How the Group Self Is Built

Identity is always assembled in community

WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS

After reading Inside the Invisible for a while, you will begin to notice a quiet
groundedness beneath the noise of daily life — greater calm, clarity, and a
growing awareness of God in ordinary moments. This newsletter will not give
you new beliefs. It will help you see with new eyes.

Twenty-six years old, fresh out of seminary, and I remember exactly how long it took me to learn how to be a priest in that particular parish: about six weeks. Not the theology – I already had that. The unspoken rules. Which pew nobody sat in without provoking a quiet, decades-old feud. What we called the building fund, and what we never, ever called it. How to tell the story of the parish's founding so that it landed as sacred history rather than as the fairly ordinary real-estate transaction it actually was. Nobody handed me a manual. I absorbed it the way you absorb a language – by being immersed in people who already spoke it fluently and wanted me to speak it too.

That is how every group self gets built, and it is worth naming the mechanism plainly, because once you see it you cannot unsee it operating on you right now. A group forges its self through shared narrative – the story it tells about where it came from and what it's for. Through ritual – the repeated actions that make belonging feel embodied rather than merely believed. Through a common enemy or threat, real or imagined, which turns out to be the fastest and most reliable glue there is. And through language – the words, the inside jokes, the shorthand that marks who is inside the circle and who is still standing outside it.

None of this is sinister by default. Your family built its identity this way. So did your church, your college, your country, your favorite sports team, the group chat you've been in for a decade. The group self is not optional equipment; it's how humans have organized survival since before we had language sophisticated enough to argue about whether we should. The trouble starts, as it always does with identity, not with the construction but with the ossification – when the story hardens into the only permissible story, when the ritual becomes more important than what it was meant to point toward, when the common enemy stops being circumstantial and becomes structural, a permanent feature the group needs in order to keep knowing who it is.

“The group self turns pathological in exactly the ways the individual ego does, just at a larger scale and with more casualties.”

This is where the group self turns pathological in exactly the ways the individual ego does, just at a larger scale and with more casualties. Tribalism. Scapegoating. The quiet, reflexive dehumanizing of whoever is standing on the other side of the line the group has drawn. And here is the part that should genuinely unsettle you: the group self is not simply a bigger, louder version of your individual ego. It has its own logic, its own defenses, its own capacity for cruelty that individuals inside it would often never commit alone. Ordinary, decent people do things as members of a group that they would be horrified to do as individuals – not because the group corrupts them exactly, but because the group self has its own survival instincts, and those instincts do not always answer to the individual conscience that's supposed to be running the show.

Scapegoating deserves more than a passing mention, because it is arguably the most reliable and most dangerous of the group self's pathologies, and it operates by a mechanism worth naming precisely. A group under internal strain – economic, moral, spiritual – does not usually resolve that strain by examining itself. It resolves it, far more often, by locating a single person or a single subgroup and designating them the carrier of whatever the group cannot bear to look at directly. The scapegoat does not need to be guilty of anything. Guilt was never really the point. The point was relief – the sudden, genuine sense of unity a group feels once it has found something outside itself to blame. The philosopher and literary critic René Girard spent much of his scholarly life tracing this mechanism across mythology, religion, and history, and his central claim is uncomfortable precisely because it is so well evidenced: nearly every founding myth of nearly every ancient culture contains, somewhere near its origin, a killing or an expulsion that the group needed in order to become a group at all. Whether or not you take the larger theological claims built on this observation, the psychological one is worth sitting with regardless: your own group identities have very likely been unified, at some point, by finding someone to blame rather than something to change. Naming who that was, in your own history, is not a comfortable exercise. It is a necessary one.

The Tension Between the Group and the Individual

Which brings me to a tension I have not yet named directly, and should: the pull between individual autonomy and group loyalty. Every group self, healthy or not, asks something of its members that a purely autonomous individual would never volunteer for on their own – conformity of belief, conformity of behavior, a willingness to subordinate private judgment to collective coherence, at least some of the time. This is not automatically a bad trade. A marriage asks it. A congregation asks it. A functioning community asks it constantly, in smaller ways, every time a member accepts an outcome they privately disagreed with. The question I want you to sit with is not whether groups should ask this of you – they will, and some version of the asking is unavoidable if you want to belong to anything larger than yourself – but whether you have ever consciously decided how much you're willing to give, or whether you have simply been giving it, by default, since childhood, without ever once being asked.

So here is the question I want to leave sitting with you this week, uncomfortably, on purpose: which of your group identities have you never actually examined? Not the ones you're proud of. The ones you've simply always assumed – nationality, denomination, family loyalty, political tribe – never once asking what story you were handed, and whether you'd choose it now, awake, if you were building it fresh.

The Four Elements of the Group Self

Let's slow down on each of the four mechanisms, because naming them quickly makes them sound simpler than they are, and simplicity is exactly what lets them operate on you unexamined. Shared narrative is the origin story a group tells about itself – where it came from, who wronged it, what it's owed, what it's destined for. Every nation has one; every denomination has one; every family has one, usually organized around a founding hardship or a founding triumph that gets retold at holidays until the retelling itself becomes part of the family's identity. The narrative doesn't have to be false to do its work. It only has to be selective, which every narrative necessarily is, and the selectivity is where the shaping actually happens – in what gets included and what quietly never comes up.

Ritual is the second mechanism, and it works on a different register than narrative – not through the mind but through the body. This is why a group can lose its narrative almost entirely, forget the theological or historical reasoning behind a practice, and still keep performing the ritual faithfully for generations. The ritual has become the carrier of belonging even after the explanation attached to it has evaporated. I've stood in more than one congregation where I could have asked half the room why we do a particular thing at a particular point in the service, and gotten a shrug – but every single person still knew exactly when to stand, when to kneel, when to answer. The body had learned the group self before the mind had, and kept it long after the mind's explanation had gone quiet.

