CONCEPT
The Crowd (Kierkegaard)
The crowd is untruth — not false but a mode of existence that provides positions without requiring the existential work of arriving at them, dissolving individuality through leveling into anonymous uniformity.
Kierkegaard's most politically charged concept: the crowd as a structural mechanism that eliminates genuine individuality not through oppression but through the provision of ready-made positions. Writing against the Danish press of the 1840s, Kierkegaard observed that mass media manufactured public opinion with unprecedented speed, offering readers positions on every question without requiring the work of thinking through the questions themselves. The crowd is 'untruth' not because it believes false things but because it exists in a false relationship to belief — adopting positions for social validation rather than through individual engagement. The person who thinks as a member of the crowd has opinions but no judgment, positions but no ground beneath them, a performed identity with no existential substance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Kierkegaard distinguished the crowd from the community. A community is constituted by individuals who have each made their own choices and happen to align. The crowd is constituted by the dissolution of individuals into a mass.