“Follower” doesn’t mean what it used to.

In the dark ages of my juvenescence, when I was learning the meaning of words, “follower” conveyed an intense, even cultic attachment. One was a follower of “my Lord Jesus” or Mohammed or some guru in an ashram. To say one “followed” a pundit would have sounded sniffy, off.

Now any performer has followers, that is, folks who’ve requested routine delivery of some emailed or texted communication. I’m often asked how many followers I have, to which I reliably respond, “None of your business” (albeit more politely). A reader is no more my follower than the pedestrian behind me on the escalator. Companion, colleague, coeval, conversant – co-words – catch the spirit more closely. We cohabit a moment which, by conversing, we’re conspiring to comprehend. That anyone invites my utterances into their precious privacy thrills and daunts. You have given me a mite from your fast-dwindling treasure of time: I owe you something worthy in return.

Don’t think I’m nitpicking here, splitting hairs. (Never scribbled either of those cliches before. I like them.) Words matter. Modulations of meaning evoke the evolution of consciousness. Not so long ago, for example, “silly” meant “worthy, good, pious, holy.” That sanctity morphed into folly tells you something.

Followers can’t be leaders: the nouns are antonyms. Following, I am not leading, but trailing some preceding spirit, like Good King Wenceslas’ page. Followers are subservient for the duration of their fealty: audience, not actors: compliant.

This slip-slide of signification correctly conveys the evolution of contemporary consciousness. More and more we are followers, depending on performers to show us the way. Engrossed in another’s performance, we’re not thinking for ourselves but taking in what we’re shown, reacting not acting.

We see this in our appalling politics. Not only have voters become servile sheep, parroting nonsense (if sheep can parrot), so have their purported representatives, whom we used to call leaders. Mitch McConnell, I just read, privately called Trump a “narcissist” and a “despicable human being,” but did his constituents benefit from that obvious observation or see it reflected in McConnell’s behavior? “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah 53:6) or, in the words of Yale’s Whiffenpoof songsters, “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa. Baa. Baa.”

Never in human history have we possessed more information or, I fear, exercised less thought. A common refrain these nail-biting weeks is, “How could anyone vote for one of the Presidential candidates, knowing what we know?” Answer: they are following – blindly, obediently, ovinely, because the amount of available information (and misinformation) is mountainous, overwhelming, and who knows what’s true or best, so why not deputize our brains? Who cares that these leaders are misleaders – easier to join the parade to the abattoir – “Baa. Baa. Baa.”

I may be the world’s worst follower. Ask Jane. I recoil from recipes, instructions, maps, helpful hints, authoritative explanations, preferring to dope things out on my own, regardless of my error rate. I trace this pathology (yes, pathology) to resisting my dictatorial dad, who died before I could level him. Age sixteen, I was readying my knockout punch when down he toppled on his own. For the fifty-eight years since, I’ve been swinging at air.

I follow no one (except my doctors – and Krugman on economics) and want no one to follow me. Let us be partners in being, collaborators in confusion. No one knows our whereabouts on the arc of time, but we’ll know better – and feel better – if we sort our own evidence and form our own opinions. “Come, let us reason together” (Isaiah again).