence should have done in the first place. Even according to the devs.
The way this mod works, you get two edicts: "Political Education" for meatbags, and "Mandatory Firmware Updates" for your synths. (Either vanilla or from the Playable Robots mod or from the Synthetic Empire mod. Though it seems a bit pointless with Synthetic Empire, since those don’t seem to actually have divergence.) So you can change the ethos of one or the other or both, depending on what your exact current problem is.
Note that changes are gradual. Pops won’t just jump from fanatic xenophobe straight to fanatic xenophile just because you tell them to. They will go through all the shades in between, on the way there. E.g., from fanatic xenophobe -> xenophobe -> neither -> xenophile -> fanatic xenophile.
Also each of those steps takes a very long time. On the average 10 years. And averages are average: some pops will comply faster, some will stick to their old ideas for half a century. Just ask the USSR how hard it was to try to force everyone to become fanatic collectivists. (Hint: they weren’t anywhere NEAR done after three quarters of a century.) So plan to have it on for a very long time, if that’s your plan.
However, what you CAN usually get in a more reasonable time-frame is to get 1 or 2 pops of some integrated population to have less different ethics, if you need to colonize with that species. For example, if you’re some desert dwelling warmonger and just rolled over some fanatically peaceful ocean species, you might take a decade or two to get 1 or 2 of their pops to see things more your way, before you use them to colonize other ocean planets.
IF time interval modifiers work like in CK2 (seein’ as it’s the same engine), then conversion should go faster if you also quarantine information, and much slower if you encourage free thought. Free thought tends to not be very compatible with indoctrination. But so far I’m not convinced that those modifiers work in Stellaris. Still, I included the code and the game doesn’t complain in the logs, so feel free to try activating both, if you want.
This works independently and in parallel for each of the four ethic dimensions, so basically it can eventually change any combination of ethics into any other combination. Well, as long as the "any other" is your empire’s ethic combination, anyway.
This also causes a small amount of unhappiness (-5% happiness), as was really the case wherever and whenever people were forced to take part in indoctrination classes. Again, just ask the communist block how that went.
The AI SHOULD be able to use the policy too, although not intelligently. It will just depend on their government type and ethics, not whether they actually need to counter divergence. (Though it being Stellaris, everyone probably does, sooner or later.) Totalitarian regimes will tend to use polit education much more often than even oligarchic ones. And collectivists will tend to use it more, while individualists will use it much less, and fanatic individualists will almost never use it.
I tried to keep it plausible, basically.
