Healthy Communities Form People Through Tension, Not Conformity

Luke Burgis treats the central problem of identity as a tension between “the one” and “the ninety-nine”: the self and the crowd, the individual person and the communities that form him. His warning is not that people should avoid tribes, families, churches, schools, political coalitions, workplaces, or other forms of belonging. It is that modern life makes affinity easier to find while weakening the capacity to endure tension inside real communities.

The hard part, in Burgis’s account, does not begin with finding a tribe. It begins after one has found it. Belonging brings formative pressure. A person then has to learn how to remain in a group without being swallowed by it, without letting membership become a substitute for having a self.

Burgis takes the title of The One and the Ninety-Nine from the parable of the lost sheep, but he shifts attention away from the familiar description of the sheep as merely “lost.” He asks what happened to the sheep while it was away, whether it changed, why it wandered, whether it came back different, and whether it then existed in the flock differently. He said he wanted to “get inside the head of the sheep,” because he has often felt like that figure while moving into, out of, and away from groups.

Russ Roberts distinguishes this from simple anti-tribal individualism. The point is not that people should have no tribes, or that communities are inherently suspect. Human beings inevitably belong. The more difficult question is whether a person can belong without becoming merely a sheep.

Burgis describes the book’s underlying thesis as relational. Very few human problems, he argues, can be understood by looking at individual behavior alone. People must be understood in relationship: in families, at work, in schools, in political coalitions, in religious communities. The goal is not differentiation as withdrawal. It is transformation through the tension of community: remaining in relationship while becoming capable of standing as a self.

That tension matters because belonging can become a way to flee distinctness. Roberts presses the point: many people seek communities not only because they want fellowship, but because they want relief from “the one-ness” of existence. They want to be immersed, subsumed, surrounded by people whose beliefs, instincts, and styles feel reassuringly similar. Religion and politics show the pattern clearly. Within broad traditions and parties, people keep sorting into finer and finer subcommunities, looking for a place where everyone feels just like them.

Burgis answers that no group fully captures who he is. Family, church, and the school where he teaches are core to his identity, but none exhausts him. He draws on Christopher Lasch’s idea of the “minimal self” and Eric Hoffer’s account of people joining mass movements to flee an unwanted or flimsy self. The modern world, he argues, is structured to remove friction: technology reduces it, politics often promises coalitions where everyone is supposedly on the same page, and social life offers endless exits from discomfort.

The perfectly tensionless group is a fiction. Any honest community contains friction. The question is whether its members have what Burgis calls a “solid self”: a self not constantly renegotiating itself in real time so that the group behaves like “a flock of starlings,” shifting as one body without anyone serving as a reference point beyond the group’s own motion.

Healthy communities, in Burgis’s account, need people who can point beyond the group’s internal logic, sometimes at great risk to themselves. Roberts connects that idea to Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. Burgis accepts the connection, but adds a complication: even an impartial spectator can become problematic if it is mediated only by the group. What happens when the algorithm, or AI, becomes the “impartial spectator”? In Burgis’s view, such a machine is not a neutral spectator at all. It is mimetic, built out of imitative and socially mediated signals.

Against that, Burgis proposes “value response”: the ability to respond to things because they are good in themselves, not because one’s group declares them good. He says few people seem able to do this. The missing capacity, across religion, politics, and education, is the courage to respond to reality — to truth, goodness, and beauty — without having every perception filtered through the group.

One of the book’s central lines, quoted by Roberts, is: “The hardest place to stand apart is the place you were held.” The line appears with an illustration of a parent bending toward a small child. For Roberts, it names the peculiar intensity of family formation. Family is where values, religion, politics, ethics, commitments, obligations, and emotional reflexes are poured into a child. It is also the place from which the adult may later need to stand apart.

Luke Burgis thinks about this as the father of two young daughters. Part of his task as a parent, he says, is to allow them to become differentiated people with a sense of self, not fused to him in the sense that their overriding aim is to make him happy. He does not present himself as a perfect model. He hopes he is not an anti-model. The truth, he says, is probably somewhere in between.

Children, like adults, strive for communion and differentiation at the same time. They want to be with others and to be known as themselves. The family is the “forge of identity” because it is where most people first learn, or fail to learn, where their emotions end and a parent’s emotions begin. Burgis is not speaking only about ideas transmitted in the home. He is speaking about emotional fusion.

