The Crowd and the Anti-Crowd

Identifying the enemies of "that single individual"

Some of the more distasteful parts of far-right “internet culture”¹ have long taken a turn against “NPCs”, “normies”, and “the herd”. With its popularity exploding around the time of Donald Trump’s presidency, it has stuck as a pseudo-philosophical category for the general public to pseudo-understand the way that individuals interact with mass media, democratic consent, and a wide range of intellectual issues concerning the individual’s relationship with society. Drawing on philosophical minds such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the criminally misunderstood Orwell, it is possible to see the intellectual roots of this disdain for “NPCs”, with each of these thinkers expounding similar but distinct social categories within their work. For Kierkegaard, this is “the Crowd”, although he had also used “the herd of beasts” at times² very much anticipating the soon-to-be Nietzschean fashion. In this way, there is a certain contempt for mass movements, for collective ideology - but is it accurate to say that S. K. would have fallen in with these wayward thinkers?

At the foot of the cross, the Crowd formed and dispersed - the apostles heard those terrible words: “forgive them”.

As with the Nietzschean “herd” and Orwellian “groupthink”, S. K. would likely have included the very people who are so quick to identify others as “NPCs” as belonging to “the Crowd” as well - but understanding what makes “the Crowd” into “the Crowd” is a little more complicated than what the venomous term might indicate at first appearances³, which requires a moment to think about what precisely S. K. disliked about collective ideology and mass movements. When we have understood that, we can begin to expand on what we might call the “Anti-Crowd”, and finish in turn with an examination of the Kierkegaardian escape through smashing the dialectic in surrender, in gaining strength through the surrender of power, and in undermining the deification of democratic consent through “reasonable fideism”⁴.

Identifying “the Crowd”

For anyone who has studied at least some of S. K.’s works, they will have no doubt come across the notion of “the Crowd” - a term used against the unthinking masses within a society which then leads to their unquestioning support for the cause with goes against their own interests. In a small moment of praise for the radical right, phrases like “Blue No Matter Who” and the generational transmission of voting tendencies (especially in the UK, which presumably makes up the majority of the people still dedicated to Labour despite their right turn under Blair and polite backwards step into uselessness under Starmer - how interesting that a party of the working people would be apparently not working!) indicate that there is a certain tendency, especially within politics, to surrender one’s individuality in the name of a “higher cause” outside oneself. More pressingly, the “NPC” aspect of “the Crowd” is particularly accurate in terms of the way that “the Current Thing” is identified by the far-right: the distractibility of “the Crowd” is a continuous concern, with seemingly contradictory positions being dropped and picked up at the maddeningly random will of whichever figurehead demands collective ire be directed at a new temporary target. In short, we see the far-right and S. K. in agreement on at least one issue: an opposition to ideology.

This is quite understandable and, at face value, not obviously a bad thing - there are certainly times when we must surrender an indignant liberal demand for the world to recognize each of us as an Archimedean point by which it might turn around in order to achieve our goals; sometimes (most of the time, I would venture to say), there are important reasons for turning towards others and ideas outside of our immediate control in order to do good in the world or simply to carry out a duty which “is, thus, not an imposition ["paalaeg," i.e., "laid upon"], but something which is incumbent ["paarligger," i.e., "lying within"]”.⁵ Even more starkly, it would make no sense for a Christian to be opposed to collective movements an sich as Christianity, as a faith, is collective and requires us to base our wants outside ourselves - in the will of God, in the prototype of Christ, and in the tradition of the Apostles and the Church Fathers. “The Crowd”, very obviously, cannot simply be an attack on collective movements because they are collective movements - but neither can it simply be collective movements which the “I” finds distasteful, either.

“The Crowd is Untruth”

Although S. K. would lay out his understanding of “the Crowd” and his general suspicion of collective movements more generally in works like A Literary Review and his “attack” upon Christendom, there is a standalone essay which really digs into the problems that “the Crowd” presents for Christians and non-Christians alike: that essay, “the Crowd is Untruth”⁶. Short, largely poetic, and razor-sharp in its insight, it is a typical Kierkegaardian scold for the mass society of mass men and timid women that he saw around him.

