My title contains a rewriting of a passage from John Calvin which elaborates his idea that the problem with humankind was an unruly mind forever looking beyond the uncertainty, from their perspective not His, of the invisible of God and his predestined plan to a palpable, tangible and visible reassurance of His presence. Mortals are not God and do not think or create as God creates, he insists, but in each of their, to Calvin, limited minds ‘imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods‘. That mind moreover ‘overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance … conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God‘. I was led to this statement from a theologian I am sure I would not have otherwise even read much about by a blogger, Rachael Kastner, who blogged on the ‘Psychology of Following‘, based on a social experiment in which she was the sole active participant. Having had 40,000 followers, she unfollowed them all and relinquished her own following activity and history. Her conclusion was that this helped her find her own voice, by being more selective about who you choose to follow based on the motivation of the ‘following’ in each case. Meanwhile Calvin is applied to characterise not the ‘human mind’ or ‘nature’ specifically but the manifestation of written words offered to be followed: ‘A perpetual scroll of idols. Manufactured. Packaged. Delivered‘.
She quotes in her article only one sentence from John Calvin (the italicised central phrase of which appears in my sentence here) in support of what she believed to be her psychological insight which claimed that the nature of humankind, soon reduced by Calvin to the troublesome human mind, was that this mind, in all of us, ‘so full of pride and boldness’ as we are, ‘is a perpetual factory of idols‘, a workplace where the artisan, skillfully enough no doubt, involved us all ‘fashioning gods according to their pleasure’. To our modern mind the English term ‘factory’ implies mass production, not an idea that Calvin would have intended, with more awareness of the workshop that engineered exquisite clockwork automata, each the pride of its maker. Calvin’s point is less clear when it appears to evoke the ‘history of the Israelites’ as if it confirmed what an inadequate religion would be:
The example of the Israelites shows the origin of idolatry to be that men do not believe God is with them unless he shows himself physically present.
Does he mean that the people of the Old Testament continually veered to idolatry until pulled by prophets like Moses returning from the mountain top with God’s word engraved on tablets? Perhaps, instead he suggest that this people continually want manifestation of divine presence, as Catholics do in the Communion, as a physical reality (clearly I do not know Calvin well enough except by reputation in literature. It need not be flesh or blood presence nor immediately clear to perception but it, nevertheless manifests itself in physical, not only spiritual, effects like parting the Red Sea, only to collapse the sea back into itself when its bed contains only non- believers.
I found that blog really helpful but once I read the action points it led to I began to wonder if Kastner isn’t still perpetuating a self-fashioned idol – not in the presence of others one follows without motive but in the self-image promotoed of the idea;l blogger – the ONE that demands to be followed, not unlike the God of most monotheistic belief-systems:
So What Can We Do? Here are 3 takeaways from this journey:
1. Audit Your Inputs
Ask yourself: Who do I follow, and why? Do they make me feel inspired, grounded, curious? Or do they make me feel behind, inadequate, angry?
Treat your feed like your fridge. If it’s full of junk, you’ll consume junk.
2. Don’t Confuse Attention With Authority
Just because someone has 1 million followers doesn’t mean they’re wise. Or ethical. Or even informed. Ask: What are they selling me? Sometimes it’s a product. Sometimes it’s a worldview.
Remember: virality is not virtue.
3. Reclaim Your Own Voice
When you’re constantly watching others, it’s hard to hear yourself.
In my own journey, stepping away from the noise helped me rediscover what I value. What I want to say. Who I want to become.
You don’t have to go silent. But maybe pause. Listen inward. Then choose who to follow—and how you want to be followed—with more intention.
One Last Thought
There is nothing wrong with following. Humans are wired for imitation and belonging. But we get to choose whether we follow out of fear or curiosity, autopilot or purpose.
And maybe the real question isn’t just Who do you follow? but Who would you be if you followed different people? Who would you be if you didn’t care yourself about followers? Who would you be if you weren’t performing for anyone at all?
This isn’t bad advice but its aim is to bolster the true self of the blogger – the person they would be if they ‘weren’t performing for anyone at all?‘. There you have it – the false self , the would-be idol – is a ‘performance, a ‘mask’, the thing that the psychological paradigms of Carl Rogers and other existentialist humanist psychotherapists call the authentic self, the one that lies behind social masks. The point being, it seems, that if you follow people without knowing why you award them authority they would not otherwise possess, and if you allow people to continue to follow you without having feedback of their intention of doing so, likewise, you aim for the mask of apparent / seeming popularity, without finding that in yourself which might be worthy of notice by yourself and others.
For me this real true self is as much a mask as any other other – it is one defined by followers just as much as any others, except that following is a conscious choice, in Calvin’s words, a ‘fashioning’ of ‘a god’ made ‘according to its own capacity’, except that it chooses those who might expand that capacity beyond what it once was in order to feel itself that bit more worthy. True selves only exist in performance just as much as any other Judith Butler might argue, as on this rather superior teaching slide – since it ends by opening itself out to learners – found on the internet:
If selves are also no more than ‘expressions of selves’, then seeking a truer self as the ‘result’ of a difference in performance (limiting your audience, inviting its feedback but limiting rigorously who is enabled to make that feedback – all results of the manipulation of following systems recommended) then the self that results is no less a performance, and cannot be judged on an inappropriate binary of the ‘true’ and ‘false’. Moreover, if we only listen to what makes us inspired, grounded, curious’, turning off all feedback that makes us ‘feel behind, inadequate, angry’, are we not ensuring that we limit the challenge otherness poses to us, the better to fashion a self in our own ‘desired image’. If we don’t like the ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall’ is it better to change it, if we can, or cover it with a blanket of repression?
When I think of myself I can’t quite relate to what Rachel proposes. Whereas she speaks of blogs with followers in the thousands, i have about just over 300, most of whom are clearly passive followers because I struggle these days, and especially after I have unloaded the pain I feel about Gaza (which always takes a chunk out of readership/consultation numbers thereafter). In myself I feel grateful anyone chose to follow me and do not mind that they remain selective – if they stay at all? The point for me is that I do not feel I can ever know people from such flimsy evidence – for knowing is a thing of mutuality and uncertainty, subject to constant need for re-learning or new learning. Hence, I don’t think I have the right to have an agenda related to who follows whom, whether related to me or others. I don’t want to discourage others but I find, given the limits of my numbers I must do, but I don’t really know why, even when they tell me, I cannot know if that is not merely a performative statement of self-assertion on their part. When people talk mutually, they learn about each other but not in order better to please each other but in order, instead, to find a space in which performative people-pleasing is not the only criteria for dialogue or monologue, the former triggered out of the latter when monologue has openings, mechanisms for intervention in return, whether used or not. I live in hope and love:
The mind desires an idol and the hand
Confirms its birth in ticks - come to me now,
Follow me into dark space and time: strike
A match and let there be light, instead of
Likes, that do not like, or fall behind and
Do not follow anymore, but open
Up to find that thing we have always lost,
Before: a compass pointing out true North
To follow together where faces frost
In masks that need less show than human warmth.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Steve_Bamlett_blog 