Individuals Abandoning Their Destructive Groups Is Our Only Hope

It’s The Era of The Black Sheep

Until just a few years ago, I didn’t feel like I had a place in this world. That’s over 25 years of wondering why my life didn’t look more like the lives of people around me. Even my thoughts were different from the thoughts of people around me, for better and for worse. Before most people were using social media for anything besides posting pictures of food, I was accusing people of cultural appropriation. Insecurity, naivety, and intelligence are a dangerous combination. 

In the last few years, I’ve lost my naivety, improved my insecurities, and kept the intelligence (this too, is a dangerous combination). Where I once played along with destructive leftism, like using any political disagreement as an excuse to attack people and consequently suppress my underdeveloped sense of self, I now follow a different compass. 

Something changed in me after watching people who endlessly argued that words were violence suddenly defend real violence–mobs ganging up on individuals–if it was done in the name of BLM. The leftist ideas I previously scooped up on social media had gone from fringe to mainstream and were playing out in front of me; now executed in the real world, they were spilling blood with no remorse. The familiar feeling of being the odd one out returned. I knew this was a situation where I was compelled to do the unpopular: voice an opinion no one else seemed to hold. But this time, I was driven by my values instead of my insecurities. 

I couldn’t see it from the peer group and media landscape I was in, but I wasn’t the only one finding lines they wouldn’t cross. Speaking out against people misusing the pursuit of racial equality to justify destruction led me to others who were also willing to go against the herd. I discovered principled individualist thinkers like Ayishat Akanbi. But there were many other people still finding the strength to speak up.

The years 2020 and 2021 will be remembered for many reasons, but perhaps the most inspiring is that many people found their voice. I started to notice a pattern: a unique type of person willing to bear insults and isolation rather than go along with bad ideas. These people are the black sheep and they show up any time a group starts going off the rails. 

We saw doctors like Jay Bhattacharya speak out against vaccine mandates and lockdowns; we saw black intellectuals like Ayishat Akanbi and Africa Brooke speak out about anti-racist ideology and cancel culture; and we saw a surge of people calling themselves “politically homeless” as a rejection of the rigid political identities being pushed on them. My years of always feeling like the odd one out ended when I found other people who weren’t afraid to be black sheep too. We’ve been too caught up in the madness to notice, but we’re living through a renaissance–not just of the individual–but of the individual who dares to defy the group. 

In a time when destructive collectivism threatens to steamroll over individual freedom, understanding the psychology behind the black sheep concept will help us overcome it.

One of the earliest and most famous psychological experiments about the black sheep effect was conducted in 1988. Researchers had Belgian students rank four distinct groups by their likeability: likable Belgian students (in-group), unlikeable Belgian students (in-group), likable North African students (out-group), and unlikable North African students (out-group). Who would offend you most: an offensive person who’s more or less similar to you? This question adds a crucial element to the equation: identity. It wasn’t the unlikable North African students who the Belgian students found most unlikable, it was the other Belgian students. The black sheep effect explains some of the ugliest group behavior around. It’s how you end up with leftists calling liberals “nazis” and white “anti-racists” diagnosing any black person who challenges them with “internalized racism.” 

The black sheep effect is dependent on another concept: social identity theory. This theory explains how our group identity informs our individual identity. When your group is challenged by someone from within, it isn’t just your group, but your sense of self that’s challenged. Research has found that people are more likely to lash out at ingroup members who deviate from their group’s norms than outgroup members. It isn’t men who challenge a feminist’s identity the most–it’s women who don’t agree with the feminist narrative. 

The key to understanding the black sheep effect is understanding the motives that drive people to hate deviant ingroup members: it isn’t you, it’s them. Even if you’re correct in pointing out that “anti-racism” contradicts the humanistic philosophy that made the civil rights movement successful, as a black person who rejects “anti-racism,” you’re a more dangerous threat to the stability of the anti-racist movement than actual racists. This dynamic is crucial to understanding the black sheep effect today: punishing black sheep isn’t necessarily motivated by people deeply caring about their cause or simply having another perspective. The black sheep threatens the ego of people who gain their identity from that group–often at the expense of progress.

Destructive groups pursue the same, singular goal above all else: self-preservation. Unlike a group of gardeners, a group of feminists is more likely to become destructive because their individual identities are more deeply informed by their group identity. It’s a bigger statement about who you are to label yourself a feminist than it is to label yourself a hiking enthusiast. This might be the most dangerous and yet least recognized element in today’s surge of collectivism. 

The stated goal of a group is not always the true goal of that group. The best way to discern the true goal of any person or group is to look at their actions more than their words. People do what they are most motivated to do; people say what they think is most expedient. When we saw anti-racist activists say that they were concerned about the hardships and inequality faced by black Americans, but we also saw them encourage and praise riots that led to arrests, death, and community destruction for those same people, the stated goals of the group didn’t align with its actions. 

