Most people have seen a rally. Everyone in the same colors, chanting the same lines, clapping before they can realize if they even agree with what they just heard.
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In the center of the rally a man wears a shirt that reads I AM AN INDIVIDUAL. He believes that the shirt proves he is a sore thumb.
It does not. Thousands of people can buy the same shirt and wear it to the same rally.
And that’s what happens. The same man goes to a later rally and finds many people wearing the same shirt. They all chant in unison “I AM AN INDIVIDUAL.” They believe their words but deep down they hope they just became the tribe’s latest colors.
We never ask what the tribe demands from us before we are granted a place within it. The price is always the same. It demands the individual sacrifice their individualism .
Do not confuse the individual with personality. Personality is a style. Nor is the individual a set of preferences, a person’s taste, or their biography. The individual is something more fundamental: the unrepeatable particularity of a human being. It’s a specific configuration that makes one person this person and not that person a specific arrangement of experience and perception that only exists once in reality and is never seen again.
Some believe that society bestows dignity upon an individual through rights, recognition, and laws. These things matter as they can protect dignity. But they do not create it. Before any government or constitutions there were particular human beings whose existence mattered simply because no one else could occupy the specific space that they occupied. Each of those people carried something that had no duplicate. They carried something that if lost would leave a particular shape of absence in the world.
Particularity is uncomfortable because it resists oversimplification. Every genuine individual is full of contradictions that refuse to collapse into slogans. They carry loyalties that compete with one another, convictions that evolve, doubts that never really disappear. Reality itself is unfinished. And the person who refuses to surrender their own particularity must then learn to inhabit that incompleteness.
Some individuals choose solitude, which they see as the cost one must pay to not become less than oneself. Most pay this price for a while, but life has many burdens and the weight of those burdens accumulate. Then the tribe appears offering relief from the overwhelming weight.
Not every tribe that offers relief is a tribe that this essay is describing. The distinction is not based on size, intensity, or even ideology. It is what the group requires as a condition for admittance. A friendship, marriage, and at its best, a family do not set a price for admission. The individual is encouraged to be just that, an individual. You become known and loved by how much of yourself you disclose. Another type of tribe inverts this, where your tribal belonging deepens as particularity disappears. So the test becomes: does a deep belonging require you to be more of yourself, or less?
The rest of this essay concerns groups that have failed that test.
There is real comfort to be gained by joining the lesser tribe. It would be dishonest to deny it. It is instinctive that humans long to belong. They long for languages they can understand, for help carrying the weight of reality’s uncertainty, and to just not be alone. The tribe can alleviate some of this. The tribe does not offer counterfeit gifts. The belonging can be real. The certainty feels real, and the relief is real.
The tragedy is not what is offered by the tribe, but what the tribe demands in return. No tribe can wholly steal an individual. The individual must offer oneself. The defining characteristic of a destructive tribe is not that it demands conformity, but that it makes surrender of particularity a condition of belonging.
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Recently, many movements have gleaned tribalism for its most cultish characteristics. People socially crucified for not a hundred percent agreeing with the ever changing rules of belonging. They are not worth naming, that is not the point. The point is that we are all being put in or putting ourselves into tribes.
The surrender is almost never dramatic. It happens quietly, through small decisions repeated over years. Agreement over honesty, certainty over curiosity, and belonging over solitude. Each choice makes the soul a little smaller, a little more legible, a little less inconvenient to the collective. Over time the unique shape of the soul becomes inconvenient, then embarrassing, then invisible. Even to the person who is carrying said soul.
A caterpillar enters a cocoon to complete a metamorphosis into something we consider more beautiful. The tribe has its own cocoon, but this cocoon does not transform, it consumes. What emerges is not monstrous, not grotesque. It is simply without particularity, smooth where there were once rough edges, certain where there were once questions. The soul’s unique kind has been replaced by something the tribe can use. Something that no longer produces the friction created by an actual person. Beauty disappears in silence. Now the husk only works.
Some forms of beauty depend on irreducibility. We find people the most beautiful when the things in them are rare and irreplaceable. Beauty appears wherever reality gives rise to something that cannot be exchanged without loss. The soul’s unique kind is exactly this.
The husk becomes a tool for the same consumption that produced it. It enforces conformity to justify the sacrifice they themselves made. Nuance is looked at with suspicion. Betrayal equated to independent thought, and any hesitation in another person is just a reminder of the self they sacrificed. This is not done out of malice. The husk does this because it has no other function left. It polices from need, not conviction.
Yet, the tribe demands more. Doctrines start to evolve, purity tests become more volatile, the tribe’s heroes become heretics, and finally the ones enforcing today’s moral orthodoxy become tomorrow’s examples of insufficient loyalty. The offering was accepted, this was always the arrangement. The cannibalization is not a betrayal. It is the contract’s completion. The tribe never promised to preserve the individual. It promised only to use them.
Maybe this explains why nuance is one of the first casualties of tribal life. Nuance can be seen as indecision and weakness. It can be inferred as individualism. The tribe cannot and will not tolerate this for long. The choice to surrender all of these precious things is the responsibility of the individuals. They can be empathized with but their plight remains their own.
Those of us not in the tribe have a responsibility. It is narrow but it is still there. It is not an obligation to condemn, but an obligation to accurately describe the actual cost. This must be done before the transaction is made and to someone who still has particularity left to lose. This is only a small thing to offer and is easily withheld. It is still owed.
The tribe can offer belonging, certainty, purpose, and relief. These are real. But it will not preserve the one thing it demands as payment. So find the man in the shirt, before he learns all the chants. And say as clearly and as honestly as you possibly can:
You are being asked to relinquish something that the universe will never see twice.
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