The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion
By Luke Burgis.
St. Martin’s Press, 2026.
Hardcover, 288 pages, $30.
Reviewed by Gene Callahan.
Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation. This theme was beautifully symbolized by Albert Camus in his short story “The Artist at Work,” from his book Exile and the Kingdom. The artist frequently paints in his garret while a group of his friends socialize below him, torn between his desire to be with his friends and to create his art. One day, when he fails to come down from the garret as expected, his friends climb up, only to find him dead in his chair. Before him is a canvas bearing just a single, painted word. But the friends cannot tell if what he painted was “solitary” or “solidary.”
The parable that gave the book its title is from the Gospel of Luke: A single sheep wanders far from the flock. The shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep behind to go in search of the one lost sheep.
Burgis presents this as a puzzle: “Who in their right mind risks ninety-nine to save one?” He goes on to say, “It took me fifteen years to see what was hiding in plain sight. In the parable of the lost sheep, the shepherd does not choose between belonging and differentiation. He wants to bring the one lost sheep back into the fold, but he knows and cares for each of the other ninety-nine individually.”
That is all well and good, but it does nothing to resolve the puzzle Burgis presented us with two pages earlier: the shepherd still risked a pack of wolves descending on the rest of his flock while he was away looking for the one lost sheep. One cannot resolve a dilemma by wishing it away. In any case, that puzzle leads him to the book’s premise: “Each of us is torn between belonging and differentiation, and few ever learn to manage that tension. We might not even realize it exists. Once we become aware of the tension and learn to navigate it, we can live with far more freedom—and far more integrity—than ever.”
Without becoming aware of this tension, Burgis argues, we become highly vulnerable to social contagion and peer pressure. And, he adds, this problem has been made much worse by social media.
His solution to this problem is to develop what he calls a “solid self,” as opposed to a “pseudo-self.” While the intention behind this distinction is good—he wants us to have a firm sense of our values, so that we cannot be lured into bad choices by the weight of the opinions of those we were with at the time—I find the terminology a little bit odd. After all, Jesus told us, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” That does not sound like they are making a more “solid self.” And Saint Augustine told us to surrender our amor sui and instead embrace amor dei. The teachings of the Buddha were similar in this regard. As Leonard Cohen put it, the light gets in through the cracks.
Of course, Burgis does not mean that we should create a “solid self” by erecting an impenetrable barrier around our ego. But that is why I doubt “solid self” was the best term for what he wished to designate.
Burgis then introduces the idea of a “value response.” He posits a hierarchy of importance, where some of our actions may aim at some end because it is subjectively satisfying, others because the end is socially important, and others because it is objectively good for us.
But whereas Burgis treats these as distinct categories, they seem to me to be matters of degree, each of them present in any action. For instance, he considers his plan to have another cup of coffee as aiming at a purely subjective good. But it seems he enjoys writing more when he has a hot drink at hand. In this sense, he aims at something objectively good for him: getting his work done to earn his sustenance. And if he hopes others will read his writing, the action is socially important.
Burgis attempts to differentiate what is merely subjectively satisfying by pointing out that, for these goods, “their importance evaporates when circumstances change.” But that confuses the transitoriness of their desirability with subjectivity. The very good he uses as an example of what is objectively good for him, working out at the gym, is also not continually desirable. For instance, if he had just finished a long and taxing workout, going back into the gym and working out again would turn out to be objectively bad for him.
In discussing social influence, Burgis holds the Nazi Party up as an example of pernicious influence because “only the values that served its ends were held up.” But was that really the problem with the Nazi Party? Wasn’t it, rather, that the ends it sought were evil? Doesn’t, for instance, the Catholic Church only “hold up” values that serve its end of saving souls?
Burgis includes a little table demonstrating the transformation, across seven realms, of how they search for quick hits of dopamine have come to dominate our behavior. For instance, whereas in traditional culture, one would play a sport, it gradually became more common to watch a sport, and finally, to continually gamble on a sport, with the ability to place bets online on things like whether Ohtani will hit a home run this next at-bat.
