A Prophecy by Soren Kierkegaard - with commentary

[In the following entry, my commentary is italicized while the words of Kierkegaard appear in regular font.]

Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube which, say, could be heard over the whole land... I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used.

[Kill your television now before you and your whole family become pod-people!]

On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its being calculated to make, if possible, the passing moment a thousand or ten thousand times more inflated and important than it really is. But all moral elevation consists first and foremost in being weaned from the momentary.

[Wake up and smell the fact that this present moment only matters in light of eternity.]

If Christianity is really to be proclaimed, it will become apparent that it is the daily press which will, if possible, make it impossible. There has never been a power more diametrically opposed to Christianity as the daily press. Day in and day out the daily press does nothing but delude men with the supreme axiom of this lie, that numbers are decisive. Christianity, on the other hand, is based on the thought that the truth lies in the single individual.

[Television makes us slaves to popular fashion! You will not be free unless you stop caring about the things they want you to care about, like American Idol and superbowl ads, and simply cherish what Christ plants within your soul!]

If someone adopts the opinion of the public today and tomorrow is hissed and booed, he is hissed and booed by the public. A nation, an assembly, a human being can change in such a way that they are seen to be no longer the same; but the public can become the very opposite and is still the same, the public.

[God can change an individual, or even ten thousand individuals, but nobody can transform a mob or a crowd.]

It is very doubtful, then, that the age will be saved through the notion of social organization, of association. In our age the principle of association (which may at best have validity with respect only to material interests) is an evasion, a dissipation, an illusion, whose dialectic is that as it strengthens the individuals, so it weakens them. It strengthens by numbers, by solidarity, but from the ethical point of view this is a weakening. Not until the single individual has established an ethical stance in spite of the whole world, not until then can there be any question of genuinely uniting. Otherwise it gets to be a union of people who separately are weak; a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child marriage.

[The only way to make a group of people strong and effective is if it is made up of individuals who have stong ethics, good morals, and God's values; and they must have embraced these on their own.]