His example is ordinary: a parent is upset about politics while watching the news. Does the child learn that the parent’s distress is the parent’s distress, not necessarily the child’s? Or is the child instantly subsumed into the parent’s emotion? Because children often do not yet know enough to evaluate the issue itself, they mirror what they see. The transfer is subtle and usually unconscious.

Burgis uses Murray Bowen’s family systems theory to describe how this works. He emphasizes Bowen’s claim that the smallest stable unit of relationship is not an individual and not even a dyad, but a triad. Two people in conflict are volatile. A third person gives them somewhere to offload anxiety. In a two-parent home with one child, the family is already a triangle. With more children, there are more triangles. Children learn to occupy positions in that system. They may learn to stand as differentiated selves, or they may learn to move into whatever role relieves the family’s tension.

The father-son story makes the mechanism visible. A father asks his son to play catch. The father imagines he is doing something good: spending time, bonding, playing the archetypal game of parent-child connection. But the son is absorbed in a school writing assignment on Hamlet. He likes playing catch, but not at that moment. He says no. The father is crushed and sulks away.

Then the mother enters. She does not want to deal with a sulking husband all evening, so she tells the son he should play catch because it will make his father happy. To Burgis, the mother’s intervention reveals the coercion inside many innocent family moments. The son is being asked not simply to choose between Hamlet and catch. He is being asked to regulate his father’s emotional state and relieve his mother’s anticipated discomfort.

That kind of moment happens “day after day after day” over 15 or 16 years, Burgis says, and shapes a person’s instinctive response to other people’s needs. The child learns whether he may have a desire that causes tension, or whether his job is to smooth out the system.

The same pattern travels outward. Education often trains students to make the teacher happy, follow rules, and avoid dissent. Political parties and coalitions often deal with tension by telling the uneasy member to leave rather than work through the conflict. Groups sort themselves into smaller and smaller units of people who claim to share “the same values,” but Burgis is skeptical that this resolves the problem. In his experience, once people sort into a very like-minded tribe, the hard work often begins.

Roberts calls this a central feature of adulthood: standing apart from a tribe without necessarily leaving it or opposing its goals. Burgis agrees. Sometimes leaving may be necessary, but the more important question is what process a person goes through to test and discern that. Many people do not even bring the tensions to conscious awareness. They refuse to acknowledge them.

He sees that refusal in unhealthy workplaces, where “everything’s always just great all of the time.” To him, that is not strength. It is insecurity or weakness. A healthier community can tolerate people who honestly distinguish between what they believe, what they are willing to stand for, and the dynamics of the group. The aim is not grumpiness or contrarianism. It is a relationship in which differentiation can coexist with communion.

Humor can mark the same pressure point. Roberts suggests that jokes often become a way of saying “I object” without openly risking exile from the tribe. Burgis agrees, invoking the court jester as the one who can tell the truth through comedy. In a seminary setting where he lived with 250 other men after age 30, he found that shared commitments did not remove tension; sometimes the more people had in common, the more micro-differences mattered. It was difficult, he says, but also one of the funniest places he had lived. The jokes did not erase the pressure. They revealed it.

Burgis’s argument about education is not mainly curricular. It is about whether education forms a person’s desires, attention, agency, and judgment about association — or merely gives content, credentials, and next steps.

Luke Burgis writes, in a passage Roberts quotes, that “a core part of education is learning what we believe, what we’re willing to commit to, and what we are willing to walk away from.” He also says a real education should shape a person’s instincts about whom to marry and which communities to bind oneself to more than it shapes a future resume. Roberts observes that this is not what happens in most classrooms.

The prevailing model, Burgis argues, treats education as content and knowledge transfer rather than formation of the human person. For him, education should be an education in desire: what a person learns to want, pursue, and give himself to. Students should be formed as hunters more than gatherers. The hunter has agency and responsibility in learning, rather than being passively fed.

Association is central because people are formed by what they join. Burgis invokes Tocqueville’s idea that the “science of association” is the mother science, but notes that schools generally do not teach a course in the science, or art, of association. Yet everyone is formed by associations: friend groups, clubs, workplaces, marriages, schools, churches. People also form those associations in return. Every significant commitment begins a process.

A first job is not merely a line on a resume. It hooks a person to a process that will shape him. Marriage does so even more radically. Burgis asks whether the person one marries is someone with whom one wants to be transformed, suffer, cry, and laugh. A decision cannot be evaluated only by its first step. One must ask what steps two, three, and four may look like, given the character of the people and institutions involved.