Kierkegaard’s views are multifaceted and complicated - inspiring communists, radical liberals, fascists, anarchists, and everyone in between.

S. K. begins by noting that “[t]here is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side”, implying that there is an equation of democracy with truth in contemporary society. This doesn’t seem too alien to us now: political struggles are constantly fought on the grounds of democratic approval, academia is oriented towards establishing “scholarly consensus” in order to identify respectable positions, etc., so, in a way, there is a certain need for “the Crowd” to exist not only to add power to any particular position, but also to gift it truth. This is a worrying shift, however, as the truth of vox Dei had been replaced by vox populi - it didn’t matter what was being said, only rather that a lot of people agreed to it. This degradation of truth was necessary for liberal democracy to take root: if there is a truth that stands beyond the simple consent of the masses, then there is something that can be appealed to in opposition to the party line.

Despite a few choice voices identifying S. K. with a certain anarchist approach to life⁷, the Great Dane was very much an ardent monarchist in his youth. Noted for his conservativism from a young age⁸, he saw monarchy (particularly the perceived benevolent monarchy of his contemporary Denmark) to be a proper organization of society. In very much an aristocratic statement of indifference, he saw the presence of a monarch as beneficial to society as it remained a position that was granted on grace instead of ability⁹; it, by necessity, refused to judge the other - which a strange but consistent Christian argument for monarchy, in a way. Although Ellul would rather be caught dead than identified with monarchism (viewing himself as an unconventional ally of “the Left” in a period dominated by fascist tendencies to the south in Francoist Spain and to the east in Nazi Germany), he elaborated upon this “thread” of S. K.’s thought as representing the “anti-technical” side of Christianity¹⁰ - instead of the perception of technical competency being necessary for xyz role, understanding the equality of humanity as subjects before God was the true root of egalitarianism in a world which can never provide material equality. While this will no doubt sound like a strange display of apologism to those on (or beyond) “the Left” today, it is important to identify S. K.’s understanding of what it takes to oppose “the Crowd” as opposed to simply creating a new Crowd. By having a single figure who could “cut through” the problems of society (or, operate in the “state of exception”¹¹, as Schmitt appropriated it), “the Crowd” is constantly kept at bay and not allow it to dictate the direction of society. In a way, monarchy is most effective in opposing “mobocracy” when the mob is a real threat - but this shouldn’t be considered a defence of monarchism as monarchy, in the historical sense, has been almost universally disposed of. Even S. K. himself did not become a reactionary proponent of the reinstitution of an absolute monarch, noting that this collapse of traditional power structures seems to have been God’s plan¹² and that we must now find a way to organize society in a way which did not rely on old ideas that were no longer acceptable to us. But finding this way means diagnosing how to deal with “the Crowd”…

Even more concerningly, “the Crowd” doesn’t seem to mind what was said at all, but only that a “party man” was there as a figurehead to present whichever position he intended to present with an air of authority, officialism, and respectability. In an article written in the run-up to the Corsair Affair, S. K. identified that there is a false want in the democratic population for a “Great Man” to emerge, as a kind of quasi-monarch in stature and mythological status:

“That a man is a great man and as such amounts to something has been heard before, but that every man is a party is unheard of. (No wonder, then, that no one pays any attention to an experienced, earnest, stirring Right Reverend voice when it speaks - if not daily, at least once a month - for it is only a great man who speaks, not a party; it is only a solitary voice, not a party voice.)”¹³

Note here the appeal to the former authority of society: the clerical voice of the Right Reverend. This position is no longer of any interest (unless it is a scandal¹⁴), therefore all that matters is that there is a “party man”: someone unjustly taking the position of vox populi¹⁵. Here, we find a limited form of sympathy for the “masses” in S. K.’s thought - “the Crowd” is not a problem of collectives forming, but rather that figureheads emerge and submerge any particular will that the people may have.

