When I was growing up, it was customary for children to join the scouts once they reached fifth grade, around the age of 9 or 10. My parents bought me the scout uniform with the matching scarf and leather loop to fasten it around the collar, and I still remember feeling special and grown-up as I wore the uniform to the local scouts chapter.
We all formed a circle, sitting cross-legged on the ground as the group leader sat on a small stool and addressed us very seriously. When he finished talking about what it meant to be a junior scout, he told us to stand to attention as he recited the scouting pledge, and we repeated it solemnly after him.
As I said the words out loud, I knew for the first time that I was different. While the other kids seemed awed by this initiation – by the sacred bond forged with their fellow inductees and all those who had come before them – I felt nothing. They were just words.
Most people find it hard to imagine what it is like to not feel any particular affinity or loyalty towards any group. This is so unusual that it is understood by some as a psychological problem to be treated. However, over my 40 years as a clinical psychiatrist I have realised that for many of my patients (and for me) disinterest in group membership and assimilation isn’t a psychological problem – it is simply a personality type that hasn’t been recognised before.
Otroverts is the term I use for those who don’t feel the obligation to merge their identities with others. We are all born as otroverts, before the cultural conditioning of childhood cements our affiliations with various identities and groups.
Being unable to adopt a group identity can have social consequences in a culture that is designed for joining. However, it can also be quite advantageous. When you don’t belong to any group, you aren’t subject to the group’s implicit rules or swayed by its influence. This confers two beneficial traits: originality and emotional independence.
Being outside the hive, so to speak, allows you to think and create freely: to come up with unique ideas, untainted by groupthink or by what has come before. Able to distinguish between the gravitational pull of the group consensus and your own inner, personal centre of gravity, you are free to think whatever you want and to be flexible when situations change, without fear of subverting collective notions about what makes an idea “good”.
Given that you can’t be cast out of a group to which you don’t belong, you have no fear of such social rejection. You don’t seek external validation, nor do you rely on others for emotional support. You don’t feel the need to convince anyone of anything, least of all your own worth.
Our communal society often conflates belonging with connection. However, while it is true that people who struggle to connect might find it hard to achieve a sense of belonging, it isn’t true that not belonging means no connections at all. In fact, without the noise of popular culture, gossip, family conflicts or political tribes (all disinteresting to otroverts), you are free to focus on deepening bonds with the people you feel genuinely close to.
History is full of independent thinkers who aren’t emotionally dependent on any group and can therefore see the fanaticism of a hive mind long before most people do: George Orwell comes to mind.
Sadly, it often seems that people need to emerge from the ashes of self-destructive groupthink before they realise that individual thinkers can be right.
Perhaps we can learn from otroverts that, while there are many reasons to praise community, we should also be acutely aware of its darker side – tribalism.
Rami Kaminski is a psychiatrist and author of The Gift of Not Belonging
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