This is how Burgis advises students. As a faculty advisor to roughly 30 students at a time, he often speaks with students choosing among jobs. His favorite thought experiment removes prestige, income, and measurable success from the decision. He asks them to imagine that each option fails after two years by all ordinary performance metrics and becomes something they may not even want on a resume. Which path, then, would still help them become more of the person they think they want to become?

The question changes the unit of analysis. The issue is no longer which path gives the best external return, but which failure would still form the person in a meaningful direction. Burgis gives the example of a student choosing between consulting and trying stand-up comedy for a year. The student chose stand-up. Burgis says he did not push the choice; he generally tries not to, except in rare cases where he will “step on the scale” a little.

Marriage raises the same problem at a higher level. Roberts notes that many young adults are not asking whom to marry but whether to marry at all. If marriage is formative, and if spouses shape each other, perhaps the prospect of being formed by another person has become too uncomfortable.

Burgis’s theory is that modern life has lost rites of passage. The major ones — Bar Mitzvah, confirmation, marriage, having children — mark transformations after which a person is not the same. If marriage is a person’s first serious rite of passage, he suggests, that may be a problem. A rite of passage involves differentiation through transformation: separation from a group, a liminal period in which much is uncertain, and reintegration with the old group in a new status or with a new group altogether.

Marriage is a serious rite of passage, a radical change in life. If someone has had no practice in transformative experiences, Burgis says, marriage may seem overwhelmingly daunting. People then seek utilitarian proof that it is the right choice. He recalls a friend who wanted an empirical argument that he would be happier if he married. Burgis could not provide the proof his friend wanted, and the friend did not marry. At some point, he says, such a choice requires commitment.

He does not deny economic and stability reasons for delayed or foregone marriage. But he emphasizes maturity and a solid sense of self. One way people acquire that differentiated personhood is through rites of passage, small and large. In his view, many contemporary rites occur online, and those are weak substitutes.

Attention is part of the same formation. Burgis writes that the humanities and arts, including poetry, once trained people in “the disciplined act of attention”: discerning what truly matters rather than being told what matters. Roberts sees that as a radical idea in 2026. Burgis replies that people are not merely told what to attend to; they attend to things because masses of other people are attending to them. Social feeds operate through a mimetic process untethered from what is real or important.

The educational task, for Burgis, is to recover a fuller perception of reality. He invokes sensus communis, not as “common sense” in the usual phrase, but as the point at which the senses cohere. These include not only the five physical senses but also intellectual and spiritual senses: capacities to perceive truth and read meaning at multiple levels. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Burgis says technology often extends one sense to the detriment of others. That imbalance damages the sensus communis, the integrated perception needed to distinguish what is real from what is unreal and what matters from what does not.

If education cannot train that perception, he says, it risks merely training people to be responsive to the mimetic environment they already inhabit.

Roberts quotes James Vermillion’s phrase, written in response to earlier EconTalk episodes: “the cultivation of an inner life substantial enough to withstand the world’s pull.” Roberts says that is one way to understand the task of education at Shalem College in Jerusalem: disciplining attention, discerning what matters, learning to think for oneself. He sees in Burgis’s life a case of self-education arriving after conventional success proved inadequate for the questions that began to matter to him.

Burgis describes his formal education as passive and gamified. Grades were levels. The goal of second grade was third grade; the goal of third grade was fourth. He treated school as something to endure rather than something to make his own. Looking back, he says, it is crucial for a person to feel like the protagonist of his own education, and more broadly of his own existence. If that drive is beaten out of someone over 15 years, some vitality is lost.

That was his experience. He got into a good school, worked on Wall Street, and started companies. But because he had not taken his education seriously, he reached his late twenties lacking foundations. He had majored in finance, which he says is fine, but he lacked the philosophical, classical, and theological ideas beneath the human phenomena he was trying to understand. He says he learned more about markets by reading René Girard than by reading most finance blogs.

The realization made him angry. He was able to step away for about a year, a period that coincided with a religious experience and a return to Catholicism, the religion in which he was raised and from which he had fallen away. He discerned religious life for a time, studied philosophy and theology, and spent about five years in self-directed learning. He says he did not receive fancy degrees from that period and does not care. It changed his life because it gave him foundations from which to look at what was happening from a human and anthropological standpoint.

