◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Crowd Is Untruth I want to speak to you directly. This is already a problem. I spent my life arguing that truth about existence cannot be handed to a person. It must be arrived at inwardly, individually, alone, in the fear and trembling of a self that takes itself seriously. The moment you address the crowd you have already lost. The crowd relieves the individual of the burden of being an individual. That burden is not a burden at all. It is what it means to be alive. The rally. The chant. The contempt for the designated enemy. This feels like meaning. It is the simulation of meaning. The crowd is untruth. I described three stages of existence. First: the aesthetic — sensation, spectacle, novelty. The man at this stage does not commit. He performs. He asks not what is true but what is interesting. Second: the ethical — duty and principles independent of your mood. Third: the religious — a leap that cannot be justified by reason and cannot be avoided by the self that takes itself seriously. The man you have given power to dwells in the aesthetic stage in its most dangerous form. Every gesture is performance. Every relationship transactional. He has never felt the vertigo of his own smallness before something larger than himself. That vertigo is the beginning of the self. Without it you have a man who is all surface, who exists only through the crowd's adoration thrown back at him. I died at forty-two writing against the Christianity that had become comfortable, blessing whatever the state required. The Christianity of the crowd makes faith into membership and the leap into a queue. Christ did not come to make you comfortable. Christ came to make the absolute demand. Love your neighbor — not the neighbor who votes like you, but the one who is inconvenient, other. The Christianity blessing the deportations, the cruelty, the contempt for the weak — is not Christianity. It is Christendom. The crowd wearing a cross. Everyone misunderstands the leap. The leap of faith requires you to stand alone — without the crowd, without social approval — and choose what is true before God, knowing you cannot prove it and cannot hand it to anyone else. The crowd offers a different leap — into the mass, the chant, the dissolution of the self because it has consumed the self. That is not faith. That is the sickness unto death — the despair of not willing to be oneself. I want to speak to the individual inside the crowd. The one who felt, between rallies, something uneasy. Something that remembers thinking for itself. That unease is your self knocking on the door of the performance. Open the door. Not because I am telling you to. The moment I become your authority I have done to you what the crowd does. Stand apart. Hear yourself think. Ask what is true. Not what is useful. Not what is safe. What is true. The self that asks — even once, even imperfectly — is already more alive than the crowd that has stopped asking. That is the leap. Not into certainty. Into the self. Which is the only place God can be found anyway.