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The crowd is untruth, then and now

Last week I saw a bumper sticker saying, “Don’t lose your job. Buy American.” The sticker was on a rear bumper of a European car.

Such a contradiction between what we proclaim and what we do, between what we say and what we see, it is also clearly seen in numerous other cases about more important issues than a sticker on the bumper of an imported car urging readers to buy American products.

For example, on the afternoon of Friday, April 3, 2009, the main stories at the web site of a major Denver newspaper included a story about the local football team, the weather forecast for the next day (there was a winter storm warning), several police and business reports, a note about gays in Iowa, and Madonna’s attempt to adopt yet another girl from Malawi.

At the same time, the main stories on the home page of a well-known and widely used search engine included stories about how to avoid mistakes when dating, the real name of a certain Hollywood celebrity, the connection between unemployment and the stock market, and how the bees’ brain changes when bees reach maturity.

None of those sites nor others I visited included among their top ten stories any information about the killing of 13 immigrants that same day in New York state. Even more, the story about the massacre was only a link to a different page.

However, if you wanted to read about gays in Iowa, about Madonna in Malawi, or about bees’ brain, all the information was there.

We live at a time where superficiality is more important than reality, thus revealing that the media is just a massive tool for entertainment and manipulation, but not for information.

I am not saying that because a story is important and interesting to me that story should be on the cover of the newspaper. What I am saying is that whatever appears on the cover of the papers or on the home page of the web sites is going to be as superficial, irrelevant, amorphous, and self-contradictory as the sticker I mentioned above.

In the middle of the 19th century, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a short essay, The Crowd is Untruth, superbly explaining how and why a crowd, the amorphous agglomeration of people, the “one” in “one says,” the “you” “you know” when in fact no second person is being referenced, the masses lacking all individualization and personality, all of them are untruth and leading to more lies.

The crowd here is neither this particular group nor that one. It is any accumulation of human beings that, showing contempt for anything related to human dignity, want to impose their own desires upon others, using their force, influence, reputation, or dominion. He who opposes such a move is at risk of becoming a martyr.

The mob-mentality brings only dishonor and misery to humanity. The crowd always want a scapegoat, be it 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem or today in any major city.

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