From the Grand Stand has an excellent, thoughtful post on groupthink versus true individuality:

once you remove all the external cosmetics, the adornments and affectations, what you're left with is what's inside—what they think, what the know, how they express themselves, and how they persuade. Most of these folks are empty vessels, soulless individuals finding camaraderie in being ostentatious, with really bizarre and outrageous packaging.

I think most of them would go mad and never recover from it, finding that their ideas of expressions and uniqueness were actually a fad, a façade and a farce. They're nothing more than clowns and were it not for the group-think acceptance of others in their soulless cliques, they'd never get a date.

In a classical-liberal society, we can't stop people from trying to impose their estimation of our dignity and worth on us--sometimes loudly and publicly--but we're not obliged to go along with it. Are there really people who don't think that's worth the compromise?

Don't answer that.

While I would never suggest that all leaders think, I have to admit a certain grudging respect for those leaders who have come up with and articulated original thoughts, even if I disagree with them profoundly. In an earlier post in which I asked whether ideas have consequences, commenter Jan Bear brought up Jacques Derrida:

In a film about Jacque Derrida, someone asked the great professor why, given his views about morality, didn't he steal his students' wallets. He was quite offended.

In this context, he chose not to implement his deconstructionist ethics. Many of his students, however -- or more accurately, students of students who capture deconstructionist ideas not from advanced philosophers but from the air -- don't just think about the idea that ethics are divorced from tradition, but implement it with knives and baseball bats.

Suppose I propound an idea that later turns out to be wrong, but which I thought was right. If I wasn't bright enough, perceptive enough, wise enough, or emotionally stable enough to see the errors in my thinking, is it reasonable to expect that the people unoriginal enough to follow my thinking uncritically would be? Further, what kind of thinker is a follower? Not much, as commenter Joe Peden opined:

if you only adopt an idea, you have not thought it, in my way of thinking

Is it fair or logical to hold a thinker responsible for the "thoughts" of someone who doesn't think, but merely adopts? In a military setting, where men are ordered into battle as a result of the thoughts generated by superiors, it certainly is. In American politics, it is, because the people trusted with government are at least in theory held accountable by voters.

But in an educational setting, students are not supposed to be ordered into battle or told what to think. Certainly not at the university level, where professors like Derrida are granted the podium. When I attended UC Berkeley I had all kinds of professors, many of whom were Marxists. I had been a Marxist in high school, but it was in Berkeley that I began to think for myself and I saw the errors in their thinking. If others did not, was that the professors' fault? In a free country, no one has to think anything. I also went to Grateful Dead concerts and had great, um "experiences" in which I reflected upon the cosmos; if others did the same thing and ended up becoming homeless and living in the streets, how was that the fault of the band? People said that it was. If it was their fault, then why wasn't it also my fault? (Similarly, if gay men screwed and got AIDS, was it my fault for believing in and stating that they had a right to screw?)

There's Shakespeare's old saying, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." One of mine is "Neither a follower nor a leader be." I realize that this poses problems, but I can't stand the idea of accepting responsibility for things I cannot control, and I certainly cannot control the thoughts of other people. (The idea that anyone might "follow" my chaotic and spontaneous thinking fills me with terror, and I'd sooner be a recluse than allow something like that to take place.) Leading often strikes me as a form of following anyway, and leaders are often former followers who've waited until it's their "turn." Much as I instinctively abhor those who would lead, I more abhor those who would follow. While this makes me sound like an anarchist, I recognize that leadership is a necessary evil, especially in war. And the founders of this country saw it as a necessary evil in government too. They tried to compromise with it.

I think that subsequent leaders have paid too much attention to their followers, and this resulted in the compromise being compromised -- to the point where if you believe in the original compromise (with the evil of leadership), why, you're an anarchist.

But anarchists don't believe in compromising with evil, so that can't be right. . .

I like to think that those who agree are really agreeing with themselves, but what if I'm wrong?

Would that mean the communitarians are right and humans are like sheep?

Again, I hope not.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT: In logic, the leaders and followers of incorrect schools of thought are both wrong. But mindless followers are in my view more worthy of contempt than leaders, because, assuming a thought is wrong, one who is unable to defend a thought he claims to think is worse than the one who came up with it but who nonetheless defends it. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think that people who cannot defend adopted thoughts are almost beneath contempt, and far inferior to those who had the thoughts originally.