The Philosopher Who Predicted Instagram in 1846

0:00There's an amusing subgenre of Kierkegaard that deals with the press in the media. Yeah. And I actually think it's incredibly timely for the world that we live in today, but it's also just kind of funny. Back in 1845, There was a literary reviewer who talked a little bit of shit about Kierkegaard in a local tabloid. And Kierkegaard, of course, just being a bundle of sunshine and joy, didn't take it very well. He got very, very butthurt about it. And so he decided to kind of like poke the bear a little bit.

0:36And he wrote some disparaging things about the publication and the author and made fun of his ideas and his work a little bit. And in Kierkegaard's mind, he was stoking an intellectual feud with another intellectual and that they were going to argue ideas to ideas. What he didn't realize is that most people don't care about ideas. They just enjoy reading about somebody shitting on somebody else. And so what ended up happening is that this publication just started roasting Kierkegaard brutally over multiple months.

1:11Yeah. And like getting into his personal life, making fun of what he looked like, how he walked. They dug up the stories about Regine and just tortured him about how stupid he was and how he was like too afraid to marry this girl and how he's all alone and everything. Like just absolutely roasted him to the point that people would actually stop on the street and point at Kierkegaard and laugh at him and be like, oh, are you the guy in the magazine?

1:40Oh, my God. So obviously Kierkegaard didn't enjoy this very much. I don't think anybody would enjoy it, but especially a guy like him didn't really take to it. What's interesting, though, is that Kierkegaard was astoundingly brilliant. And so what this inspired in him is some of the greatest philosophy and writing about media and journalism that has ever been put to page. He basically took all of his personal grievances and turned it into philosophical works that critiqued Marxism.

2:14Just the whole profession of journalism, the whole apparatus of media and what the effect of widespread media and the printing press was having on society at large. So Kierkegaard's argument, he made this argument in his essay called The Present Age, is he said that it created an environment where people are able to disseminate opinions without any accountability for those opinions. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar, right? So he said basically any jackass can just go, you know, pay 10 cents, get a bunch of pamphlets printed, start putting them on street corners and say whatever the hell they want about anybody.

2:52In a lot of cases, these people were publishing anonymously. There were no repercussions. There was no fact checking. There was no like... I think back then there were probably no libel or slander lawsuits. So it's just like rampant disinformation going everywhere, all over the place, all at once. The second thing is that he noted that this media environment created this kind of nebulous sense of, quote unquote, the public opinion. Now, he brilliantly broke down the fact that public opinion is like not really a thing, right?

3:24Like it's the public, everybody, it's thousands or millions of individuals who all have their own opinions and all have like very nuanced perspectives on all sorts of different issues. But... When taken in aggregate, it just seems like this one massive blob of sentiment. It's like an abstraction almost. It is. There's nothing real to it. There's... A hundred percent. Okay. And what he noted is that this kind of our inability to conceptualize public opinion or recognize that it's a bit of a mirage, it doesn't really exist.

3:56He said that journalists will leverage this to their benefit, right? So they will... publish a bunch of stuff, talking a bunch of shit about Drew Bernie, right? They'll come back a month later and they'll say, well, public opinion is that Drew Bernie is like a really terrible person, right? And so they will seed public opinion by what they publish. And then they'll come back later and say, well, this is what the public thinks. So we're just reporting on it.

4:18And this is something, I mean, you still see this today, right? And he noticed how pernicious this is and how it breeds kind of a certain amount of distrust in others and within society. And obviously he was kind of on the butt end of the joke of that, but it really concerned him, the social direction that this would take culture and intellectual discourse. One of my favorite quotes by any philosopher ever is Kierkegaard. I love this quote so much.

4:47He said, if I had a daughter and she became a prostitute, I would spend every day of my life trying to save her, trying to correct her ways. If I had a son and he became a journalist, I would disown him on the spot and never speak to him again. Wow. Okay. Yeah. That gives you a sense of kind of where Kierkegaard put the mainstream media. The reason this matters, and this is extremely appropriate today, is that he said that it created this social, this kind of widespread media in this like phantom public opinion that everybody is trying to live up to, even though like it doesn't really exist.

5:25It creates this effect on each individual, which he called leveling, which is that it creates an incentive to not stand out in any distinctive way. To kind of bring all of your impulses and desires back to the baseline medium of the public opinion, right? Like he noticed that people generally outsource their decision making and they outsource how they see things. And so if... The handful of newspapers and magazines are telling them that everybody thinks this way.

