Kierkegaard’s diatribe on “the public” is priceless:

In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public.

[…]

A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by the deceptive juggling of an age of reflection, which makes it appear flattering to the individual who in this way can arrogate to himself this monster, in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor. The public is the fairy story of an age of understanding, which in imagination makes the individual into something even greater than a king above his people; but the public is also a gruesome abstraction through which the individual will receive his religious formation—or sink.

This is considered over against “the concreteness of individuality.” Not, it should be noted, individualism, but the individualness which may be “taught to be content, in the highest religious sense, with himself and his relation to God, to be at one with himself instead of being in agreement with a public which destroys everything that is relative, concrete and particular in life; educated to find peace within himself and with God, instead of counting hands.“

There is footnote for the above passage that goes well with David Dark’s lonely war against abstractions:

All Kierkegaard’s religious discourses, which form a large part of his works, were dedicated to " ‘that individual’, whom with joy and thankfulness I call my reader because he reads, not thinking of the author, but of God".