The Single Individual

Kierkegaard sets the single individual (den Enkelte) against "the crowd." The crowd offers anonymity, and with it release from responsibility: in a mob no one has to answer for himself, and so "the crowd is untruth." Truth, as he understands it, always addresses one person – you, here, who must choose and cannot hide behind "everyone." It is his bequest to democratic mass society and to every later critique of conformism, from Heidegger's das Man to anyone who has asked how to stay himself when everyone is saying the same thing.