In a sense, this hasn’t gone away: for two notable examples (from opposite sides of the spectrum) of leaders who were not “party men”, we only need to look at Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. By refusing to toe the party line and become a respectable, bourgeois face of a movement, they were met with scorn by the powers that be. In the extravagant, almost camp approach to leadership in the bombastic liberalism of Trump, we saw a man who might best represent the state of moral nihilism in modernity - it didn’t matter what was said or done, only that it caused media outrage and an “unsettling” of status quo; a show of power to ruffle the feathers, but never really any overarching goal or “positive” aspect to his leadership outside of scandal. In this sense, Trump is a typical Kierkegaardian nihilist; there is only negation, never followed by a genuine push for change. On the other hand, Corbyn was very much an example of “the ethical” emerging in modern politics¹⁶: a person who has an understanding of a particular approach to right and wrong and wants to instigate that understanding at an institutional level. In a sense, this put him into contradiction with an existing Crowd already - the British media and establishment, as recognizable figureheads and dictators of public opinion, could identify a target to turn against via their arms of influence in mass media. This, most notably, was done through the identification of Corbyn with antisemitism and the undermining of his party structure around him, allowing for the structure of government to undermine and overturn his position through popular consent. The vox populi became the vox instrumentorum, turning against an individual and his cadre who - at least in appearance - had their best interests at heart. This, in essence, is the cyclical reality of “the Crowd” - constantly being pulled towards one or another particular cause, seemingly unaware of the apparent hypocrisy and inconsistency of their position. In a sense, this is democracy manifest: the masses consent to their own manipulation on account of the eventual vote which allows them to formally admit to their manipulation.

Whether Corbyn would have been or whether Trump was an effective leader is irrelevant here - the point that S. K. was trying to stress might be best expressed by:

A crowd - not this or that, one now living or long dead, a crowd of the lowly or of nobles, of rich or poor, etc., but in its very concept - is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision.¹⁷

Numerical matters

As with many of S. K.’s particular and implicit critiques of political form, a laser-precise understanding of “the numerical” plays an important part. By no means was S. K. the first to consider this, of course, but his stress on this opposition between “that individual” and “the numerical” is a sometimes overlooked and misunderstood aspect of his approach to sociology and politics.

Observe, there was not a single soldier who dared lay a hand on [G]aius Marius; this was the truth. But given three or four women with the consciousness or idea of being a crowd, with a certain hope in the possibility that no one could definitely say who it was or who started it: then they had the courage for it; what untruth!

Here, we set up a broad dialectic: the single soldier vs “the Crowd” of women. Although it is now distasteful to modern sensibilities, the continual illustration of women as being in a “despair of not being oneself”¹⁸ - a despair over the reluctance to actually exist as a being before God as one is, falling away into the role of a societal “character”, a caricature of the individual themselves (I will not defend S. K.’s apparent sexism here - I will simply point towards the eminent Kierkegaardian scholar M. G. Piety’s short reflection on the enduring popularity of the Dane’s work for women, his constructivism, and his view that the timidity of women was very much a societal issue and not an essential characteristic). But, when these same timid creatures coalesce into “the Crowd”, they gain a new bravery - or rather, they lose their fear.

For a crowd is an abstraction, which does not have hands; each single individual, on the other hand, normally has two hands, and when he, as a single individual, lays his two hands on Caius Marius, then it is the two hands of this single individual, not after all his neighbor's, even less - the crowd's, which has no hands.

“The Crowd” has no hands in that no one within “the Crowd” is responsible for its actions - it may have a figurehead directing them, but the directed are still only human beings, potential existential beings, with their will towards whatever telos they have being suppressed in the fervour and panic of groupthink. As these women are a caricature of timidity, their newfound “courage” is only their self-responsibility falling away from them - in an attempt not to be themselves, they turn into a group which cannot be held responsible for what it does. And, of course, this behaviour does not simply exist for women (the particular members of “the Crowd” here are a scandalous illustration, not a particular piece of essentialist social commentary) because everyone has the capacity to despair over their self as recognizable before God for what they have done - and, in turn, run from that responsibility if given a chance!

For every single individual who escapes into the crowd, and thus flees in cowardice from being a single individual… contributes his share of cowardice to "the cowardice," which is: the crowd.

