Over the last ten years or so, the genealogy of a new morality has been charted in western culture. The hyper-morality branch that has come to the fore and threatens its critics with cancel culture is powered by an ersatz religion that ignores scriptural reasoning. Unlike a theistic religion, all that matters with ‘social justice’ is that you signal and piously endorse in public (for political convenience) the ‘virtues’ of the ideology. It is therefore akin to a mythology or secular gospel whose practitioners seek false gods. This mythology has saturated western educational institutions, resulting in intellectual vandalism and dishonesty. Students have little chance of discovering the truth but are instead spoon-fed ideology and fake moral fervour. The result is that critical thinking has been extinguished at a time when we live in a post-truth, hyper-real clown world where billionaire, alleged paedophiles rule over polarised ‘liberal democracies’ and start unprovoked wars to divert attention away from their heinous crimes.

The social justice ideology aims to create a kind of systemic cognitive dissonance where people refuse to change their beliefs because of the perceived discomfort it might bring about. Once an ideology can create cognitive dissonance at a systemic level, then it has begun to lay the course for an authoritarian mindset. Discussing tangential themes and writing in the 1930s, the Russian linguist Voloshinov noted: ‘Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the edifice of ideological signs.’[1] It is the crowd that determines the linguistic code.

But in line with Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and with this systemic cognitive dissonance in mind, I would also argue that the ‘crowd is untruth’. In his eponymous essay, published posthumously in 1859 and written at a time when Kierkegaard protested against the conformism and dogmatic religiosity of the Danish Lutheran Church, he makes his existential critique of mass society.[2] He does this by emphasizing the centrality of the individual as opposed to the crowd, which he believes to be fallacious in terms of spiritual and intellectual truths. He poignantly reminds us that it is precisely for this reason, the crowd is untruth, that Christ was crucified.

Kierkegaard believed that crowds subvert the truth because they crush the subject. In the current context of European cultural degradation, the pervading herd morality doesn’t just subvert the truth, but replaces critical thinking with virtue signalling. For example, the entire public sector, and then subsequently the corporate world, embraced the absurdity of the DEI agenda (diversity, equality, inclusion) without even questioning it. How many CEOs of major companies stopped to ask: ‘Why should we discriminate against the British white male population, all because a black felon in the US was the victim of police brutality?’ They must have known the crowd represented the untruth and moral hysteria, but they did not hesitate to jump on the woke bandwagon. People seek the crowd in this manner, because it means they can belong to a ‘virtuous’ group (safety in numbers and thus diminished responsibility). And this group membership appears to enhance their social standing.

Nietzsche understood that such herd morality is one of the greatest inhibitors to cultural development. If you have to canvass the crowd to see what your ideas might be in the first place, you create a feeble, risk-averse society (der letzte Mensch). The scars of this herd mentality are now everywhere to be seen: Sklavenmoral, wokeism, and ‘social justice’-ideological hegemony have resulted in insidious groupthink – the bonfire of critical thinking. Bad decisions are being made without the right kind of ideological-free scrutiny. For example, just look at the flawed and costly decarbonisation of Europe.

The problem with these kinds of mass societal norms underpinning this herd mentality: they force people to index inauthentically certain values. This would have been an affront to Kierkegaard, for he wanted people to live authentically. By this he meant: live according to the truth and practice what you preach. Then peoples’ lives would be meaningful. You turn inwards, act authentically and live out your beliefs – authenticity is not the objective truth, but subjective truth. Kierkegaard was opposed to his wealthy Danish peers who called themselves Christians, but went to church only once a year and never gave to the poor. Similarly, those who today subscribe unthinkingly to pseudo-values such as ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are living inauthentically, for they are not serving any subjective truth, but instead they accommodate an ideological whim. A virtue-signaller is not being true to himself and thus has no chance of discovering any truth at all. He is simply indexing pseudo-values so that he can be perceived to be righteous. Instead, a true society made up of individuals behaving authentically might be one whose people aspired to ‘stoicism’, ‘bravery’ and ‘critical awareness’, for these values are real and trans-generational. There is no cowardice here.

If you are self-censoring, biting your tongue, because you think speaking out might damage your career, then you too are being inauthentic in the Kierkegaardian sense. You are denying yourself the subjective truth, and therefore truth altogether. Thus, you are living in the shadows of soft totalitarianism, all so you can get your pension and live out your conventional life in a safe-space. But an inauthentic life is one that is shackled to a repressive, Kafkaesque system; you are denying yourself the responsibility of your own existence, and that ends in despair or what Kierkegaard called ‘sickness unto death’.

