The Dead Cause Is Not Mine

The supposedly vital left-wing “Union of Egoists” has been dragged to the garbage heap of the joke collection of anyone who calls themselves a Marxist or a Socialist. And since this is already a garbage heap of a sizable proportion, this is the garbage heap’s garbage heap. Garbage to the second power! Those who call themselves “egoists” (or more accurately, those who flirt with the writing of anarchists on their way to the polls to pull the lever for any centrist candidate endorsed by the New York Times) takes on the gambit of causes which mark every progressive, liberal racket which has ever skidded past Joe Biden’s intern’s to-do list. What is an “egoist” if all that one sees as “their property” is a milquetoast pastiche of progressive causes which are alien to their own interests?

“A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defense. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious.”

-Nietzsche, “The Antichrist”

How can one find one’s interest? One does not find it with the rational part of their brain, the rational part of the brain is only of service to the animal, to the lizard which knows what is their cause, and what is an alien cause. How much would you love to commune with yourself, with your true causes?

The lizard however, is sadly a fool. The lizard brain becomes anxious when it sees what can help it, and it wholeheartedly embraces those who wish to kill it. Maybe it is a disservice to call it a lizard brain, as the lizard knows better who wishes to kill it and who will help it much better than man!

“Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself,” Stirner wrote mockingly of the critics of egoism. Yet, he grovels to Marx that he is only against “sacred” socialism and not socialism. This while Marx attempts to throw Stirner on the garbage pile of history. But maybe it is because Stirner is correct to look at self-interest, that Marx has forever necro-bumped Stirner into the popular imagination whenever someone dares write his name three times on the chalk board!

Dialectically, Stirner has Marx to thanks for his immortality, for Marx survives in a way which one could imagine Hegel desired to. Hegel, aligned with constitutional monarchy, a dead system in first-world nations, could have easily been the “Marx of Monarchy,” but instead, he was the plaything of Marx.

Hegel currently has wide swaths of proponents, but all under the heel of Marx who is the dominant political character. Hegel’s politics are a side-note.

Stirner is a different case than Hegel, although he suffers the same contextual prison as Hegel as a secondary character to Marx, the material origin of production doesn’t overcome the necessity of Stirner’s anarchic destruction in the true heart of liberation. Stirner’s ontology was lacking in some key ways, which we could say was Stirner’s own fault, but maybe it was more of a fault of his times, for he did not know Freud, he did not have access to every iteration of anarchism and their failures, he did not know the failure of Makhno’s black army, Stirner was just publishing his thoughts.

As Stirner published his thoughts, so do I. I do not say much, only that the dead cause is not my cause, and it will never be my cause. My cause will always be my own. I will bring those along the way who are aligned with my cause, and I am indifferent to those who have other pursuits, until they align themselves against my cause.

When that day comes, I will politely discuss with anyone my cause. What, did you think I was going to war? What century is this?

Like I said, I do not say much, only that the dead cause is not my cause, and it will never be my cause. My causes will always be my own.