Turned outwards, in this sense, we see that these individuals who seek to become “the Crowd” are at the behest of “the One”¹⁹ - the human being who cracks the (hidden) whip against the cowardice of “the Crowd” for his own benefit:

The crowd is untruth. There is therefore no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a human being than those who make it their profession to lead the crowd.

In this sense, Christianity is an offence to those who would lead mass movements. In attempting to establish a mass movement, people are simply attempting to become dictators to the fearful, individuals who stand out from “the Crowd” due to their ability to turn a fawning, sentimental appreciation for this quivering mass of ideologically “crude” numbers into a tool towards achieving their own goals. By identifying this “professional Crowd leader”, we have found the enemy of Christianity: the individual who would turn the fear and cowardice of the Crowd into an instrument of their own success. And who would be a better example of this than the mass media? As mentioned above, we see this with political leaders, journalists, revolutionaries, artists, clergymen, etc., etc. - individuals who attempt to impose themselves, often through a subtle underhandedness, onto a mass movement and direct it to whatever they aim to accomplish; and as “the Crowd has no hands”, the excuse for unspeakable violence, intolerance, the transgression of “unspeakable” boundaries to our moral fortitudes, these all become the intended instruments of “the One”, das Man, who will turn the masses against themselves to achieve particular ends. Vox populi becomes vox instrumentorum in the hands of the manipulator - and in those hands, the only possible outcome is a levelling of society, a complete “making the same”-ness of all individuality and difference.

A fear of small numbers

“The Crowd”, in the sketch above, is hopefully starting to take its monstrous form in the mind of my reader now: the responsibility-rejecting, false-courage-granting, manipulatable, mutable, and plastic conglomerate of individuals “without hands”, who willingly flee into anonymity and violence, is a danger to both Christianity and radicalism. However, the notion of Christianity’s uncompromising search for the individual, on the grounds that God insists that “only one receives the prize” (I Corinthians 9:24) necessarily cuts through the levelled, anonymous herd. Indeed:

“The tyrannizing, leveling world of time present is always trying to change everything into homogeneity so that all become mere numbers, specimens.”²⁰

What Marx had referred to as the strength of capitalism, that “all that is solid melts into air”²¹ that allows for a great rapidity and “agility” in its creative and productive capacity for change, is here identified in stark nakedness: this is the force of “levelling” that has reduced everything into homogeneity, turned the notable into the sameness, and destroyed the very thing which makes humanity human. “The Crowd”, whipped up into a frenzy by Marx’s sabre-rattling, the band of women’s scheming, Hitler’s rasping propaganda²² - all of them attempting to form the recognizable before “the Crowd”, the figure to follow, the means by which they have “no hands”.

But there is something else which we can identify as a typical moment of shock for those who collapse into the vortex of “the Crowd”: a fear of small numbers. In turning to “that single reader”, “that individual”, S. K. made a point of identifying a singular you who would be his audience. In a sense, that is what stands against the Crowd and, in typical Kierkegaardian fashion, repulses it:

“To be deprived of human numbers, to have to stand alone, abandoned, ridiculed, etc., is what animal-man fears most.”²³

Without the weight of numbers on the side of “the Crowd”, there is only the fearful object of the lone individual. In very Romantic imagery, the “one man against the tide” is a partial, but incomplete, picture of the Kierkegaardian individual. The most dangerous aspect of this individual is, of course, his refusal to fall into a herd that is defined by an opportunistic leader-of-men. This, in turn, calls the repulsion in “the Crowd” which can be best summarized as “the fear of small numbers”.

Drawing on the anthropology of Arjun Appadurai²⁴, we could view “the Crowd”’s fear of small numbers as being related to a rupture in ideology - in being handed a particular ideological stance to adopt, or, rather, “flee into”, “the Crowd” is aghast to find that there is a creature who dares to stand against it. The imagination of “the Crowd” creates a picture of society that then demands that reality conforms with the ideological dictum - the appearance is moulded into a particular form and then used to bludgeon the thing-in-itself, so to speak. But this leads to “imagined magnitudes”²⁵ of those who do not cleanly fall into these groups: racial minorities stand out against the imagined homogeneity of the ethnonationalist, political insurgents become repulsive in the eyes of the indolent mass approvers, the religious minority group offends the sensibilities of (recognized or not) secularity in its practices and hope. The danger of the broken image of society is in “the Crowd”’s own fear of being exposed - there is an ontological and moral realisation in the presence of the individual that forces the masses to splinter, to be identified in their fleeing from the dangers of individuality.

