A Short History of Not Joining

The unjoined have no lineage, which is proper — a genealogy of non-joiners would be a membership roll, and the whole point would drown in its own filing system. What they have instead is a constellation: points of light with no connection except that each one burned on its own fuel. Here are a few of the brighter stars.

Begin in Athens, fourth century BCE, with a man living in a large ceramic jar. Diogenes of Sinope had been exiled from his city — the ancient world’s severest unjoining, inflicted rather than chosen — and converted the sentence into a philosophy. Asked where he came from, he gave an answer with no precedent in a world where identity was civic enrollment: “I am a citizen of the world.” The word he coined, kosmopolitês, is usually remembered as a boast of broad belonging. Read in place, it is the opposite — a polite refusal to be filed. Athens sorted men by deme and tribe the way a modern form sorts by checkbox, and Diogenes returned the form blank. He paid a jar’s rent for the privilege, which tells you the price was real and that he had done the arithmetic.

Nineteen centuries of guild, parish, and fealty later — systems in which not joining was not eccentricity but civil death — a French magistrate climbed into a tower and shut the door. Michel de Montaigne had spent his life amid the French wars of religion, an era that presented every soul with a two-box form: Catholic or Huguenot, and the wrong checkbox could be fatal by geography. His response was to invent a literary form — the essay, from essai, an attempt — whose very grammar refuses the creed. A creed says we believe; an essay says let me try. His motto, Que sais-je? — what do I know? — was carved not on a banner but on a personal medallion, conviction sized for one. The tower is a real place and a misleading picture: Montaigne came down from it to serve two terms as mayor of Bordeaux and to carry messages between Henri de Navarre and Henri III, and he died a practising Catholic. The door did not stay shut. What he refused was never public life; it was the two-box form. While the leagues massacred each other in certainty, the tower produced the modern West’s most durable manual of the grey. It is not a coincidence that the form he invented is the form this site is written in; every essayist since has been living in Montaigne’s tower without paying him rent, which he — believing no idea should be anyone’s property — would likely have approved.

Amsterdam, 1656: the Talmud Torah congregation issued against twenty-three-year-old Baruch Spinoza the fiercest writ of expulsion in its records, and the young lens-grinder’s response was silence, followed by the calmest shelf of books in the history of metaphysics. The sequel is the instructive part. Seventeen years later, the Elector Palatine offered him a professorship at Heidelberg — prestige, salary, a chair, a side. Spinoza took six weeks over it and declined, and the second of his stated reasons deserves its fame: “I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion.” He had been thrown out of one institution and was now refusing to be thrown into another, having noticed that the two operations threaten the same organ. He kept grinding lenses — a man who declined every uniform, manufacturing clearer sight for strangers, which is as close as history comes to writing its own metaphors. He did not, note, decline company: he was sustained by the Collegiants and by a circle of friends without whom his books would have burned with him. Declining a chair is not the same act as declining a table, and the distinction is the whole of Article V.

The eighteenth century supplies the constellation’s least likely star: a head of state. George Washington, retiring from an office he could have kept for life, spent his farewell warning the republic “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party” — faction as arsonist, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms.” The warning was ignored with historic speed; the first party system was already assembling itself around his own cabinet, like weather forming around a mountain that has asked the sky for calm. But note what the episode proves: the critique of allegiance is not a loser’s consolation. It came, at least once, from the man holding the largest banner ever offered to an individual, at the moment he set it down.

The nineteenth century moved the scene indoors, to a Norwegian bath-town with contaminated water. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People stages the unjoined life as civic drama: Dr. Stockmann discovers the town’s profitable spa is poisoned, expects gratitude, and is instead voted an enemy of the people by a compact majority protecting its season’s bookings. His closing discovery — “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone” — is the constellation’s most quoted line, and it must be handled with tongs, because Ibsen was too honest to write a saint. Stockmann is also vain, rash, and half in love with his own martyrdom; by the last act he is proposing to take in street urchins — “regular ragamuffins,” he calls them, “curs” he means to experiment on — and raise them into an elite of free spirits. That is recruiting, and it follows a public-meeting speech in which he has sorted humanity into poodle-men and cur-men. The play sees what its hero does not: the standing-alone can curdle into a pose, and the pose is just one more costume. Ibsen, it should be said, defended the substance of Stockmann’s position in his letters while calling him “a more muddleheaded person than I am” — so read the play as a cautionary label on the temperament, not a retraction of the argument.

