When groups of people band together, they are often held together by a pact. Sometimes it is spoken, but more often it hums beneath the surface, coded in glances and shared language. The pact usually implies this: if you belong here, you’ll be safe. But safety is not free. Belonging, in most pact systems, comes at the cost of some degree of compromise. You learn what not to say, what not to notice, what not to remember.
At first, the cost may seem minor—a white lie here, a polite nod there. But over time, a deeper erosion takes place: the soft, almost imperceptible suppression of your own moral instincts. In families, it’s called keeping the peace. In companies, professionalism. In truth, it’s a kind of neurological submission. A rewiring of what you’re allowed to see. And that’s not a metaphor.
Neuroscience confirms what many of us feel in our bones: group belonging alters perception. Studies show that when we conform to group opinion, our brain’s reward systems light up. Belonging quite literally feels good. Disagreement, on the other hand, activates areas associated with conflict and pain. In fact, being excluded from a group activates the same pain pathways as physical injury (Eisenberger et al., 2003).
And so, most people conform because their nervous systems are begging them to. But what happens to those who don’t, or won’t, play along? What does it mean to see clearly from outside the pact? What is the cost, and ethical necessity worth anyway?
I, like many, have known this place well. Years ago, in the final months of a long relationship, I began suffering debilitating migraines—waves of pain, nausea, light sensitivity, cognitive blur. I had become enmeshed in a tightly bonded family system that demanded cohesion within a dogmatic worldview. Their pact was mostly unspoken, but highly effective. Things were not to be named. Truth was negotiable, especially if it threatened the exposer or the alliance. For years, I contorted myself to maintain peace—until something in me gave out.
These headaches were a message, and a warning. More recently, while directing a digital systems project for a government agency under heavy DEI mandates, I experienced something similar. The values on paper were sound. But in practice, the culture became increasingly ritualistic and performative. Everything had to mirror the organisation’s moral positioning, and any deviation was met with psychological pressure. Within months, the migraines returned. Again, I found myself embedded in a pact I could not withstand.
What I gained from those experiences was a hard-won clarity—anguished, but exacting. The neural cost of acceptance, the moral erosion of pretence, and the strange, often painful power of the outsider’s vantage.
The Mask and the Migraine
We begin our lives by learning how to belong. Before we can name our needs, we’re already shaping ourselves around the expectations of parents, teachers, siblings. An infant learns to signal distress in ways the caregiver can decode. The child intuits when a truth is too sharp to say aloud. The teenager modulates expression to avoid social punishment. We adapt. We adjust. We survive.
Our brains are astonishingly plastic. Social approval quite literally shapes neural architecture. MRI studies show that people who frequently adapt their beliefs to match group consensus display increased activity in the brain’s area tied to self-evaluation and social learning (Zaki et al., 2011).
I now understand those migraines as my body’s response to two opposing signals at once: my environment assuring me I was safe—so long as I complied—and my inner clarity knowing that compliance would come at a quiet cost I couldn’t afford. This was cognitive dissonance presenting itself as pain.
Over time, sustained dissonance manifests in the body—headaches, fatigue, anxiety, eventually chronic illness. This is the biological toll of self-betrayal in the name of peace. And yet we are often praised for our adherence. We are expected to understand this as maturity, diplomacy, towing the line.
But what we call maturity is often a practiced masking. When Jung wrote about individuation, he described it as a “painful separation from the persona”—a necessary rupture from the self we constructed to survive. This process begins in discomfort: when the mask can no longer keep smoothing our tone, softening our insight, nodding along to things that ache at the root of us.
And with that discomfort comes guilt and shame. The shame of noticing what others have trained themselves not to. The shame of making it awkward. And yet that shame, I’ve come to realise, is not a failure. It is a psychological opportunity presenting itself. It signals that the body is no longer willing to uphold the group’s pact. That we value something more than inclusion. That we are crossing—painfully, and likely irreversibly—into clarity.
The Outsider’s Attention
The clearest sign you’re standing outside the pact is a sudden lucidity. A lightening of gravity. Not loneliness exactly—though your nervous system may interpret it that way for a time. With reflection and solitude, perception sharpens. You begin to see what others edit out. The unspoken agreement to praise the wrong person. The subtle friction between stated values and actual behaviour.
Your body begins to detect it too—your senses sharpening slightly at the edges of the unsayable. This is the perceptual gift of the outsider: refined attention. The philosopher Simone Weil called attention the highest form of ethics—“the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is a mode of unflinching, sustained perception: to see what is, without distortion.
This kind of attention is difficult to maintain from within organisations. Groups demand shared seeing. And to a point, this makes sense—human brains are wired for mirroring. In groups, this mirroring builds trust, synchrony, and collective momentum. But when a group’s shared perception diverges from moral truth, those same neural mechanisms become tools of self-deception.
The outsider begins to see through rather than with the group. This does bring discomfort. Perception without belonging can feel disempowering. You’re aware, but not invited. You witness, but cannot steer. You begin to track the choreography, not just the dance.
There’s a phrase in neuroscience: prediction error. It describes what happens when the brain encounters data that doesn’t match its expectations. In group dynamics, the outsider is a living prediction error. Their clarity interrupts the narrative. The group must then either expand its frame within the pact—or reject the source of the dissonance.
Living from the Edge
Choosing to stand as an outsider is not about defiance alone. It must be lived in, and made inhabitable. Under-nurtured, it calcifies into cynicism or self-superiority. The opportunity is learning to live well at the edge of group pacts. With dignity. With relationships that do not demand distortion as their entry fee. This requires building habits of attention rooted in ethics, identity, and reality. Cultivating relationships that do not fear clarity. Colleagues who value creative tension over disagreement. Friendships where discomfort isn’t a threat. These are rare. But when they appear, they can feel like oxygen.
Many enduring works of art, philosophy, and science have emerged from this quiet periphery. Alan Turing foresaw a thinking machine long before the world could imagine its uses. Van Gogh painted what others could not yet feel. Each stood just outside the pact—and in doing so, revealed what the group could not yet bear to see.
To live from the outsiderhood is not to flee from social connections—it is to remain awake within them. To see what the group pacts cannot. Alliances may steer the machinery of the world, but it is those who stand apart who shape its ethical contours, and give voice to its yet-unspoken ingenuities.