THE CROWD

Søren Kierkegaard: "A crowd in its very concept is the untruth"

We all want to be authentic. We all want to show our true self to the world. Plus, maybe more importantly, we all know that it’s required for freedom; for any free choice must first be authentic. But from the existentialist view, the path towards authenticity isn’t an easy or enjoyable one. The journey of seeking who one truly is does not mirror the fantasy of the monk, who we all imagine inching towards enlightenment, gaining more and more inner peace and equanimity as they grow. That road to serenity is a well groomed façade, like the duck calmly gliding on the water, masterfully concealing the mayhem and commotion beneath the surface. No, for the existentialist, the path to know oneself requires a willingness to undergo discomfort, pain, and struggle, with no promise of anything positive. From this view, the one who knows themselves least is, in many cases, the happiest. 

In an effort to name the various stages of existential enlightenment, I’ll call the person in this first level The Follower. This person’s acts are influenced mostly by the crowd, what others are saying and doing. At this level, the person looks for others to tell them the answers to the inconsistencies of the world, they parrot these and they strongly oppose the natural antagonisms that arise, staying, at all costs, within their bubble of certainty. More power to those who can stay and live well in this space of repression. It is a happy and satisfyingly ignorant space. One may be able to live their entire life here, a blissful puppet to the world. Yet this group can suffer from the unconscious pushing down of the uncertainties of life, becoming like an over-pressurized tire, exploding violently without warning in body or mind. 

The next stage of selfhood is the Hero. This is the one who breaks from the crowd into individuality driven by a purpose to achieve some objective. This is the level that Hollywood pumps up as who we should be striving to become. It’s the poor house keeper’s son who rises up and leads the rebellion, overcoming the controlling forces of society, or the millionaire who escapes the rat race to live peacefully in the wilderness, or the ill-fated laborer who marries the millionaire and escapes their destitution. The Hero believes that achieving some end state will solve all their problems and put them in control of their life. Conveniently, these heroic stories always stop short of living with the reality of freedom they’ve seemed to gain. They don’t show you the broken society after the rebellion, they don’t show you the millionaire cowboy, lonely, being mauled by a bear outside his wilderness cabin, they don’t show you the couple in marriage counseling from not being able to stand each other. Although the Hero was able to recognize the antagonism of the crowd and attempt to escape its control they, in a sense, are just as controlled by the crowd, because they are unaware of how the crowd defined the object of their desire. It was the crowd who told the destitute that the answers were in money, and who told the millionaire that the answers were in the wilderness. The hero is so focused on the answer that they are blind to its embeddedness in the system they seek to escape. 

This is why every person who survives their traverse into the Hero role, if they are willing to continue, is ultimately led to the next level of enlightenment, the Tragic Hero. The Tragic Hero is the one who comes to realize that the antagonism that drove their desire to escape to wholeness outside of the system cannot be fulfilled; there is nothing that can ultimately satisfy their desire fully. They become disillusioned, and realize that achieving what they have propped up as the solution will not ultimately satisfy them and understand that chasing this endpoint will keep them controlled in a spiral of desire. This is why we find so many successful people, like celebrities, falling into depression. They achieved their paradise, and it’s hell. When one first comes into contact with this void left by the absence of what they thought was certain, they can progress to a type of sad acceptance of this fact in the next stage as the Knight of Infinite Resignation. 

The Knight of Infinite Resignation is a Kierkegaardian term and ties with Freud’s insight that the goal of life is to move from the “misery” of neurosis that comes with living in a crowd that pushes you around with its fantasies to an “everyday unhappiness” that can see how the cracks in society tell us something more true about reality than mainstream conventions. This stage is a somewhat stoic stance in the face of a lack that we can never overcome, yet the knowledge of this complexity paralyzes this knight into a type of living coma. Like the man of war who’s “seen things” and has trouble coming back to live in “normal” society, he sees the contradictions of reality not as something to suppress, but as evidence of the “dizziness of freedom” that we possess. Others who live blindly to this freedom are exposed as fake, and the knight is unwilling to participate. 

But if the knight pursues, and the conviction to stay in the authenticity of this tension grows, their refusal to lie to themselves becomes ever stronger, no matter the societal pressure to return to the in-crowd, no matter how tempting the crowd’s promises. In this case, the Absurd Hero, a Camusian term, emerges when a glimmer of meaning arises again in the void itself; the characteristic of unknowing begins to hold more truth than knowing. Every lived experience brings with it a deep personal presence in the absence of something purposeful. A comfort builds, not to relax and stay still, but to continue on and participate just as strongly in a universe without inherent meaning, but with only the meaning you bring to it. A love of life grows for it to be exactly how it is, driving us to pursue goals with unmatched passion, free from the need to achieve them.

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