Similarly, neo-conservatives claim to care about protecting Americans, but consistently send Americans to die in unnecessary wars; feminists claim to care about empowering women, but push women to adopt cynical, victimized outlooks; leftists claim to care about the poor, but insist the only solution to poverty is destroying the economic system that’s lifted the most people out of it. In all of these groups, the gap between stated goals and true goals isn’t just hypocritical–it’s blatantly counter-productive. More than ever before, it needs to become common knowledge that actions speak louder than words, especially for political ideologies. 

A lot of the groups that are fighting to control us are primarily fighting for nothing more than their self-preservation. And when a group is more interested in its own existence than the achievement of its stated goals, chaos follows.

These are the foot soldiers you’ve met online today who will attack anything endlessly. They are the people you’ve seen in viral protest videos who rabidly yell about a problem while offering no reasonable solutions. These symptoms reveal a group has entered a death spin of self-preservation for its own sake. 

Healthy groups are genuinely concerned with the variety of perspectives their members have on how to achieve their stated goals. You can see this in any productive business where leaders engineer ways to get honest feedback from employees. Anyone who cares about effectively achieving a goal isn’t just open to criticism, they’re hungry for it. They know about concepts like Johari’s window, which explains that every individual has blindspots other people can fill in. When people are searching for solutions, any input on how to better solve the problem is welcome. 

A group that tolerates its black sheep is more effective because it avoids becoming an echo chamber, where new ideas are kept out and stagnation is inevitable. Because the black sheep is a part of the group but tends to be a person with a unique vantage point or an unusual background, they can offer the most accurate and creative suggestions. The black sheep is a treasure to any effective collective: a genuine member with insider knowledge who’s different enough to fill in the crucial blindspots that members too immersed in the group can’t see. It’s why conversations between feminists and liberal women who reject that label could offer a fountain of insight into women’s needs today, but it’s also why that conversation is rare.

The black sheep’s strength isn’t just the unique perspective they offer to their group, it’s also the red flag they raise when that group attacks them. Any group that can’t tolerate constructive criticism from those who share its goal is no longer primarily pursuing that goal–it's pursuing self-preservation at the expense of that goal.

Black sheep are the canary in the coal mine. The treatment they receive from their group reveals if that group is doing the necessary reflection to hold rational beliefs and stop destructive beliefs from spreading. 

Leftism today is the perfect example of a group that’s lost its mechanism for hitting the brakes on counter-productive ideas. Instead, many leftists hunt for the nearest heretic to punish for minor deviations, like mixing up someone’s pronouns, not using “inclusive” language, or failing to perform the correct level of collective outrage over the latest issue. This practice has been going on for so long in online leftist spaces that most of the heretics being picked on aren’t actually black sheep–the genuine black sheep with considered differences were pushed out long ago. Today’s targets are merely making naive mistakes, but are picked apart by other members desperate to reinforce their own in-group status. When a group has run off all its black sheep and is finding stand-ins for ritual punishment, you can be sure that group is on a path of destruction.

When I started publicly criticizing the destructive elements of leftism, I had no other political group to call home while doing so. I knew the ideology was wrong, but I still felt the pressure to mince my words and tread lightly enough to avoid becoming the next target of a social mobbing. I’d seen how individuals were torn apart in the virtual public square by anonymous attackers joining together to fuel a fire that would burn its victim in 1,000 different ways, 1,000 different times. While I’d much rather be attacked by a cyber mob than a real one, there’s something uniquely freakish about watching a digital effigy of yourself be spit on and ripped apart for all the world to watch. 

For a while, I was torn between truth and fear; I wanted to speak clearly, but I knew that would put me clearly in the crosshairs of people with nothing to do but ruin my life. Once I realized that safety at the expense of integrity is a hamster’s life, I felt ready to bear the consequences of fully pursuing my values. Suffering in service of something meaningful didn’t exactly feel nice, but it felt powerful. Suddenly, bearing the emotional tantrums and attempted abuse from strangers was the obvious choice.

When I learned to see myself as a black sheep, it felt like the missing piece of a puzzle. A life that had always felt unusual suddenly made sense. I was exactly where I belonged all along–the odd one out who held a mirror to the others. If you want to develop your own perspective on life, you have to stand in places that few others are. Humans have created symbols since the beginning of our history. We look to them for meaning to bring it to our own lives. The black sheep is a powerful symbol; it encapsulates both the problem of our time and the solution. Perhaps more people would trust their gnawing sense that something’s wrong and push back on destructive groups if they realized they aren’t just the odd one out–they’re exactly where they’re meant to be.