His method was direct. While running a company, he would go almost every night to a 24-hour Starbucks in Las Vegas and read until two or three in the morning. He read classical books and followed the footnotes. He names Homer’s Odyssey, Plato, Dostoevsky, Adam Smith, the Bible from front to back, and books from his old shelves that he had claimed to read in school but had not.

The point is not that Burgis found a perfect syllabus. It is that he moved from being carried through education to taking responsibility for it. Footnotes became paths. Mentors later entered his life. Seminary later imposed readings of its own. But the central change was agency: becoming, in his phrase, the protagonist of his own existence.

He now thinks artificial intelligence may, by a kind of via negativa, strip away what is not human and thereby show what is most human. For that reason, despite the failures he sees in humanities education, he thinks the humanities may have a bright future if they are embraced and understood well. They are exciting precisely because they concern the human foundations that passive credentialing did not give him.

Mimetic desire, in Burgis’s account, means imitative desire. People often think their desires well up from an authentic self, but many desires are borrowed or adopted from others. Desire is contagious. Other people model desires to us, and we take them on.

Luke Burgis says this happens first in ordinary family life. Admired parents who are doctors may model a desire for medicine. An older sibling who goes to medical school may become the model for a younger brother. But mimesis can also operate negatively. Differentiation, usually a positive term in Burgis’s account, has an unhealthy form when it becomes reaction against another person. If someone else believes X, I must believe Y. If someone else likes X, I cannot like it.

Politics is full of this. Burgis says ideas often cannot be debated on their merits because, once one party embraces a policy, it becomes mortifying for members of the other party to acknowledge anything good about it. The basis of differentiation becomes what the other side chose first. Envy, insecurity, and pride color the choice before the idea has been evaluated.

Russ Roberts notes that this sits uneasily with the economist’s preference for rational choice and with the modern person’s self-image as agentic and independent. People do not like to imagine that their beliefs are shaped by crowds. Yet if one had to predict a stranger’s political beliefs with only one variable, Roberts says, one powerful question would be: what do your parents believe? Sometimes the person defines himself against the parents, but often religion and politics are adopted from parents, peers, or a surrounding group. People then narrate those inherited beliefs as if they were reached by evidence alone.

Burgis extends the point. If he asked a person about one hot-button issue, such as gun control or the Second Amendment, he believes there is a high likelihood he could predict the person’s positions on nine other hot-button issues, perhaps correctly 90% of the time. The clustering is strange if one assumes each view was independently reasoned. It makes more sense if beliefs operate by family resemblance: “this is what people like us believe.”

Adults, Burgis says, are ashamed of imitation in a way children are not. His daughter delights in imitating. Adults hide imitation underground, where it becomes mimesis: subconscious, disavowed, and therefore powerful.

He also emphasizes that the crowd does not influence people only as an undifferentiated mass. Often the decisive influence comes from particular individuals. Girard, in Burgis’s reading, saw that specific people can have outsized power over our desires and beliefs because we are fascinated by them, fixated on them, admiring of them, or hostile to them. Hatred can bind as strongly as admiration.

A practical diagnostic follows: ask which individuals one pays the most attention to. On X or Twitter, who are the people whose posts one watches most closely? The hive usually appears through persons. If someone cannot name the people who most influence him, Burgis suggests, those people may be especially powerful.

Roberts gives a personal example from the contemporary news environment. During uncertainty over the war in Iran, he follows many commentators and tells himself he is trying to learn what is happening. But he admits that sometimes he is seeking comfort rather than insight. If someone he considers insightful gives him the answer he does not want, he may stop reading and decide the person has a blind spot. The episode becomes less about information than reassurance.

For Roberts, much of Burgis’s book is about growing up: overcoming childlike mimetic desire, the childlike wish to be loved and held, and learning to stand on one’s own feet while still belonging. Burgis’s account of mimesis explains why that is hard. The inherited, borrowed, and reactive elements of the self often feel like one’s most original convictions.

Near the end of his book, Burgis turns to monastic communities as possible models of stability. Luke Burgis asks what kinds of communities have endured for a very long time. Benedictine communities, living according to a rule written by Benedict of Nursia well over a thousand years ago, became an obvious example. He wondered whether the Rule of Benedict might be not only a monastic rule but also, in some sense, a durable organizational manual.

The rule’s details can be unexpectedly sober. When someone knocks at the monastery door and says he wants to enter, Benedict does not say to welcome him immediately. Let him stand outside for a few days. Then let him in only partway. Do not invite him to dinner immediately. See if he still wants in. Burgis reads these instructions as evidence that the rule is concerned with stable community, not merely spiritual aspiration.

