Soren Kierkegaard

tion of privacy itself, is entirely incompatible with being mentioned all over
the country in a newspaper.” The vignette itself is so shy and retiring that
the reader can scarcely get a glimpse of the problem, but it is there .Even
though an announcement such as this is ethically neutral in itself, the mere
fact of its publication becomes a violation of privacy .Kierkegaard saw more
and more clearly that the media’s transformation of the population into “the
public” was accompanied by increasing infantilization, by the deprivation
of the individual’s rightful authority, a condition that was all the more cata-
strophic because it wassaidto be identical to the public’s self-determination
and its supposed possession of influence .And Kierkegaard had no doubts
concerning the consequences of the new shape of public life .It will in fact
be “Denmark’s mortal wound: narrowness, each person’s fear of his peers,
town gossip, backbiting, an absence of the outspokenness one needs to stand
by an opinion,.. .espionage within family life, snooping in domestic mat-
ters, in sum, whatever it takes to please the esteemed public.” The press
was simply “the government’s filth machine”
The press bore a considerable share of the blame for this corruption, and
Kierkegaard did not show a second’s hesitation: “Woe, woe to the daily
press! If Christ came to the world now, as sure as I live, he would take aim
not at the Chief Priests and so forth, but at the journalists.” And if Christ
wouldn’t, Kierkegaard certainly would: “God in Heaven knows that blood-
thirstiness is alien to my soul,” he wrote in 1849, “but yet, yet in the name
of God I would take upon myself the responsibility for giving the order to
fire as soon I had conscientiously taken the greatest pains to ascertain that
not one single other person, indeed not one living being, was in front of
the gun barrels excepting—journalists.” It is not strange that Kierkegaard,
with Giødwad in mind, found it “inconceivable that I have had a friend
who was a journalist.”
It may be true that Kierkegaard did not say anything about the press that
has not been said by others, but he said itbeforethey did .His critique of his
times was so far beyond his own times that it was only many years later that
it became possible to establish the legitimacy of his views .Take, for exam-
ple, this curious little caprice: “Suppose someone invented an instrument,
a convenient little speaking tube that was so powerful it could be heard all
over the entire country .Wouldn’t the police forbid it out of fear that its
use would result in the whole of society becoming mentally deranged? In
the same way, of course, guns are forbidden.” Kierkegaard jotted this down
at about the same time that Karl Marx proclaimed the age of the proletariat
and declared that religion was the opium of the people .Kierkegaard would
only have given his assent, merely adding that the proletariat of the future
would not be organized and active but, on the contrary, it would be an