In S. K.’s own attack upon “Christendom”, this was main push forward: firstly, to identify dishonesty in the acts of those who had acted dishonestly, presenting the “Crowd-formers” in their nakedness - Mynster, Martensen, the Danish Hegelians, and the rest of the lackadaisical clergy who had failed to hold up the New Testament as a point of deliberation for the people of Denmark; secondly, to identify with laser-pointed accuracy the “imagined magnitudes” and expose the great fraud of the era:

“My one thesis is that Christianity no longer exists... my task is to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom.”²⁶

If that was the case, then the imagined magnitude was surely the greatest of all magnitudes that were possible in the parochial Danish society - Christianity, the bedrock of the very culture they were living in, was nothing. It had vanished, potentially centuries ago, and no one had noticed because they were imagining something entirely different. And this is the fear for the faithful among us: what if Christianity is impeded by the way we approach faith in the modern era? What if, as opposed to our image of those faithful few sat at the foot of the Lord, we are truly the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt - unaware that our God cries out for us, simply because we have forgotten and those who came before us had forgotten as well? The charge is high: what do we do if we are tasked to become missionaries to “the world”, but “the world” is now donning the long robes of Christianity?

In one of his most dangerously deconstructive musings, S. K. turns this temptation to form “the Crowd” back onto the apostles themselves - the possibility, the unspoken horror of the possibility that the Acts of the Apostles is neither hagiography nor propaganda, but rather a criminal record against those who were too quick to take up their teacher’s words:

“Should the apostles not have had misgivings about the appropriateness of Christian conversions by the thousands auf einmal?”²⁷

The Anti-Crowd and Failed Scepticism

The above presumably makes for grim reading for the vast majority of people, especially those who believe that the world can be made a better place - mass movements rob us of our individuality and potentially make Christianity impossible. This is a distinct problem when we remember that there are many Christian “mass movements” such as the Catholic Workers, the Social Gospel, aid communities and organizations, international pressure groups, and various sectarian groups that intend to live out the message of the gospel in love for God and the neighbour alike. You might even feel a pang of reaction here, due to the panic: we must turn against the popular opinion, treat it with distrust and scorn it. It would be understandable to take this position, but it is yet again missing the point of what S. K. was saying when he identified “the Crowd”. If anything, we would only be exposing ourselves to the danger of the Anti-Crowd.

If “the Crowd” is formed through the ideological apparatus of a class society²⁸ and this extends beyond the power of the individual to affect in their individuality, then there is a double danger for the individual qua individual - acting as a total negativity towards the prevailing currents of social change is not a case for individuality, but rather a twisted simulacrum of the prevailing current itself. This very much links to S. K.’s understanding of the self as consisting of a historical character that ties together seemingly disparate events into a cohesive “narrative”, providing continuity and “upbuilding”²⁹ from the position of the contingent “victim of circumstance” nature of our sinful lives towards the telos of Christian liberty (1 Peter 2:16) that holds necessarily to the pattern, paradigm, and prototype of Christ. Simply existing relationally negatively to the Crowd doesn't stop the Crowd's grasp on the life of this history-tossed being; the individual is simply more combative than those positively related, but otherwise no different in their relation to “the One” itself. This is where the false radicalism of the “NPC”, “normie”-mocking crowds becomes truly ironic: if your radicalism extends only so far as to exist simply as a negation of “the Current Thing”³⁰, then you also only exist qua political and moral agent within a society insofar as “the Crowd” bays towards any particular political and/or moral issue.

