The Man Who Belongs to No Tribe
We live in the age of alliances. Everybody is part of one group or another, and everyone classifies the others as belonging to some camp. You are seen as either with them or against them — never the neutral. The centrist, the uncommitted one, gets punished brutally, labelled by both sides as wicked.
At the broadest level as well as the most intimate, humans are tribal by nature. They find their tribe everywhere. They adopt the same views, hold the same opinions, and despise the same kind of people. You can see this playing out wherever large groups of people gather. Everything eventually collapses into tribalism. They are all waging quiet wars against one another.
The one standing in the center is often punished most severely, because the one who belongs to no tribe is resented by all tribes. Each side assumes he belongs to the other — that he is a trojan horse — but in truth he is nobody's anything. People have lost the art of existing without belonging. Some are intellectual vagabonds, constitutionally incapable of pledging themselves to any one community for long.
The very concept baffles people — that such a life can be lived, and willingly so. A centrist is despised because he is read as a coward. In communities and large groups, the centrist is perpetually regarded with suspicion. In the absence of enemies, the neutral person fills that vacancy and must absorb the hostility of all sides until he bends his knee and capitulates to one.
Few people ever endure this particular ordeal, because as humans we are wired to belong. We cannot bear the risk of isolation, so we readily adopt whatever opinion draws us closer to others. The fear of abandonment outweighs the fear of being wrong. But there are still those who refuse to join any tribe — who insist on remaining free of such allegiances — and for them, life can become a sustained ordeal.
If you are someone like that, the wisest recourse is to cultivate stoicism, because you cannot afford to trust anyone unconditionally. People will come probing — they will want to know your position, your read on things, which side you sympathise with. They must, because a person with no allegiance is, to them, an anomaly that demands explanation.
So if you are someone who resists tribal belonging, you must master indifference as a discipline. You must learn the art of saying much while revealing nothing — speaking without ever exposing which side you are on or what you truly think. Because expressed opinions will immediately anchor you to a faction.
You do not defend yourself when attacked from both sides. This is the price of refusing to choose. You must learn to absorb accusations without offering justifications, because every justification you provide will be dissected and used to assign you a tribe.
In a world divided along ideological lines, a man with allegiance to no one is perceived as a villain. And yet such a man may be the only one genuinely worthy of trust. After all, the one who would sooner endure slander than pledge himself to a side is, in all likelihood, the one most committed to something larger than belonging — provided, of course, that his detachment stems from integrity and not from the far less noble impulse of cowardice.