The twentieth century, which perfected the mass movement, also perfected its refusal. Simone Weil — who had marched with anarchists in Spain and worked the line at Renault, no armchair abstainer — spent part of her last year of life writing On the Abolition of All Political Parties, an essay whose title is not a metaphor. Her indictment has the precision of an engineer’s failure report: a party is “a machine to generate collective passions,” “an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members,” and a thing whose “first objective and also the ultimate goal … is its own growth, without limit.” The member who swore to judge every question by justice and truth alone, she observed, would be expelled for saying so — proof that the machine’s real product is what she called “mendacity at the very centre of his soul.” George Orwell, her contemporary, filed the companion report on nationalism — the habit of placing one’s unit “beyond good and evil” — having watched, in Spain, his own side’s press invent battles that never happened. Both had been in; that is why their testimony convicts.

And in Prague, 1978, a playwright found the constellation’s most ordinary star: a greengrocer. The third section of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless opens with him — a man who places in his shop window, among the onions and carrots, the sign “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel’s question is the essay’s engine: does the greengrocer believe it? Of course not; nor does anyone who reads it. The sign’s actual message, Havel writes, is “I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace” — and Havel is careful about the addressee in a way that borrowings of this passage rarely are. The message is aimed upward, at the greengrocer’s superior, and it doubles as a shield against informers. This is a vertical relation to state power, not diffuse peer pressure, and the price of taking the sign down is stated on the page: demotion, lost pay, and his children’s access to higher education. Havel called the program “living within the truth,” and it begins with one man taking one sign out of one window.

Two things the borrowing usually omits, and this essay owes them. Havel himself licensed the extension westward — he asks whether the grey emptiness of the post-totalitarian system is not “an inflated caricature of modern life in general,” a warning to the West about its own tendencies — but note the direction: the coerced case is the enlargement of the ordinary one, which means a social-media bio is the smaller thing, not the equivalent one. And the individual gesture was never the whole program — Havel was already doing the other thing when he wrote it. Charter 77, a collective declaration with 242 original signatories, which is to say a list of names, was two years old by then; VONS was six months old; the essay itself was written for a Charter collection. Civic Forum and a presidency came later. The greengrocer’s window is where the argument starts. It is not where the man went.

What should a reader take from the constellation? Not heroes; the unjoined make poor icons, and half of them would have crossed the street to avoid the other half — Diogenes mocking Washington’s ceremony, Weil fasting through Montaigne’s dinner party. That discord is the finding. Across twenty-four centuries, climates, and temperaments, minds with nothing in common — a beggar, a magistrate, a lens-grinder, a general, a mystic, a greengrocer — kept arriving at the same small refusal by entirely separate roads.

And now the objection this essay has been setting itself up for, because a reader who has got this far deserves it stated rather than dodged. The sample was chosen because its members refused, and because they were famous enough to be written down. The unjoined lives that produced nothing, or ended badly, or were simply forgotten leave no constellation to plot. Convergence across a sample selected for convergence is not evidence of anything. Worse: select instead on changed the world and the list comes back entirely different — Paul, Luther, Wilberforce, Pankhurst, Debs, Gandhi, King, Mandela — and every one of them built an organisation. That asymmetry is real, it is the strongest thing that can be said against this page, and it is the reason the constellation is offered as precedent rather than as proof. Movements need founders, and this one has none. It does not even have members. It has only precedents — which is all it claims.

Every text quoted in this essay — with editions, dates, and links — is documented in the Sources.