If you want to be a critical thinker, you have to ‘become one and not many’. As always with Kierkegaard, it feels like an either-or scenario. Being one and not many in the twenty-first century means questioning the groupthink, resisting ideological control, looking inwards to find the truth, and speaking up if you feel something is wrong. And then, as Kierkegaard said: ‘Everyone who in truth will serve the truth, is eo ipso in some way or other a martyr.’[3] Sadly, this fact will, I suspect, only become apparent at a later stage, when European societies degenerate into sectarian violence and voluntary apartheid, and when its citizens retrospectively seek explanations for the lunacy that has unfolded.

But Kierkegaard went one stage further by stating that he believed recognising the ‘crowd as the court of last resort’ was to deny God, because crowds can only lead to untruths. God is the truth, so, in Kierkegaardian terms, when we appropriate truth, we are appropriating God. But you can only find the truth from within. Kierkegaard thought that we had to seek God for ourselves rather than follow the crowd. And that has been my own recent journey to Orthodox Christianity: lonely at times, but ultimately fulfilling, because you appropriate the truth on your terms. It requires commitment and sacrifice, which boil down to the same thing. As with all treasures, it is rewarding to find the sacred through your own toils rather than being told where to look for it, because it fosters a sense of agency. You enjoy a sense of ownership over your spiritual trajectory, and you have created a positive feedback loop, as psychologists put it.

Kierkegaard believed that ‘Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity, and subjectivity is a passion for one’s eternal happiness.’[4] Subjectivity is the truth of man who, as an authentic being, can act as a free agent – unlike philosophy, Christianity teaches us how to become a subject in truth.[5] My own spiritual path has been premised entirely on subjective faith, and I could only gain that subjectivity when I moved away from the crowd, who told me repeatedly: Stiven, tebe eto ne nuzhno (“Stephen, you don’t need this”). Just as man has to achieve greatness alone, the road to salvation must be travelled alone. You don’t need Hegelian systemic thinking, social conformity, rationality or discursive reasoning. In this era of objectivity, there is after all no need for God.

Even after becoming Orthodox, my favourite services remain those where I am apart from the crowd and can enjoy the beauty and sacred allure of Orthodoxy as an individual before God. Then, you can rest a while in the pathos and inwardness of understanding. I would never try and persuade someone to become a Christian through analysis of Scripture or preaching. This kind of objectivity dulls the personal interest – the ubique et nusquam in which faith comes into being. I would simply take him or her to vespers at the most beautiful Orthodox church I know, and see if there is any spark from the synaesthetic immediacy and immanence that Orthodoxy expounds. If there is, then perhaps that person can find his or her own path, and it will probably be very different from mine.

In this regard, you might say that I take the notion of the fallacy of the crowd and the individualism it implies to extremes. I sit in crowded restaurants in Moscow saying grace aloud in Church Slavonic before tucking into my Lenten coulibiac. People stare at me. Not because this is so unusual, but because it is exceptional for a foreigner to do this in Russia. But these tokens of gratitude structure my day and remind me to keep God close in everything I do. Nobody taught me to do these things. It just became part of my lived Orthodox routine.

If you spend any time with monks at Orthodox monasteries, you soon realise that they seek to dwell in the world of interiority and subjectivity at all times. The Kierkegaard way is the Orthodox way. And one of the reasons he told us to be aware of the fallacy of the crowd is that it opposes all things conducive to a spiritual awakening. By joining the fallacy of the crowd, Kierkegaard believed you might not only be denying yourself the truth, which is subjective, but also the authentic path to God. When I look at the closed-minded thinking that induces the herd morality currently plaguing secular western societies, that is more or less how I see things too.

Stephen Pax Leonard is an author, linguist, and traveller. He lives in Moscow. Books: Noble Sentiments for an Exile: And Other Writings (Wipf& Stock, 2024), Annals of Solitude: A Year in a Hut in the Arctic (Wipf& Stock, 2022), Travels in Cultural Nihilism: Some Essays (2017). More at: https://stephenpaxleonard.com/

Image: © Peter Feiler, Music Was My First Love (2019, Detail).

Notes

[1] Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1986 [1929]. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Harvard University Press.

[2] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kierkegaard/untruth.html. [online edition of The Crowd is Untruth by Søren Kierkegaard].

[3] Kierkegaard, The Crowd is Untruth.

[4] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 1944 [1846]. Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson. Princeton University Press.

[5] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.