The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

by Max Stirner

If I have no duty, then I know no law either.

“Why, everything must go topsy-turvy if every one could do what he would!” Well, who says that every one can do everything ? What are you there for, pray, you who do not need to put up with everything? Defend yourself, and no one will do anything to you! He who would break your will has to do with you, and is your enemy. Deal with him as such. If there stand behind you for your protection some millions more, then you are an imposing power and will have an easy victory. But, even if as a power you overawe your opponent, still you are not on that account a hallowed authority to him, unless he be a simpleton. He does not owe you respect and regard, even though he will have to consider your might.

The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime.” Crime,208 then—so the individual’s violence is called; and only by crime does he overcome 209 the State’s violence when he thinks that the State is not above him, but he is above the State.

Good-hearted people think the laws ought to prescribe only what is accepted in the people’s feeling as right and proper. But what concern is it of mine what is accepted in the nation and by the nation? The nation will perhaps be against the blasphemer; therefore a law against blasphemy. Am I not to blaspheme on that account? Is this law to be more than an “order” to me? I put the question.

If you let yourself be made out in the right by another, you must no less let yourself be made out in the wrong by him; if justification and reward come to you from him, expect also his arraignment and punishment.

Every ego is from birth a criminal to begin with against the people, the State.

"Everyone who has ever drawn a breath has broken a law." - Christopher S. Hyatt

Talk with the so-called criminal as with an egoist, and he will be ashamed, not that he transgressed against your laws and goods, but that he considered your laws worth evading, your goods worth desiring; he will be ashamed that he did not—despise you and yours together, that he was too little an egoist.

Only against a sacred thing are there criminals; you against me can never be a criminal, but only an opponent.

Society would have every one come to his right indeed, but yet only to that which is sanctioned by society, to the society-right, not really to his right. But I give or take to myself the right out of my own plenitude of power, and against every superior power I am the most impenitent criminal. Owner and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right than—me, neither God nor the State nor nature nor even man himself with his “eternal rights of man,” neither divine nor human right.

According to the liberal way of thinking, right is to be obligatory for me because it is thus established by human reason, against which my reason is “unreason.” Formerly people inveighed in the name of divine reason against weak human reason; now, in the name of strong human reason, against egoistic reason, which is rejected as “unreason.” And yet none is real but this very “unreason.” Neither divine nor human reason, but only your and my reason existing at any given time, is real, as and because you and I are real.

Once you no longer let right run around free, once you draw it back into its origin, into you, it is your right; and that is right which suits you.

Every one is equally dear to God if he adores him, equally agreeable to the law if only he is a law-abiding person; whether the lover of God and the law is humpbacked and lame, whether poor or rich, and the like, that amounts to nothing for God and the law; just so, when you are at the point of drowning, you like a Negro as rescuer as well as the most excellent Caucasian—yes, in this situation you esteem a dog not less than a man. But to whom will not every one be also, contrariwise, a preferred or disregarded person? God punishes the wicked with his wrath, the law chastises the lawless, you let one visit you every moment and show the other the door.

The “equality of right” is a phantom just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace, which, be it said, one may also acquire by his desert; for desert and grace are not contradictory, since even grace wishes to be “deserved” and our gracious smile falls only to him who knows how to force it from us.

Truly it is not a failing in you that you stiffen224 yourself against me and assert your distinctness or peculiarity:

🤨🤔😏

Our weakness consists not in this, that we are in opposition to others, but in this, that we are not completely so; that we are not entirely severed from them, or that we seek a “communion,” a “bond,” that in communion we have an ideal. One faith, one God, one idea, one hat, for all! If all were brought under one hat, certainly no one would any longer need to take off his hat before another.

As unique you have nothing in common with the other any longer, and therefore nothing divisive or hostile either; you are not seeking to be in the right against him before a third party, and are standing with him neither “on the ground of right” nor on any other common ground. The opposition vanishes in complete—severance or singleness.

What I called “my right” is no longer “right” at all, because right can be bestowed only by a spirit, be it the spirit of nature or that of the species, of mankind, the Spirit of God or that of His Holiness or His Highness, etc. What I have without an entitling spirit I have without right; I have it solely and alone through my power.

What I can get by force I get by force, and what I do not get by force I have no right to, nor do I give myself airs, or consolation, with my imprescriptible right.

In what lies the folly of the political liberals but in their opposing the people to the government and talking of people’s rights? So there is the people going to be of age, etc. As if one who has no mouth could be mündig!230 Only the individual is able to be mündig. Thus the whole question of the liberty of the press is turned upside down when it is laid claim to as a “right of the people.” It is only a right, or better the might, of the individual. If a people has liberty of the press, then I, although in the midst of this people, have it not; a liberty of the people is not my liberty, and the liberty of the press as a liberty of the people must have at its side a press law directed against me.

Liberty of the people is not my liberty!

A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual’s expense; for it is not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people. The freer the people, the more bound the individual; the Athenian people, precisely at its freest time, created ostracism, banished the atheists, poisoned the most honest thinker. How they do praise Socrates for his conscientiousness, which makes him resist the advice to get away from the dungeon! He is a fool that he concedes to the Athenians a right to condemn him. Therefore it certainly serves him right; why then does he remain standing on an equal footing with the Athenians? Why does he not break with them? Had he known, and been able to know, what he was, he would have conceded to such judges no claim, no right. That he did not escape was just his weakness, his delusion of still having something in common with the Athenians, or the opinion that he was a member, a mere member of this people. But he was rather this people itself in person, and could only be his own judge.