The press will in such times [of upheaval] itself assume the concrete character of the disarray. But just as sedentary professionals are especially prone to spin fantasies, so too a passionless, sedentary, reflective age, when the press, itself weak, is supposed to be the only thing that can keep life going in the prevailing torpor, will spin out this phantom [of lifelessness]. The public is levelling’s real master, for when levelling is only approximate there is something it levels with, while the public a monstrous nothing.³¹

In this sense, we can see the manipulative role of the press, in S. K.’s eyes. By assuming the “concrete character of the disarray”, the press and mass culture in general intercede themselves between the individual and their fellow individuals and start to turn one against one another. In this sense, the press is necessarily nihilistic - it doesn’t matter what is said and to what end it was intended, but only that something is published, something causes division, and something makes money. This, in turn, is designed to stop any possibility of individuality predicated on a passionate relation to a life-goal by bombarding the society, the would-be mass society, with persuasive (“sagacious”) and often conflicting messaging.

As you would expect, the abstraction formed paralogistically by individuals [who have read the press], instead of helping them, makes them recoil from one another. Someone who, with actual persons in the contemporaneity of the actual moment and situation, has no opinion of his own adopts the majority’s opinion, or, if more inclined to be combative, the minority’s. But note that the majority and the minority are actual human beings, and this is why resorting to them in supportive… To adopt the same opinion as these or those particular persons is to know that they would be subject to the same danger as oneself, that they would err with one if the opinion were wrong, etc. But to adopt the same opinion as the public is a treacherous consolation, for the public exists only in abstracto.

Here, the notion of “the Crowd” becomes all the more clear: it is not a matter of siding with majority or minority positions (although there is a certain self-flagellation in consistently siding with “plucky underdog” positions amongst those who would flee into “the Crowd” for noble ideals), but rather being able to side with a concrete individual and a concrete idea in relation to that concrete individual as an individual. In an early example of social ontology, S. K. had set apart, very clearly, a few social categories that make individuals into menighed³² as opposed to “the Crowd” - in a considered relation which maintains the individual’s capacity to act and live as a free moral agent within a collective, the individual is protected from fleeing into irresponsibility, from casting off hands, from becoming “the numerical” in “the Crowd”.

In this way, despite my earlier examples of Trump and Corbyn, we see “the Crowd” has emerged in these two different social groups: the ascension and decline of the figureheads was met with ecstatic collective campaigning, propagandizing, moralising (or immoralising), and cult-formation that allowed for a certain attitude of helplessness, indebtedness, and Messianism to emerge in the ranks of society. As the promise is realized in the words and perceived actions³³ of the figureheads, “the Crowd” becomes incensed, loses responsibility, and hands themselves over in full commitment to their chosen idol. This is expressed in the way which is typical for the age: memes, songs, sports chants, and other expressions of cultural significance all turn over the vortex of the figurehead, creating a mythological image that the individuals hold in their imaginations. This becomes the very power that drives them together, gives them an ideal to model themselves upon, and holds them at a distance. Similar critiques have been made by secular figures such as the Situationists and Fredy Perlman - however, they were all too aware of how this process works when the ascension leads to the inevitable decline.

When the wave of popularity, of novelty, becomes blasé, the public starts to lose interest. The radicalism of the figurehead gives way to a drudging and comfortable nihilism, the return to the previous state of affairs, while now losing the faux-radical but still actual expression of the individuals in the would-be herd. In seeing the decline of the figurehead, “the Crowd” turns to itself in dismay - no longer is salvation guaranteed, no longer is the Messiah coming to aid us through the actions of those exalted figures. The ideal is lost. “The Crowd” emerges. There is nothing to separate each individual from one another, so their concrete interest towards a telos collapses into bone-on-bone contact, with nowhere to look towards, nothing to look forward to, aside from one another. The necessary has disappeared (if it was ever held at all) and now there is only contingency, confused contingency in the flux of history.