Burgis continues by analyzing how group dynamics in the family interact with the struggle for differentiation. In doing so, he claims, “Every family system takes shape in emotional triangles. The smallest stable unit is never two people, but three.” Now, I don’t doubt that it is usually possible to analyze family dynamics in terms of triangles. But is analysis in terms of triangles always more fundamental than binary analysis, or analysis in terms of rectangular or pentangular relationships?
In any case, Burgis makes the plausible case that to achieve differentiation in social situations in general, we must first achieve it in the context of our original social situation: the family in which we grew up.
After a pitch for anti-schooling, including homeschooling and schools based more on concrete activities than abstract learning, Burgis goes on to discuss the impact of technology on self-formation. He lists three pathologies of our digital life:
- Counterfeit rites of passage, such as adolescents’ initiation into the world of sex through pornography.
- Curiositas, which is not mere curiosity, but a disordered love of gorging on more and more information and content, without any concern for whether the object of curiositas is helpful or useful. An example would be scrolling through endless gossip posts on social media.
- Acedia (roughly, restlessness), which is exacerbated by technology that makes us feel restless and dissatisfied with how slowly things move in the non-digital world.
As medicine for these ills, Burgis recommends genuine rites of passage, studiositas as a replacement for curiositas, and leisure (in the sense Josef Pieper used the term) to combat Acedia, all sound recommendations.
Turning to politics, Burgis declares that today, politics “functions like a dysfunctional family.” Because of the greatly increased partisanship of today’s world, many people form their political opinions based upon what will gain approval from whatever partisan group they belong to. In Burgis’ terms, this tendency reinforces the “pseudo-self.”
He gives the example of Václav Havel’s greengrocer, who, in communist Czechoslovakia, puts up a sign in his window proclaiming “Workers of the world unite!” not because he believes the slogan, but because he expects approval for doing so. Today, that shopkeeper puts up a pride flag in his window, or posts online that “trans women are women”: People say what they are expected to say in order to gain approval.
Turning to religion, Burgis argues that genuinely religious experiences must point us towards something beyond ourselves and even beyond the group touting the experience. This is, indeed, a useful way to differentiate cults from genuine religions: cults are a sort of spiritual cul-de-sac, while genuine religions continually open us up to the transcendent.
Then Burgis addresses art. He says that “great art emerges from love, resists the logic of virality, and aims at the timeless.” He offers us Ornette Coleman as an example of an artist who would not conform to the strictures of the prevalent jazz forms, but instead continually aimed at the timeless.
Burgis discusses the rule of St. Benedict as a way of organizing communal life to avoid some of the pitfalls he has outlined. He is on solid ground in arguing that the endurance of the monastic form of life following that rule is a point in its favor. But it might have been salutary to note that one monastic order succeeded another because the very success of an order in inspiring admirers made it wealthy through their donations, and that wealth sooner or later compromised the order’s discipline.
Burgis’s decision to intersperse stories of his father’s health crisis and its impact on him, and others in his family, throughout the text is, I think, an effective way to help the reader relate to these ideas on a personal level. Less successful were the insertion of pages with QR codes, or a page just repeating the word “iteration” over and over again.
Burgis is often careless with the examples he uses. Frogs won’t actually sit in a pot of heating water until they’re boiled. Moths do not flutter around porch lights because they fly towards light. (They actually try to keep their back towards the light so they stay upright.) By the 1990s, contra Burgis, personal computers were already pretty widespread. At another point, four critiques of technology are introduced, including Heidegger’s… but they never seem to be mentioned again. So why bring them up? Diogenes masturbating in public is introduced as though it were some sort of bold act, creating a “solid self,” rather than merely being creepy.
Nevertheless, this book is worth reading. It is filled with interesting insights, and good recommendations for how we might alleviate our current malaise. But I think it could have been an even better book, if only it had taken more time to find its solid self.
Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People and Oakeshott on Rome and America, and co-editor of the books Tradition vs. Rationalism, Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, and Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Revisited. He has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University and teaches at NYU.
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