TWO-AND-A-HALF thousand years ago, a man turned his back on the high position birth had given him and retreated to a life of solitary asceticism in the forest. Known then as Siddhartha Gautama, he is better known today as the Buddha, and an estimated 500 million people follow his teachings.
Ninety years ago, a man died in poverty (due, in no small part, to his having torn up a lucrative royalty contract to help out the other side) in a New York hotel, having spent his final days feeding the pigeons who were almost his only friends. But thanks to Nikola Tesla, we use Alternating current rather than Edison’s preferred (if less efficient) Direct current, we have electric motors and Wi-Fi and we rely on hydroelectric as a source of clean power.
In his speech after the Southport trial, the Prime Minister took a swipe at ‘misfits and loners’. To Keir Starmer, I think, this is a particularly damning condemnation. Society is a machine to be operated by his government and its citizens are components with an assigned purpose, valuable to the extent they contribute to the success of the whole. Those who refuse to play their part or who wish to go their own way are shirking their obligations and preventing our return to the sunlit uplands where pensioners get their Winter Fuel Payment back.
But if the Prime Minister might be a misfit in the totalising nature of his view of society, he is not alone. ‘Misfits and loners’ are weirdos. They are odd. Slightly threatening, perhaps, in their refusal to toe the line. There is something wrong in their standing apart. Why can’t you just be normal, we wonder. Why can’t you just do what we do and like what we like? Why do you have to be different?
Isaac Newton died a virgin and devoted most of his life to alchemy. Churchill spent the thirties being derided as a friendless oddball obsessed with Germany. Emily Dickinson ore only white, never married and, in her later years, was reluctant even to leave her bedroom.
But, of course, all the people above were seen as misfits and loners in their time and just imagine the world without them. It’s not easy. For a start, given Tesla’s contributions, you wouldn’t be reading this. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man’.
Rather than a blanket condemnation then, ‘misfits and loners’ requires rather more nuance than it generally gets. We should be grateful for Newton’s existence; that of Axel Rudakubana seems to have been a rather more mixed blessing. Even this, understandable though it may be, particularly in the latter case, bears the taint of Starmerite thinking. Do what you want as long as it ultimately rebounds to our benefit. Ask not what people can do for themselves, ask what they can do for us.
Such a utilitarian approach allows us to avoid the challenge misfits and loners pose. If they are doing things differently to us, perhaps they are doing things better than us. Perhaps they are right, and we are wrong. More comfortable to disparage them, put the blinkers back on and have another run around society’s hamster wheel than face the prospect we might be wasting our lives.
Common though such an approach may be, there are schools of thought which suggest that at least some loners and misfits might be doing it right, doing it better than us. They could be people to be admired and possibly emulated rather than disparaged and ignored. Strangely, despite the continent’s reputation for community and consensus – the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, as the Japanese say – two of them come from Asia.
Daoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy, counselled aligning oneself and one’s actions with the Dao (the Way or the Way Things Are), not, as its rival Confucianism taught, the rigid rules of society. To the Daoists, such were generally an imposition on the natural order of things, and adepts pursued wu-wei the ‘actionless action’ whereby their actions flowed with the order of the universe, not the order of Man.
In the famous ‘We’ll see’ story, the farmer refuses to behave in the way his neighbours expect because he knows, as they do not, that the Dao is always unfolding – the disappearance of his horse is not, as they think, a cause for sorrow because it returns with a herd of wild horses. Nor, as they think, is this gift a cause for celebration since his son breaks his leg while trying to tame one. Nor does he need their commiserations when this happens, his injury means the young man can’t be conscripted when the recruiting sergeant visits the village. The farmer may appear odd to his neighbours, but to Daoism, he is the one who is correct, pursuing ziran – the natural unfolding of his own nature without concern for how others see this.
Zen Buddhism – the product of Buddha’s teachings with an admixture of Daoism – offered its students a model of progress called the 10 Ox-Herding Pictures to illuminate the path they were following. Enlightenment is not, as one might expect, the end, but merely the eighth picture. After achieving it, the practitioner appears to undergo a period of withdrawal – ‘Dwelling in one’s true abode – unconcerned with and without’ before returning to society. If no longer a loner, he is clearly, however, now a misfit – ‘barefoot and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world, my clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful’. Misfits and loners are not, in these traditions, to be condemned but admired, their seeming oddness an inherent part of their spiritual development.
More convincing, perhaps, to the secular Western mind, might be the work of the Polish psychologist, Kazimierz Dabrowski, who developed one of the few formal models of personal development, Positive Disintegration. Most individuals, he argued, operate at level I, where their values and behaviours are dictated by society. Some will come to realise that these are holding them back, preventing them from fulfilling their potential (level II). They then go on to develop new values (level III) and integrate them into their lives (level IV). Those who complete the process (level V) are able to produce work of great and lasting originality reflecting their new values.
Any individual who pursued this path would inherently appear to outsiders to be a misfit since they would have adopted a set of values different to those of their society and they might well appear to be a loner (they would probably withdraw from society while integrating their new values in level IV and might remain somewhat detached having done so in level V) but they would be exceptionally developed human beings. Dabrowski offered Buddha and Jesus (not, given the disciples a loner, but certainly – to the Romans and the Jewish authorities at least – a misfit) as examples of individuals who had achieved complete re-integration.
That may, one can almost hear the Prime Minister say, be all well and good for the individuals concerned, but what is in it for us? What do we get out of these weirdos? Dabrowski’s answer would be quite clear. Individuals who followed his path (and, in a strangely elitist twist for one who worked in communist Poland, he was clear most people could not, only those who were outliers in some dimension could) made the world a better place. They raised up humanity as a whole. Others might turn the question back on him – government, morality and rules were only necessary because people had turned their backs on the Dao according to Daoism’s founder Laozi. People who follow it, odd though they may appear, are not holding society back, it is being held back by those who do not. A society of Daoist sages would be better and more natural than a society without them.
Not every misfit and loner is Spinoza or Jesus or Newton. But neither are they necessarily lank-haired oddballs lurking around the more recondite areas of the internet, still less psychopathic spree-killers. So, let’s not condemn them just because they are different. Some of them might actually be right. One of them might be a new Buddha. And that seems rather more worthy of admiration and emulation than being Keir Starmer.
This article was first published in The Country Squire and is reproduced here by kind permission.