Now the ideal is lost, “the Crowd” emerges in its “crudeness”³⁴ - the individuals can no longer relate to one another in agreement towards a particular telos as the telos is destroyed in the decline of the figurehead. Now, there is only a collapse of any particular stance that the individuals had held prior to this - now there is only “the Crowd” and it can only operate “without hands”. Of course, if you have been watching closely, you will note that the reactions to a collapse of the Right³⁵ and a collapse of the “Left”³⁶ are very different, but united in a particular way: in their nihilism. While the collapse of the Trump presidency (in its aesthetic marvel, with the attack on Capitol Hill serving as a fever pitch moment for a movement that was far smaller than it actually was) led to the emergence of terrorist reaction against the perceived leftward turn in America, this demanded show of power - an almost Schmittian demand for an iron fist in the “state of exception” - is completely absent in the reaction from the character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn; instead, the despair of the lost telos has led to a collapse in the modest gains made for the Western left, with first the rise of reactionary forces and then dissolution of any consistent platform on which to build. While the future seemed bright, the Messianic age was ready to be ushered in, the decline of Corbyn’s faction has resulted in the retreat into “the Crowd” of Starmer, liberalism, and “different colour tie” politics.

In a way, I don’t wish to paint either party as either a victim nor a hero here. Instead, I intend to point out the clear parallel in the way the movements reacted to collapse: destruction in the formation of “the Crowd”. The Trump cadre turned to despair and violent grabbing out at the world; the Corbyn faction towards resignation, hopelessness, and a mass emergence of the Mass Man. In both camps, there is a loss of value, a loss of direction, a loss of the idea that both binds them together and holds them at a distance.³⁷ Without a sufficient telos to carry them through disappointment, bind beyond a physical show of power, and a lend hope to those who require it in both light and dark. In short: both the aesthetic and the ethical will collapse under pressure, so what is left for us to turn to? Is the world really so beyond salvation that we cannot bind ourselves together in comradery, as a congregation, against evil?

Closing remarks to my reader

It should be clear now that S. K.’s particularly pessimistic view of collective action is not necessarily a wholesale response against collective action outright. Although his image of the world tainted by Original Sin and “the Crowd [which] has no hands” paints a monstrous picture of any possibility of success, it lends a certain comfort to know that a movement which transcends and discards the issues of despair and the Mass Man are very much diagnosed and presented in their stark reality. In this sense, as with all of the darkest moments in the Kierkegaardian oeuvre, we are given a reprieve in the freedom of hitting rock bottom: in recognizing that movements of liberation and power are, at least logically and experientially, prone to failure regardless of the particular skill that comes with these movements throughout history. If we were to turn to Ellul’s analysis of technique, we could point to Napoleon as the perfect genius of war³⁸, Hitler as the master technician of battle³⁹, and Lenin as the specialist in government⁴⁰ - all of them, ultimately, failures in achieving their goals and making the world in their image. A subtle reminder of Kierkegaard’s challenging polemic that “[a] logical system can be given... but a system of existence cannot be given”; maybe these thinkers, technicians, and masters-of-war had forgotten that prior to their theorizing, they are indeed alive and that life must be lived. In this way, we find the release - the nihilist temptation to resignation calls us down into the depths of despair, but we remember another that reaches out to us:

“One must make every effort precisely to avoid wanting to strengthen oneself through the numerical, through human help - because then one loses God's help.”⁴¹

For the Christian, this understanding that no matter our knowledge, skill, or technique, our efforts are not the deciding factor in the changes in this world is the root of liberation itself. And while it would be wise to explore the liberation of Christ to answer the pessimistic polemic above, that will have to wait for another time. As this topic requires a full exploration of what it means for the Kierkegaardian, for the Christian, to take up the gospel in opposition to both “the Crowd” and the Anti-Crowd, we will need to dedicate a suitable amount of space to understanding dialectic, S. K.’s methodology, and the liberation through repetition that his thought pointed to in the words of Christ.

For the time being, you will have to entertain yourself, my reader, with a prolegomena on the nature of nihilism in modernity and the Christian’s precarious place in relation to it:

• Christian anarchism and the Problem of Nihilism - part I

• Christian anarchism and the Problem of Nihilism - part II

If you would prefer to read a mildly unjustified postscript, see here instead:

• Prolegomenic Unscientific Postscript to "The Crowd and the Anti-Crowd"

1. If such a thing as a “culture” on the internet is possible, or at least any more possible than in the bottom of a discarded yoghurt pot.

2. Such as in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 190, S. Kierkegaard

3. Isn’t this the case with all philosophy? Hegelianism seems beyond doubt until we remember that an individual might have to think at some point - ironically, “the Crowd” seems beyond reason until we remember that an individual might have to think at some point.

4. Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account, p. 7-13 C. S. Evans

5. Either/Or, vol. II, p. 213

6. Link

7. Most notably Vernard Eller and Jacques Ellul, both of whom created their own sketches of Christian anarchism based on the particular approach to faith laid out by S. K.

8. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 5, S. Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay

9. Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, p. 110 J. K. Hyde

10. Most notably in The Technological Society, but elaborated throughout his life’s work.

11. "Public Confession", from The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, p. 7, S. Kierkegaard

12. ""Out with It!": the Modern Breakthrough, Kierkegaard, and Denmark", B. H. Kirmmse, from The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 17

13. "Public Confession", from The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, p. 9, S. Kierkegaard

14. "Newfound religious assurances (guarantees)", from The Instant, no. 5, July 27th 1855, from Attack upon "Christendom", p. 172-173, S. Kierkegaard

15. "Public Confession", from The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings, p. 9, S. Kierkegaard

16. Which truly is a rare thing!

17. Link

18. The Sickness Unto Death, p. 49-67, Anti-Climacus

19. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 62 S. Kierkegaard

20. JP II, 2061

21. Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 36, K. Marx

22. For an excellent treatment of Nazism from the Kierkegaardian perspective, see "Toward a Kierkegaardian Understanding of Hitler, Stalin, and the Cold War, C. Bellinger, Foundations of Kierkegaard's Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, p. 224, edited by G. B. Connell and C. S. Evans

23. JP II, 1940

24. Best exemplified in "The Danish Cartoon Controversy as Viewed by Kierkegaard and Appadurai: The Social Imagination and the Numerical", J. E. Veninga, from International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. XXIII: The Moment and Late Writings

25. Ibid., p. 262

26. "The Obstacle" in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 39n, Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard

27.  JP II, 2056

28. But by no means does this class society have to deal with the strict yet loose bounds of a Marxist class analysis - it is entirely possible, for the Kierkegaardian, to say that class society is far more complicated than a simple dualism which betrays our Kantian biases and becomes frayed under the simplest of needling and prodding. We might consider the clergy, even in its modern weakness in the West, as forming a dying class; the white-collar worker may also hold differing interests to those more accustomed to a blue-collar; the political cadre of any particular society (and this need not be simply national or international politics, no matter how much they grab our attention and imagination) may also constitute a different class that rubs up against the others and attempts to assert itself through ideology. A full Kierkegaardian class analysis is due to you, my reader, but bear in mind, until that point, that I am simply saying that we should not restrict ourselves to Marxist dogma on the grounds that Marx’s particular dualism seems to have explanatory power.

29. A theme dealt with at length in S. K.’s numerous “upbuilding discourses*.

30. Another trope of the far-right, criticizing the left liberal-to-left contingents of society of being ultimately directable and manipulatable by the powers that be - and while they are not completely wrong on the matter, their position only becomes more ironic when we understand their reaction.

31. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 81, S. Kierkegaard

32. “The congregation”, a term that is repeated throughout his later journals to refer to effective, Christian social movements that maintain individuality within the collective. For more, see Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 337-345, V. Eller

33. And I stress perceived here for good reason - despite the proximal divorce between the individuals and the figurehead, there is a worship-like relation that demands constant updates, insights, and deifying reports from the knower of society, the very mass media that, prior to the ascension, was the untrustworthy rival but has now been successfully rebranded and is completely different in an ideological sense - if not an ontological one.

34. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 62, S. Kierkegaard

35. Generally an aesthetic movement, predicated on a show of power.

36. Generally an ethical movement, aiming to cut off aspects of the Right’s aesthetic, sprawling approach to the political - and while Corbyn’s credentials as an actual “left”-ward politician are certainly up for debates in the stuffy debate halls and student canteens of the Marxists or the virtual spaces of the anarchists (lacking, as many do, any real presence in reality), but he shall serve as our representative for now.

37. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 62-63, S. Kierkegaard

38. The Technological Society, p. 83 J. Ellul

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Pap. XI2 A413