{
  "id": "not-one-of-us.unlike",
  "term": "not one of us",
  "sense": "unlike",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 17,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A collective self that reads someone as outside its boundary because its model of them is not like its model of its members.",
  "folk_gloss": "someone judged not to belong to the group because they are not like its members",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "boundary.limit",
      "model.representation",
      "like.similarity",
      "out-group.outside",
      "member.social",
      "read.information",
      "someone.person",
      "outside.spatial"
    ],
    "interaction": "The boundary is set by likeness to a model of the members and not by any rule; the same test read the other way, people like us, draws the in-group.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "a boundary drawn by resemblance",
      "the same test for inclusion and exclusion"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Hugo Young's 1989 biography of Margaret Thatcher is titled 'One of Us', after the question she was reputed to ask about colleagues.",
      "domain": "politics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "stranger.unmodeled",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "a stranger is not yet modelled; not one of us is modelled and read as unlike"
    },
    {
      "id": "out-group.outside",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "the out-group is the result; not one of us is the act of reading someone into it"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "not one of us",
    "not our kind",
    "one of us",
    "our kind of people",
    "people like us"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-not-one-of-us.unlike"
}