5:57They will kind of default to thinking that way as well. And so what it does is it takes all the kind of spiky, unique individuality of each of each person and it levels them all out so that they have the same opinions about all the same things at the same time. about everybody. This prevents an ability to commit because by definition, to commit to something, you have to be willing to suffer for it. You have to be willing to stand out. You have to be willing to do something that most other people are not willing to do.

6:27And so if you are constantly being incentivized by this magical public opinion to temper the more extreme aspects of yourself, then you'll never feel at liberty to make any of those commitments. Because everything you want to do is what everybody else wants to do. He has a great quote from the present age where he says, A public... contrary to an individual, is an abstraction. It's a group of spectators who observe and gossip but never make a commitment.

6:54All talk, no walk. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because as soon as you commit to something, you are, by definition, standing out. You are telling everybody like, hey, I'm willing to lose your approval for this one thing. And I think social media has kind of just taken that. First of all, it's globalized it. And second of all, it's kind of put it on steroids because it's available 24-7. I mean, at least back in the 1840s, you could throw your newspaper away and like go sit in a corner or something for a couple days.

7:25Today, it's just it's everywhere. It's in front of you all the time. And his argument is, I mean, this does not exist without mass media, right? I mean, that's what you're saying. And so he called this 180 years ago, and it's only gotten worse. I guess with that interlude in the middle where you said about, you know, the centralization of all the information, whatever. But even then, I guess you could argue there was a homogenizing factor at that point.

7:46I think in the case of both of Kierkegaard's main arguments, A, things have gotten worse, and B, they're more true now than they ever were, right? Like it's on the one hand, it's like the optionality today is more abundant than it's ever been, right? And that Kierkegaard would say, obviously people are more anxious than they've ever been before. Like by his definition of anxiety, this is exactly what you would expect in a world full of abundance and opportunity and freedom and infinite information, right?

8:16And then on the other hand, he would say, obviously, you would expect culture to get more homogenous for people to become more susceptible to groupthink, not less. Like, when you and I were kids, right, and the internet was coming online and everything, like, the big kind of utopian promise of the internet was, like... everybody's going to have access to everything. So everybody's going to think for themselves, right? Like you're going to be able to see all sides of every issue.

8:42And so everybody's going to make their own decisions and it's going to be amazing. And I think Kierkegaard would actually make the point, no, no, no, the opposite's going to happen because the more interconnectivity people have with each other, the more this specter of an imaginary public opinion hangs over each individual. And we're just going to go to it looking for. Yes. And the more thinker, the more people feel like they must default to that opinion.

9:08It becomes more of a liability to think for yourself under those conditions than less. Our generation, you and I, we, we opine all the time. Like, oh man, remember before smartphones where you could just like be a fucking idiot and nobody cared? You know, like maybe you could go get hammered. Nobody take a picture or a video of you like. and make fun of you the next day. Like, there was a freedom to it of not having that connectivity. I just heard, like, young people don't really dance anymore because...

9:35This, I just heard. Camera phones? Yeah, because like you're going to get videoed. You're going to be on video if you're going to dance somewhere. That's leveling. It's a perfect example of leveling. They don't drink as much anymore. They don't date as much anymore. They don't have sex as much anymore. They don't even ask each other out anymore. Juerkegaard would look at this and he would say like, we're leveling the fuck out of everybody right now because it is the more interconnected everything becomes, the more of a liability it is to stick your neck out for anything.

10:01Yeah. I don't know if you notice this like towards the end of your travel years or whatever, but I'd everywhere I'd go. But if you, if you went to a big city somewhere that had been even somewhat capitalistic, I guess, you know, and it's influence, everything was kind of starting to turn into the same. I think that the, the whole travel boom you were talking about in the digital nomad thing that a lot of that was, Oh, we're going to build an infrastructure around this.

10:21And this is how you live this life. That, that was a leveling thing even for that, you know, where, where it once was a thing you did to assert your individuality, it became something that you actually became a part of the public. It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but I do think that's true. That's actually something that a couple of friends of mine have noted. I don't travel nearly as much as I used to, but I have some friends in the travel industry and they still travel all the time.

10:45And they've noted that they're like, every place is feeling the same. They all have the same restaurants, the same hotel chains. They They have the same amenities. You go to the same parties and it's the same people everywhere, right? It's everybody's like taking their Instagram selfie and drinking their bougie martini and eating their gluten-free diet and everything's becoming the same. Hey everybody, hope you enjoyed. This video, it was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.

11:11If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description. And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment. See you in the next one.