When I write about the common man, I do not mean it as a compliment. The word common once meant shared, familiar, belonging to all — a word of participation and inheritance. Today it means average, ordinary, indistinguishable from the rest. It describes the man who has traded his individuality for the comfort of belonging, and does not know what the trade cost him.
He is not evil. That distinction matters and I want to be clear about it. He is not malicious. He is not plotting anything. He is simply unanchored. He does not believe what he believes because he has wrestled with truth in the night and come out limping on the other side. He believes what he believes because it is easier to agree than to stand alone. Because agreement is warm and solitude is cold.
He is not evil.
He is simply unanchored.
Kierkegaard called this the sickness of the age. He was writing in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, a city that considered itself the center of Christian civilization, a culture saturated with church attendance and theological language — and he called it sick. Not because it lacked doctrine, but because it lacked inwardness. The forms were there. The substance had evacuated. What remained was a Christianity of approval, a faith of social performance, a religion that asked nothing of the self because the self had already been handed over to the crowd.
He warned that when a man stops being an individual — when he surrenders the burden of thinking his own thoughts, when he outsources his conscience to the collective — he becomes a reflection of others' opinions. He mirrors whatever the crowd approves of at the moment. His convictions rotate with the cultural weather. His outrage tracks the news cycle. His theology follows the prevailing sentiment of his peer group. He is not a man with beliefs. He is a man with a feed.
The common man repeats what he is told. He believes what is fashionable. He hides behind collective outrage and borrowed virtue. He no longer has a soul of his own — only a signal to repeat. This is not ignorance. The tragedy is that he may appear intelligent, cultured, or successful, and remain spiritually hollow. His identity is social, not personal. His convictions are crowdsourced.
I am not describing the hardworking father who is too tired at night to read philosophy. I am not describing the humble craftsman who does his work faithfully and goes to church on Sunday and does not have elaborate opinions about Kierkegaard. Those men still stand before God. They have not surrendered their selfhood — they have simply not been asked to perform it publicly, which is a mercy. What I am describing is the man who has been given the gift of leisure and education and relative comfort and has used it entirely to construct a social self. A man who thinks a great deal, but only ever thinks what the people around him think. A man who has all the raw material of individuality and has made nothing with it.
That is what I mean by the common man. Not the hardworking father or the humble craftsman. Those men still stand before God. The common man is the one who lets the world think for him.
The crowd's great gift is this: it lets a man feel righteous without requiring repentance. It lets him feel brave without risk. It lets him feel that he has stood for something when he has done nothing more than agree with the people standing next to him. The crowd is, in this sense, the most sophisticated counterfeit of moral life ever devised. It mimics every external feature of virtue — the passion, the certainty, the sense of being on the right side — while evacuating every internal one.
This is the real meaning of what Kierkegaard called "the crowd is untruth." He did not mean that crowds are statistically more likely to be wrong. He meant something more precise and more damning: that crowd-thinking is structurally incapable of truth, regardless of its content, because truth by its nature is a first-person encounter. Truth is not what the tribe has decided. Truth is what a man finds when he has sent every other voice out of the room and sat alone with his conscience and with God.
The crowd gives men the illusion of moral strength
while robbing them of moral responsibility.
The crowd gives people the illusion of moral strength while robbing them of moral responsibility. Inside the crowd, no one is responsible for anything. The individual judgment is dissolved into the collective judgment, and because no individual made the decision, no individual can be held to account for it. This is not an accident. It is the appeal. The crowd is a mechanism for feeling righteous while remaining unaccountable, for acting while remaining blameless, for having convictions that cost nothing because they are rented rather than owned.
There is a simple test for whether a man is common in this sense. Ask what he fears more: God or disapproval. Not which one he would name if you asked him — everyone says God. Ask which one actually governs his behavior when the two come into conflict. Ask what happens when his church's honest teaching diverges from the cultural moment. Ask what happens when his convictions require him to say something that the people around him will not like. Ask whether he has ever stood alone on anything that cost him something.
The righteous man fears God. Not in the sense of terror, but in the sense of weight — the sense that God's judgment on a thing is the final judgment, and that the approval of men is, in the end, noise. The common man fears disapproval. He may have constructed an elaborate theological vocabulary to dress this fear in respectable clothing. But underneath the vocabulary, what drives his behavior is the crowd's verdict on him. He is managed by it. He is shaped by it. He has made his peace with it.
The righteous man fears God. The common man fears disapproval. The distance between those two fears is the distance between a life and a performance.
Truth, by its nature, demands solitude. Not permanent isolation — the great tradition of the faith is communal and was never meant to be lived alone. But the encounter with truth, the moment in which a man decides what he actually believes and why, the moment that separates the owned conviction from the borrowed one — that moment is always solitary. It is discovered in quietness. In conscience. In the secret place where a man stands before God and no one else can follow him.
The Desert Fathers went to the wilderness not because they hated the church but because they understood that certain confrontations with the self can only happen when the noise has been stripped away. Every serious tradition of spiritual formation has understood this. The self must be retrieved from the crowd before it can be offered to God. You cannot present what you do not possess.
To be righteous is to walk against the current. Not because contrarianism is a virtue — it is not — but because the current, at any given moment, is flowing somewhere the truth is not. The current flows toward comfort, toward approval, toward the path of least resistance. Truth runs perpendicular to all of it. The man who has actually encountered it knows this. He does not walk against the current because it makes him feel special. He walks against it because he has been somewhere the current has not, and he cannot pretend otherwise.
