For decades as a Witness I kept a 3x5 card with a list of the number of partakers at the Memorial, which should be the same as the number of the Remnant - according to JW-think. I'd just add the year and the new number whenever that was released. When I began to seriously question the WTS, that card proved very interesting.
I wish I had the card with me, but a few things I do remember about those figures.
1.) The number of partakers, on average over several decades, goes up 25% of the time. In other words, one out of every four years, there are more Remnant on earth than there was the year before! I remember a CO's wife telling me once that there were a lot of menopausal women who suddenly became anointed. Who knows.
2). There was one year, and I can't remember when it was exactly, when the number of partakers made a huge jump - something like 225 to 250 more than the previous year. I think that was sometime in the 1980s, and it took a decade or more for the number of partakers to drop to the previous low figure again. The Society said it was due to the removal of the Iron Curtain, and the counting of all the anointed in Eastern Europe.
One point about the Remnant that seemed to soooo not make sense, was that the term the Faithful and Discreet Slave class is a reference to all of the anointed alive on earth at any one time. So all of the Remnant make up the F&DS. As a group the F&DS has responsibility for the sheep. But the reality was that there was a very small handful of those who claimed to be anointed who had any say over the JWs in general, and that was the Gov Body and perhaps a few other 'anointed' at Bethel. The rest of those who partook at the Memorial didn't have didley squat to say about anything that was happening among "Jehovah's people."
I know one brother who claimed to be anointed, who wrote all these letters to the Society about various issues. His say should have been given as much weight and respect as one of the Gov Body. As an 'anointed one,' he was theoretically in as direct a relationship with Jehovah as any other anointed, including any of the GB. But the reality is that his letters were totally ignored. WTS policy is far more determined by some lawyer who has been a JW for 10 years, or some 40-year-old Bethelite in the Service Department, than it is by some faithful old anointed sister who's pioneered for 100 years and brought a thousand people into "the trooth."
As much as anything, I think this whole "anointed" concept just goes to prove how well the human mind can deceive itself.
S4