The common enemy is the mechanism nobody likes admitting to, because it exposes something uncomfortable about how quickly and cheaply group cohesion can be manufactured. A shared threat – real, exaggerated, or invented – binds a group faster and more tightly than almost anything else available. This is not a flaw unique to bad groups. It is a structural feature of how group selves form, which is precisely why it needs to be named and watched rather than pretended away. A group with a healthy identity can name its history honestly, including the parts that implicate it, without needing an external enemy to hold itself together. A group that cannot survive without one has usually stopped examining itself and started merely defending itself instead.

And then there is language – the shorthand, the inside references, the words that mean something different inside the group than they do to an outsider hearing them cold. Every profession has this. Every family has this. Every religious tradition has an entire vocabulary that functions, whether anyone intends it to or not, as a border crossing: you either speak it fluently, which marks you as belonging, or you don't, which marks you as still outside, however welcoming everyone is trying to be. I have watched newcomers to a congregation do everything right – show up early, volunteer, give generously – and still take years to feel fully inside, simply because the language took that long to become fluent rather than translated.

What I want you to notice about all four mechanisms together is that none of them require malice to operate, and none of them are optional for group survival. A group with no shared narrative dissolves. A group with no ritual has no way to transmit belonging across generations. A group with absolutely no capacity to name a threat cannot defend itself when a real one arrives. A group with no shared language has no efficient way to coordinate. The mechanisms aren't the problem. The problem, as it always is with identity in this series, is what happens when the mechanisms stop being examined and start being worshipped in their own right – when the narrative can no longer tolerate revision, when the ritual becomes more sacred than what it was built to point toward, when the enemy becomes structurally necessary rather than circumstantially real, when the language becomes a wall instead of a bridge.

I think of a family I sat with more than once, where the founding narrative was a grandfather's immigration story – genuine hardship, genuinely survived, genuinely worth honoring. But by the third generation, that story had calcified into an unspoken rule: nobody in this family is allowed to struggle publicly, because grandfather struggled and never complained. Three generations later, the family had extraordinary outward stability and a quiet, unaddressed epidemic of untreated depression, because the group self's founding story had turned into a prohibition against exactly the honesty the family most needed. The narrative that built them was, by then, the thing slowly hurting them. Nobody had chosen that outcome. Nobody had voted for it. It simply accumulated, generation over generation, the way group selves always do when nobody stops to examine the mechanism doing the building.

Transmission across generations, worth distinguishing for a moment, happens through two quite different channels, and it matters which one you're dealing with. Families transmit their group self mostly by accident – through what gets repeated at dinner, what gets left unsaid, what a child absorbs simply by being present in a room where certain things are sayable and certain things are not. Institutions transmit theirs far more deliberately. Every religious tradition I know of has some version of formal initiation – catechesis, confirmation classes, ordination vows – precisely because an institution cannot afford to leave its group self to accident the way a family often does. These deliberate transmission mechanisms are not inherently sinister; they are, in fact, one of the more honest things an institution can do, because at least the transmission is visible, examined, agreed to out loud by the person receiving it, rather than absorbed unconsciously the way most family identity is. I would rather belong to a group that made me sit through instruction and ask me, explicitly, whether I accepted its terms, than one that simply assumed my agreement because I'd never been anywhere else. If you want a genuinely useful exercise this week, beyond the one already assigned: ask yourself which of your group identities you were formally initiated into, with your conscious agreement, and which ones you simply absorbed before you were old enough to be asked. The difference tells you something real about how much of your identity you actually chose.

Which of These Four Owns You?

Here is the harder, more personal version of this issue's question, and I'd rather ask it plainly than let you skate past it in the abstract: which of these four mechanisms holds the strongest grip on you specifically? Some people are held mostly by narrative – they could recite their family's or their nation's founding story without a moment's hesitation, and questioning that story feels, to them, like a kind of betrayal simply to consider. Others are held mostly by ritual – the sensory, embodied comfort of the familiar service, the familiar meal, the familiar gesture, in a way that would survive even a complete loss of belief in the narrative behind it. Others are held by the common enemy – a felt sense of who 'we' are that only really activates in contrast to who 'they' are, and goes strangely quiet without an adversary in the frame. And others are held mostly by language – belonging that lives almost entirely in vocabulary, in knowing the right references, in the comfort of never having to translate yourself. Most of us are held by some blend of all four, in proportions we've never actually stopped to weigh. This week's practical element is asking you to weigh them, honestly, for exactly one group – because you cannot examine what you've never named.

I think often of the difference between a group that has a creed and a group that has become its creed – the first can hold its founding statements up to the light periodically and ask whether they still say what the group needs said, while the second experiences any such questioning as an existential threat rather than ordinary maintenance. Watch for this distinction in every group you belong to. It tells you more about that group's actual health than almost anything else you could measure.

There is a redemptive version of this same mechanism worth naming before we close, because Part II in this series is not simply a warning. Groups that stay healthy tend to share one trait that unhealthy ones lose: the capacity to revise their own narrative without losing their coherence. A family that can say, at the dinner table, 'we used to believe X, and we were wrong, and here's what we understand now' has not weakened its group self. It has matured it. A denomination capable of formally repenting a historical wrong, a nation capable of teaching its own atrocities alongside its own achievements, is not dissolving its identity by doing so – it is demonstrating that its identity was never actually dependent on an unrevisable story in the first place. This is worth remembering as you do this week's practical element, because the goal is not to indict every group you belong to. It's to find out which of your groups can survive being looked at honestly, and which ones, worryingly, cannot.

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

– Genesis 11:4