The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion

In his preface to A Man for All Seasons, playwright Robert Bolt describes Sir Thomas More as “a man with an adamantine sense of his own self.”

“He knew where he began and left off,” Bolt writes, “what areas of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies and what to the encroachments of those he loved….[But] when asked to retreat from that final area where he located himself,” this genteel and jocular man “…could no more be budged than a cliff.”

I happened to watch the Academy Award winning film based on Bolt’s play just before Luke Burgis’ new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion arrived in the mail.

It was a perfect preparation. As pressures mount from king, court, friends and family, each urging England’s Chancellor to sign an oath he does not believe in, even the blade of a guillotine cannot dissuade “the King’s servant, but God’s first.”

The One and the Ninety-Nine is populated with more recent examples of the “solid self.”

From August Landmesser, who in 1936 stood in a crowd of men with arms extended and refused to join them in saluting Adolph Hitler, to Putin opponent Alexi Navalani, who mysteriously died in a Russian penal camp in 2024, each profile serves as a touchpoint in this provocative consideration of the tension between individuality and belonging.

If you’re familiar with Burgis’ Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life you’ll correctly suspect that his new book will not be a dystopian diatribe against political powermongers or social media mobs. It is instead an invitation to assess the current reality by reflecting on the nature of healthy individuals and communities. With Burgis as guide, we consider insight from contemporary sociology, wisdom from the great tradition, stories of resistance to power, and connections to family systems theory.

But Burgis doesn’t hide behind theory and quotations.

He opens his heart, vulnerably sharing the difficulties he faced when his father’s Alzheimer’s disease had become a harrowing reality for his mother. He earns our trust. Burgis is no guru on a mountaintop; he is a man honestly living an examined life.

And he has a uniquely engaging way of sharing the fruit of his private reflections. You might recall that from Wanting, with its clever drawings and fascinating stories. In the new book, sheep peer at us throughout pages punctuated with photos and charts supporting the argument he’s making. Thought-provoking “probes” like the QR code at the beginning, titled “Do Not Scan this Code” let us know that though we may be stretched, we’re in for an enjoyable time.

As with the previous book, the real invitation is not so much to examine the culture, but to examine ourselves: our loves and loyalties, our models and motivators, our associations and affinities. Which are objectively valuable and which subjectively satisfying? Which are thick and which are thin?

We all like to believe we’ve independently arrived at the lifestyles we’ve adopted, the values we hold, and the political and religious beliefs we champion. With a nod to French theorist René Girard, Burgis shows how much more likely it is that identification with a model came first.

That’s not necessarily bad, but we’ll have to detach and reflect if we to make authentic choices. When we pursue the objectively valuable as individuals, we may evaluate groups by the same criteria. If a group’s true spirit doesn’t match the external show, it’s time to leave or maintain distance.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, a prominent intellectual during the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany, provides a striking example. When the University of Munich professor noticed in Nazism “a spirit of hatred masquerading as renewal–a counterfeit communion built on fear, pride, and the worship of power,” he refused to follow fellow intellectuals who supported the party. Stripped of his German citizenship, von Hildebrand returned to his Austrian homeland and fled there only hours before the Gestapo arrived. The erudite lover of beauty and philosophy sought refuge across Europe and finally arrived in America where he taught and wrote until his death in 1977.

Refusal to cooperate with a group that backs its ideology with violence has its costs.

If we accept the invitation to reflect deeply on our own families, schools, churches, political parties, digital associations, and work environments, asking what are the unspoken rules and how conflict is handled in each, we may begin to recognize just how easy it is to point the finger at groups with whom we don’t identify, how risky to examine those with whom we do.

Each step out of any fold presents risks of misunderstanding and rejection. Since society today resembles a dysfunctional family, I found it helpful that Burgis, a master storyteller, relates how family systems theorist Murray Bowen went about challenging a dysfunction in his own family of origin, taking an enormous risk in order to expose an unhealthy pattern of triangulation. In developing the theory, Bowen coined the term “solid self” — a person who is able to exist in a group without fusing with it, without calculating every move in order to maintain its equilibrium.

I’ll “sheepishly” admit that after all my years as a counselor, I’m still working at it.

Which is one of many reasons why I appreciate Burgis’ work. There is always more growing to do, and his insights help me locate places in my heart that still need to open.

We need togetherness as well as independence. It’s yet another case of the beautiful both/and, which brings us back to the title of The One and the Ninety-Nine, the parable about the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go after one that wandered off.

“I used to think the parable was about the sheep,” Burgis writes, and so did I. Who hasn’t felt like the lost and lonely one at times? And in one context or another (the Prodigal Son’s older brother comes to mind) we may have also felt the safety of the “fold”–a family, community, church, political “tribe” or organization that gave us a sense of belonging.

But Burgis chooses here to focus on the shepherd who doesn’t force a choice between belonging and differentiation.

The shepherd cares for the one and the ninety-nine.

Freedom to leave, to forge our own path without losing our place in the fold, is the precondition for a healthy community. The thing that’s often lost in this parable is that the sheep have been given the dangerous freedom to stray. And they don’t lose the shepherd’s watchcare when they do.

At the conclusion of this rich little book, Burgis returns to the story of the shepherd and his sheep by connecting it to the one about his father. I won’t spoil it, but I will say this: after my heart recovered, I began reading The One and the Ninety-Nine a second time.

And I’m still pondering that beloved shepherd. Sure, I recognize myself in the sheep, both the one and one of the ninety-nine. But when Christ, the great weaver of all stories, told this one, he asked his listeners a self-defining question that will haunt you if you let it:

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

When enough of us take that question seriously, things will change for the better.