A crowd — not this or that, one now living or long dead, a crowd of the lowly or of nobles, of rich or poor, etc., but in its very concept — is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Crowd is Untruth
LXXII
If a man would pursue Philosophy [learning], his first task is to throw away conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he has a conceit [preconception] that he already knows.
— Epictetus, Harvard Classics, Vol. 2, Part 2 – The Golden Sayings of Epictetus
In groups of people (committees) there tends to be an inclination, for the sake of consensus, to demand compromise from all the participants rather than evaluating (debating) whether certain points of view are wrong and should be changed and whether they are right and to remain unchanged. This is why Kierkegaard makes the claim “the crowd is untruth“; the introduction of a single untruth will corrupt the truth and, therefore, make the consensus untruth. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:
There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that ‘the crowd’ received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.
For ‘the crowd’ is untruth. Eternally, godly, christianly what Paul says is valid: “only one receives the prize,” [I Cor. 9:24]
— Søren Kierkegaard. The Crowd is Untruth
Here’s the whole scripture to which he referred:
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
— Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24 (NIV1984)
Using iMovie on my iPhone I spliced together a couple of clips of Ruby and Rusty from the first week we had them. Some of the clips are, obviously, before Rusty went to Dallas with Clinton.
It just makes me smile to see them playing like puppies; I watch it whenever I’m needing a happy moment.