The whole rule, he says, revolves around humility. Benedict understood that a community cannot endure without humility and charity, and that pride and ego tear communities apart. Humility is not a single act. Benedict describes a ladder of humility, with degrees through which one descends toward deeper humility.

Roberts is struck by the phrase “leading with the head bowed down,” a paradox of leadership without self-assertive display. Burgis reads the monastic image partly as an anti-mimetic exhortation. Walking with one’s head down means not constantly looking to the right and left to monitor what one’s brothers are doing, judge them, compare oneself to them, or gather material for complaint. Having lived in seminary, he says he knows how hard it is not to keep one’s “head on a swivel” so one can complain later to friends.

Roberts interprets the bowed head somewhat differently but compatibly. In religious communities he has known, there are always troubled souls: cranky people, wounded people, people fighting battles. The natural response is judgment. “How could they talk to me that way?” or “How could they react like that?” For Roberts, the bowed head means remembering that it may not be about him. His ego may be hurt, his credit withheld, his standing slighted — but he can put his head down and keep walking.

Burgis also points to a concrete feature of Benedict’s rule: the abbot should invite the youngest monk or novice to meetings where important matters are decided. The youngest should be consulted because it is pride that assumes age and status monopolize wisdom, or that God cannot speak through the youngest person. Humility, in this model, is not merely an inward disposition. It becomes a structure for listening.

That line turns Burgis’s argument from personal formation to institutions. He draws on Yuval Levin’s distinction between institutions as platforms and institutions as molds. Contemporary institutions, he says, often function as platforms: things individuals use to advance themselves. But institutions and communities are meant to form us. They are molds, or forges.

A university, in this account, is not merely something from which a student extracts credentials, job prospects, social status, or affiliation with a football team. It is supposed to shape the person. A community is not a fountain that dispenses benefits; it is something to which one owes contribution and sacrifice. Burgis thinks institutional decay is partly connected to people’s unwillingness to give themselves to institutions, though he acknowledges there are complicated and often justified reasons for mistrust.

The question he asks as a father is which institutions or communities he would want his daughters to join. At the moment, he jokes, the question is only soccer in the park. But he knows it will soon become more serious.

The personal story that most fully concentrates Burgis’s themes concerns his father, advanced Alzheimer’s, and a baseball game that has been watched hundreds of times.

Luke Burgis explains that his father’s Alzheimer’s was worse than he realized, partly because his mother was the caregiver and did not want to burden him. Roberts says she was leading with her head bowed down; Burgis agrees. She poured herself out for his father and shielded Burgis from much of the anxiety, while he was living in different places around the world.

Then his mother died unexpectedly, and Burgis became his father’s primary caregiver. He was an only child and newly married. The experience became one of the most transformative of his life. It shaped his identity and forced him to think seriously about memory and the role memory plays in the self. He says he often thinks one of the primordial sins is forgetfulness.

By the time Burgis assumed caregiving responsibility, his father’s Alzheimer’s was already advanced. There was little he could do to change the condition. But his father was still alive, and their relationship remained beautiful. Much of it involved watching a 1999 Detroit Tigers game that his father has watched hundreds of times over five years. It is comforting to him. Each viewing is new and exciting for him, and Burgis responds as if he too is watching it for the first time.

The caregiving is formative partly because it offers no ordinary recognition. His father does not understand what Burgis is doing for him. Burgis receives no credit from the person for whom the care is being given, though he admits that sometimes he would like some. The work asks for commitment without the reward of being seen.

His father now lives in a VA home with other veterans, and Burgis says that, late in life, his father has had to learn community after living only with his wife for most of his adult life. That process was difficult at first and later improved. Burgis noticed the irony that while he was writing a book about the one and the ninety-nine, his father was learning to coexist in a new communal setting at the end of his life.

One line from his father stays with him. During a visit, his father said clearly: “Luke, this being here is not supposed to be easy. This is going to take work.” Because his father often has difficulty speaking, the clarity of the sentence surprised Burgis. It gave him the sense that his father was thinking deeply about things he could not always articulate.

The sentence also gives the argument its plainest form. Community is not supposed to be easy. Neither family nor school nor marriage nor religious life nor political life nor caregiving can be made healthy by eliminating all tension. The work is to belong without fusing, to stand apart without fleeing, and to accept that being formed by others does not absolve a person from becoming himself.