Kierkegaard and the Untruth of the Crowd
The crowd is powerful not because it is always wicked, but because it dissolves responsibility. What “everyone” thinks and says can become a refuge from the burden of becoming a self.
Few modern thinkers wrote more sharply about the crowd than Søren Kierkegaard.
His claim was severe enough to sound excessive at first hearing: “the crowd is untruth.”[1] Taken crudely, the phrase can suggest contempt for ordinary people or a romantic worship of isolated genius. That is not the heart of his argument. Kierkegaard’s concern was moral and spiritual. The crowd is “untruth” because it tempts the individual to evade responsibility by disappearing into generality.
No one, in a crowd, must answer fully as himself.
That is the seduction.
When opinion becomes collective, accountability becomes diffuse. One says what is being said, condemns what is being condemned, applauds what is being applauded, and feels fortified by numbers. The individual borrows seriousness from the mass and can therefore avoid the harder work of standing before truth personally. The crowd relieves him of singularity.
Kierkegaard considered this profoundly dangerous.
The self, in his view, is not something automatically possessed in mature form. It must be formed through inwardness, decision, repentance, and relation to what is higher than public approval.[2] A person becomes himself not by floating along with prevailing sentiment but by answering for his life in earnest. The crowd obstructs this because it makes impersonality feel safe.
That diagnosis suits modern conditions all too well.
Public life now encourages collective emotion at industrial scale. One is constantly invited to join reactions, adopt phrases, display alignment, and experience one’s conscience socially. This creates a curious moral atmosphere in which people can feel intensely righteous without becoming especially reflective. They inhabit what looks like conviction but may really be participation.
Kierkegaard would not have been impressed.
Neither, at its best, should Masonry.
Freemasonry does not exist to dissolve men into a single temper of approved opinion. It exists, if it remembers its own symbols, to refine the individual man so that he can enter fellowship honorably and responsibly. Brotherhood presupposes persons. It does not replace them. A lodge made up of men who only echo one another may be harmonious in a superficial sense, but it is not strong.
Strength requires inward substance.
This is where the liberal arts become morally significant again. Grammar guards against the lazy adoption of phrases one has never examined. Logic tests the coherence of what “everyone knows.” Rhetoric reveals how collective feeling is produced and amplified. These disciplines do not abolish the crowd, but they help a person notice when he is being absorbed by it.
That act of noticing is already a kind of liberation.
Kierkegaard also saw that “the public” could become an abstraction with enormous practical force.[3] It is not quite the same as an actual community. It is thinner, more spectral, more anonymous. Yet it exerts pressure all the same. One feels watched by a generalized audience whose approval is both unstable and addictive. Speech adjusts itself accordingly. So does conscience.
This condition has only intensified.
The abstract public is now near at hand at all times, ready to praise, shame, amplify, or erase. Many people therefore live in partial anticipation of an audience. They become less concerned with whether something is true than with whether it will register acceptably. That is not merely vanity. It is a deformation of inward life.
Kierkegaard’s remedy was not sociological technique.
It was seriousness.
The individual must recover the willingness to stand alone before truth, before God, before conscience, before the actual demands of existence. No crowd can perform that task on his behalf. No majority can repent for him, decide for him, or believe for him. The most personal duties remain stubbornly personal.
This is not an argument against fellowship.
It is an argument against evasion.
The best forms of fraternity help men bear responsibility more courageously; they do not excuse them from it. A healthy lodge should therefore send a man back into his own life more answerable, not less. If it becomes merely a source of borrowed identity, it has betrayed one of its own deeper possibilities.
Kierkegaard’s warning remains bracing because it leaves little room for flattering illusions. The crowd feels powerful, but much of its power comes from what individuals surrender to it: judgment, conscience, patience, proportion, and the willingness to be a distinct person under pressure.
Recover those, and the spell weakens.
The crowd will still exist.
The public will still murmur.
Approval will still tempt.
But a man who has learned to stand inwardly before what is true is not so easily dissolved into “everyone.” And that, for Kierkegaard, is one of the first conditions of becoming a self at all.
Endnotes
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, “The Crowd Is Untruth,” in Point of View and related posthumously assembled materials.
[2] On selfhood, inwardness, and responsibility, see Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling.
[3] Kierkegaard’s criticism of “the public” appears especially in The Present Age.
Brief Bibliography
Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Søren Kierkegaard, Point of View
