Why Do People Join Groups? And What Do We Give Up When We Do?
Why Do People Join Groups? And What Do We Give Up When We Do?
Why do people join groups? Belonging gives us community, identity and purpose—but what happens when being part of the group means giving up independent thought?
I've just always been suspicious of what happens next.
Because eventually an us starts deciding what we believe.
I've never understood how millions of people can join a political party and somehow arrive at the same conclusions about dozens of completely different issues.
What are the odds?
Religion has always made me wary for the same reason.
Then, years ago, my wife and I found a church we liked.
When Belonging Asks Too Much
I liked going to this church.
I liked the people.
I liked the community.
Then one Sunday, the sermon turned to gay marriage.
It was wrong, we were told.
I remember sitting there thinking:
I'm out.
That was it.
I couldn't reconcile what I was hearing with what I thought a church was supposed to be.
A house of love.
And I remember thinking:
This is the wrong side of history.
But something else about that morning bothered me.
The mechanism.
You come because you like the people.
You stay because you feel welcome.
You sing together. Shake hands. Become part of the community.
And then one Sunday, the group tells you what we believe.
Maybe you agree.
But what happens when you don't?
That's the part of groups that has always scared me.
Not belonging.
Belonging so completely that you stop noticing when something inside you says, Wait. I don't believe that.
And yet there's a problem with my theory about groups.
I've experienced the other side too.
We Need an Us
On September 11, 2001, I was working at 59 Maiden Lane, four blocks from the World Trade Center.
I watched the second plane hit.
I've written about that day before—the confusion, fleeing Manhattan and eventually looking back across the Hudson at the black cloud where the towers had been.
But I remember what came afterward too.
American flags were everywhere.
When baseball returned, Mets and Yankees players wore FDNY and NYPD hats.
For a little while, there were things bigger than baseball.
There were things bigger than politics.
There was an us.
And I felt it.
The guy who didn't want to join the fraternity suddenly understood the power of belonging to something larger than himself.
I felt it strongly enough that I eventually enlisted in the United States Air Force.
And I loved being part of it.
The camaraderie.
The brotherhood.
The training.
The shared sense of mission.
Other people depended on you.
You depended on them.
You weren't just doing something for yourself anymore.
Which is terribly inconvenient for my theory that groups make us dumber.
Because that group made my life bigger.
Maybe Groups Aren't the Problem
I've been thinking about that contradiction.
The fraternity.
The church.
The Air Force.
For most of my life, I thought I was resistant to groups.
Maybe that's not quite right.
I think I've been resistant to conformity.
Those aren't the same thing.
There is enormous value in belonging to something.
Families are groups.
Teams are groups.
Neighborhoods are groups.
Churches are groups.
Military units are groups.
Countries are groups.
Without them, we're just a collection of individuals standing next to one another.
We need people.
We need community.
We probably even need an us.
The danger comes when membership requires us to stop asking questions.
How to Belong to a Group Without Losing Yourself
Maybe the answer isn't complicated.
Join.
Participate.
Serve.
Wear the uniform.
Sing the song.
Cheer for the team.
Enjoy the strange and wonderful feeling of being surrounded by people who consider you one of their own.
But save a little room for disagreement.
Ask yourself whether you believe something because you've thought about it—or because your people believe it.
Let your group be wrong.
Let the other group occasionally be right.
Say I don't know.
Say I disagree.
And maybe most importantly, don't confuse disagreement with disloyalty.
I understand my college friends better now than I did at 19.
They weren't necessarily giving something up by joining that fraternity.
Maybe they had found something.
Community.
Identity.
Belonging.
Things human beings have probably been looking for since we first gathered around a fire.
I still wouldn't join their fraternity.
But I'm no longer convinced that refusing to join made me wiser.
Because eventually I found my own groups.
Some taught me when to leave.
Others taught me why we join in the first place.
Maybe we don't need less belonging.
We just need to remember that joining a “we” should never require surrendering the “I.”
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