I’m neither a leader nor a follower because both roles presume a belief in the validity of the path being taken—and I abandoned that illusion somewhere between Nietzsche and Newton.
Let me explain.
Leadership implies a willingness to assert direction within an existing system or toward a known goal. It requires a tacit acceptance of the game’s rules, even if only to manipulate them. I’ve spent decades dissecting those rules through the lenses of physics, psychology, and philosophy—and I’ve come to see most of them as scaffolding on a crumbling stage. Authority, more often than not, is a narrative device—a social placebo we swallow to suppress the vertigo of uncertainty.
Following, on the other hand, requires trust in the leader’s vision or the system’s integrity. That’s a tough sell once you’ve studied the neurological mechanics of belief formation and seen firsthand how easily the human brain can be hijacked by charisma, ideology, or trauma. As a neurologist, I can map the synaptic loops that make obedience feel like safety. As a philosopher, I see the cost: your identity, outsourced.
My experience in engineering taught me that systems fail at their weakest joint—and civilization is one vast, over-engineered contraption of power, myth, and denial. The leader-follower binary is an artifact of hierarchical thinking, useful for managing cattle or corporations, but insufficient for a conscious, self-aware being.
Instead, I’m an observer, a synthesizer, and occasionally a saboteur of stale paradigms. I navigate using first principles and probabilistic thinking, not social consensus or tribal loyalty. My compass is curiosity. My map is hand-drawn. My path? More fractal than straight.
To quote Camus: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”