“Otroverts” and why nonconformists often see what others can’t

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “The soul selects her own society.” Yet for many souls, one’s position in society is not so much a choice as it is a function of where we live, what family, religion, or social class we were born into, and what ethnicity and/or race we are. Most people embrace — or at least accept — the social groups to which they have been assigned. Otroverts do not. 

[Editor’s Note: Otrovert is Kaminski’s classification for people who, despite being well-adjusted, struggle to belong in groups and even prefer standing separate from social collectives.]

Otroverts place no trust in any group formed around an abstract idea or circumstance of birth, such as ideology, politics, race, economy, religion, and nationality, which exist only in the collective mind. For them, the idea of unquestionable devotion to a group of people linked by a set of tacit criteria agreed upon by the group’s members makes little sense, no matter how venerable that group is in the eyes of the majority.

Most humans adhere to these binding abstractions for various reasons — many of them completely valid. Membership in a group of people who share our ideology, background, or aspects of our experience creates a path for connection, which is especially appealing when other obvious routes, such as family or work, aren’t available. Such groups also provide a set of unwritten instructions about how to behave, which helps to ward off ambiguity and uncertainty, while also keeping everyone in line.

When things are good, these affiliations provide a sense of shared identity, and with it a crude way of determining who is a friend to be trusted and who is a foe to be feared. And when things are bad, […] the group ethos becomes hugely important in deciding how best to navigate the crisis and what might need to be sacrificed in its name. Though we no longer need to be part of a tribe to survive predators or the threats of the natural world, most people do still need it to survive the experience of being human. 

Unlike most herd animals, which cooperate passively, humans can cooperate actively by creating a notional entity based on many people agreeing to share the same opinions and beliefs. A hive mind creates “collective intelligence” or “communal wisdom” by pooling experiential resources. Most of us learn to conform because belonging to or participating in the hive mind provides illusory protection: the belief in strength in numbers. And as the group’s size increases, the demands for conformity intensify, as it cements the unity necessary for the group’s rule. This urge to belong subsumes all that is distinctive about a person once they become a member of the hive.

For most people, this sacrifice is made easily and instinctively. Not so for otroverts, who are neither willing nor able to passively adopt the social scripts that others do. To the otrovert, who is constantly engaged with the choices and consequences of their individual life, social norms follow a circular logic: The reason people follow them is because they have been widely accepted, and the reason they have been widely accepted is because many people follow them. To highlight the arbitrary nature of such rules, an otrovert might put it this way: If you were stranded alone on a desert island, would you still value everything that you value or were taught to value? Or would you realize that most of these judgments are useful and relevant only in the context of other humans?

Non-belonging is kind of like living life on an island, while belongers are on the mainland. When otroverts visit the mainland, they pay attention to the prevailing rules and try their best to abide by them, but they are always accidental tourists there. The rules are of no use to them elsewhere.

Otroverts cannot be convinced of the validity of an idea sheerly through the number of people who hold it. It is the idea itself that matters. The tools of the hive mind — consensus, majority, communal wisdom, and experience that come down through the generations — are useless to the otrovert if the concept behind the idea seems wrong to them. On the other hand, a wise observation or statement made by someone, irrespective of position or authority, can be profoundly appreciated by an otrovert if it strikes them as true.

As a young man, I had my heart broken. Nothing anyone said — none of the usual platitudes — provided any source of comfort. Then a Bedouin waiter in a tea shop I frequented said to me, “A broken heart is like a burn. At first, it hurts all the time, then only when you touch it, and eventually, it does not hurt at all. There might be only a faded scar to remind you.” This was 45 years ago. He was right, and I still impart his wisdom to others.

Freethinking and originality

Belongingness and consensus do not lend themselves to originality. Unencumbered by the hive mind, otroverts are original thinkers. They see what everyone else sees, but because they are not subordinate to the gravitational pull of groupthink, they allow themselves to ponder alternative interpretations. And due in part to their disinterest in popular culture and other mass entertainment, they have the mental space to embark regularly on intellectual adventures fueled by introspection and creativity. 

This opens the possibility of stumbling on serendipitous observations that elude the collective. Because they stray from the prevailing thinking, their ideas often seem radical or even threatening. This is true of virtually all truly original thinkers throughout human history, both the famous ones we have all heard of and the ones lost to the annals of the past.

Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, falls in the second category. In 1861, he published a book called The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, which described his research on maternal death during childbirth from what we now call puerperal fever. His conclusion, revolutionary for those times, was that these deaths could be prevented merely by doctors washing their hands before assisting in delivery.

Nowadays, it is obvious that medical procedures should be performed under sterile and clean conditions to prevent contamination, but germs and their putative role in infection were unknown in his day. Semmelweis deduced the connection in what was then an unconventional way: by visiting a delivery clinic where the women who gave birth were contracting childbed fever in significantly lower numbers.

Upon observing the midwives who ran this clinic, he found only one difference in their methods: Many of the doctors at the hospital assisted with labor immediately after performing autopsies, while the midwives didn’t. He concluded that the physicians might be transferring what he called “organic material” (i.e., germs and bacteria) from the autopsy to the delivery via their hands and suggested that they wash carefully before delivering a baby. Though deeply skeptical that something so trivial as handwashing could make a measurable difference, the doctors took his suggestion. When they did, the maternal death rate at the hospital immediately dropped from 18% to 2%.

Semmelweis knew nothing about bacteria and their role in infection; he simply saw something that no one else in the clinics was able to see, and this single insight was enough to profoundly alter the horrible reality of the many women dying from infection. Like most innovations, though, Semmelweis’s discovery was received very poorly by his colleagues. Even after the success of his intervention had been clearly demonstrated, they demanded a theoretical explanation as to why handwashing reduced mortality, something that Semmelweis could not provide. He was shunned by the medical society, fired from his clinical and academic positions, and suffered an emotional breakdown. His colleagues then committed him to an asylum where he was beaten by the orderlies. He died ten days later from sepsis caused by his dirty wounds (the irony is very poignant), at the age of 47.

The ideas that emerge from the otrovert mind carry the risk of being viewed as subversive, heretic, or even insane, even when the evidence clearly suggests otherwise.

In a society governed by the communal order, the otrovert’s way of thinking is threatening. But at a time when the challenges we face as a society require us to question conventional assumptions, contemplate problems from new perspectives, and open our minds to unorthodox solutions, the otrovert’s way of thinking also has the power to change the world.