To be common is to dissolve into the current. To let it carry you. To mistake its momentum for your own conviction and its destinations for your own conclusions. It is a warm way to travel. It asks nothing. It offers the feeling of motion without any of the friction of actual thought.
To be righteous is to walk against the current.
To be common is to dissolve into it.
Kierkegaard was not merely diagnosing a spiritual malaise. He was tracing a political trajectory — and he could see where it ended before anyone else was willing to look. His primary target was Hegelianism: the dominant intellectual project of his day, which argued that history was a rational progression toward a collective spirit, that truth was not personal but systemic, that the individual found his highest fulfillment not in solitude before God but in participation in the institutional whole. The state, the church, the press — these were the mediating structures through which the Hegelian man became real.
Kierkegaard saw this as a sophisticated mechanism for the destruction of the self. And he understood, with unusual clarity, what that destruction required as a maintenance tool. Oswald Spengler would put it plainly a generation later: "What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. What the press wills is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, and interchange truths. Three weeks of press-work, and the 'truth' is acknowledged by everybody." Kierkegaard would have recognized that sentence immediately. He had already written its theology.
Three weeks of press-work,
and the "truth" is acknowledged
by everybody.
The mechanism is always the same. First, establish that truth is collective rather than personal. Second, establish that the collective is mediated by an institution — the press, the party, the movement, the academic consensus. Third, make dissent from that institution socially costly. The individual who resists is not merely wrong; he is dangerous, destabilizing, a threat to the whole. He must be brought back or cast out. The crowd handles enforcement so the institution never has to.
Kierkegaard traced this logic and followed it to its terminus. He understood that relativism, utopianism, and crowd manipulation are close kin — that these ideas require each other to survive. A utopian project needs relativism to dissolve the fixed moral commitments that would otherwise constrain it. Relativism needs the crowd to enforce its non-enforcement of individual conscience. The crowd needs the promise of utopia to justify the cost of the individual's surrender. Remove any one of the three and the whole edifice weakens. Together, they are nearly self-sustaining.
The chain that followed was not coincidental. Hegel's rational spirit of history shaped Engels and Marx directly — they said so themselves, claiming they had merely turned Hegel's dialectic right-side up. The Communist Manifesto is Hegelian crowd-logic applied to economics: workers unite, the crowd becomes the instrument of historical truth, the individual is subsumed into the class. What followed — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceaușescu — was not a betrayal of the original vision. It was its fulfillment. The crowd, once granted final authority, requires a vanguard to interpret it. The vanguard requires absolute power to enforce its interpretation. The rivers of blood are not an accident of implementation. They are the cost of the premise.
Kierkegaard writes: "To become a crowd is to distinguish life from life — it is the crowd which has power, influence, reputation, and domination, which tyrannically overlooks the single individual as the weak and powerless one, in a temporal-worldly way overlooking the eternal truth: the single individual."
The single individual. That is what the crowd cannot tolerate and cannot accommodate. Not the dissident, necessarily — not the man making noise. Simply the man who has remained himself. Who has not merged. Who carries a conscience that answers to something other than the collective. His very existence is a refutation of the crowd's claim to be the arbiter of truth, and the crowd knows it, even when it cannot articulate why he bothers it.
This is why Kierkegaard's essay is not merely a philosophical observation. It is a warning with a body count attached. Every generation that has surrendered the individual to the collective has produced the same result, dressed in different costumes. The costume changes. The logic does not.
Kierkegaard believed that what made a human being irreducibly individual — what the crowd could colonize but never fully own — was a threefold structure of mind that no collective can replicate. The Aesthetic mind: the capacity to encounter beauty in art, song, architecture, and poetry, and to be moved by it as a singular self. The Ethical mind: the transcendent core truths written on every conscience, marred by sin but not destroyed, which speak to the individual directly and not through committee. And the Religious mind: the drive toward a Creator to answer the questions that naturalism and politics are wholly incapable of answering.
The crowd can organize around a shared aesthetic, but it cannot give you the private shudder of genuine encounter with beauty. It can enforce ethical norms, but it cannot produce the internal act of conscience that precedes them. It can build institutions of religion, but it cannot stand in for you in the secret place where the soul meets God. These three — the beautiful, the ethical, the divine — are by their nature first-person. They require a subject. The crowd has no subject. It has only mass.
This is the ultimate reason the crowd is untruth. Not merely because crowds make bad decisions, though they often do. But because truth, in its deepest register, is an encounter — and encounters require two parties, one of whom must be a self. The man dissolved into the crowd has no self to bring to the encounter. He can mouth the words. He can perform the ritual. He cannot be present for it.
Every generation must decide which to be. Not once, in some dramatic moment of commitment, but continuously — in every small surrender to the comfortable agreement, in every swallowed objection, in every borrowed opinion repeated with the confidence of a man who earned it. The decision is made in the aggregate of a thousand small choices that no one sees.
God sees them. That is Kierkegaard's point. That is the point of the whole tradition he was standing in. The individual stands before God alone — not as a member of the crowd, not as a product of his culture, not as a reflection of the opinions around him. Alone. And in that aloneness, all the borrowed certainties dissolve, and what is left is either something or nothing.
The common man, in the end, risks arriving with nothing. Not because he was wicked, but because he was never there.