Socrates should have known that the Athenians were his enemies, he alone his judge. The self-deception of a “reign of law,” etc., should have given way to the perception that the relation was a relation of might.

How can I be free when I must bind myself by oath to a constitution, a charter, a law, “vow body and soul” to my people? How can I be my own when my faculties may develop only so far as they “do not disturb the harmony of society” (Weitling)?

The fall of peoples and mankind will invite me to my rise.

The people is dead.—Up with me!

Certainly they can enter upon intercourse only as prisoners,

ANAL intercourse! *hums Oz theme*

For them, for these its weak members, the family cares, because they belong to the family, do not belong to themselves and care for themselves. This weakness Hegel praises when he wants to have match-making left to the choice of the parents.

🎵The strong are sometimes wrong, but the weak are never free....🎵

The fight of the world to-day is, as it is said, directed against the “established.” Yet people are wont to misunderstand this as if it were only that what is now established was to be exchanged for another, a better, established system. But war might rather be declared against establishment itself, the State, not a particular State, not any such thing as the mere condition of the State at the time;

The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual—to make him subject to some generality or other; it lasts only so long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only the clearly-marked restriction of me, my limitation, my slavery. Never does a State aim to bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to the purpose of the State.

Over the sovereign, be he called prince or people, there never stands a government: that is understood of itself. But over me there will stand a government in every “State,” in the absolute as well as in the republican or “free.” I am as badly off in one as in the other.

Edgar Bauer’s whole attempt comes to a change of masters. Instead of wanting to make the people free, he should have had his mind on the sole realizable freedom, his own.

For me the people is in any case an—accidental power, a force of nature, an enemy that I must overcome.

What empty talk the political liberals utter with emphatic decorum is well seen again in Nauwerck’s On Taking Part in the State.246. There complaint is made of those who are indifferent and do not take part, who are not in the full sense citizens, and the author speaks as if one could not be man at all if one were not a politician. In this he is right; for, if the State ranks as the warder of everything “human,” we can have nothing human without taking part in it. But what does this make out against the egoist? Nothing at all, because the egoist is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the State except “Get out of my sunshine.” Only when the State comes in contact with his ownness does the egoist take an active interest in it. If the condition of the State does not bear hard on the closet-philosopher, is he to occupy himself with it because it is his “most sacred duty?” So long as the State does according to his wish, what need has he to look up from his studies? Let those who from an interest of their own want to have conditions otherwise busy themselves with them. Not now, nor evermore, will “sacred duty” bring folks to reflect about the State—as little as they become disciples of science, artists, etc., from “sacred duty.” Egoism alone can impel them to it, and will as soon as things have become much worse. If you showed folks that their egoism demanded that they busy themselves with State affairs, you would not have to call on them long; if, on ...

In the State the party is current. “Party, party, who should not join one!” But the individual is unique,247 not a member of the party. He unites freely, and separates freely again. The party is nothing but a State in the State, and in this smaller bee-State “peace” is also to rule just as in the greater. The very people who cry loudest that there must be an opposition in the State inveigh against every discord in the party. A proof that they too want only a—State. All parties are shattered not against the State, but against the ego.248

What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

Harbor a doubt of Christianity, and you are already no longer a true Christian, you have lifted yourself to the “effrontery” of putting a question beyond it and haling Christianity before your egoistic judgment-seat. You have—sinned against Christianity, this party cause (for it is surely not for example a cause for the Jews, another party.) But well for you if you do not let yourself be affrighted: your effrontery helps you to ownness.

It is at once quite another situation if, as in North America, society determines to let the duelists bear certain evil consequences of their act, such as withdrawal of the credit hitherto enjoyed. To refuse credit is everybody’s affair, and, if a society wants to withdraw it for this or that reason, the man who is hit cannot therefore complain of encroachment on his liberty: the society is simply availing itself of its own liberty. That is no penalty for sin, no penalty for a crime. The duel is no crime there, but only an act against which the society adopts counter-measures, resolves on a defense. The State, on the contrary, stamps the duel as a crime, as an injury to its sacred law: it makes it a criminal case.

Curative means or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in an action a sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself, as a decadence from his health. But the correct thing is that I regard it either as an action that suits me or as one that does not suit me, as hostile or friendly to me, that I treat it as my property, which I cherish or demolish. “Crime” or “disease” are not either of them an egoistic view of the matter, a judgment starting from me, but starting from another—to wit, whether it injures right, general right, or the health partly of the individual (the sick one), partly of the generality (society).

If one does to us what we will not put up with, we break his power and bring our own to bear: we satisfy ourselves on him, and do not fall into the folly of wanting to satisfy right (the spook). It is not the sacred that is to defend itself against man, but man against man;

The people is quite crazy for hounding the police on against everything that seems to it to be immoral, often only unseemly, and this popular rage for the moral protects the police institution more than the government could in any way protect it.

Some have wanted to trasfigure peoples and States by broadening them out to “mankind” and “general reason”; but servitude would only become still more intense with this widening, and philanthropists and humanitarians are as absolute masters as politicians and diplomats.

new religion,

Cue Duran Duran.

Ridiculous is he who, while fellows of his tribe, family, nation, rank high, is—nothing but “puffed up” over the merit of his fellows; but blinded too is he who wants only to be “man.” Neither of them puts his worth in exclusiveness, but in connectedness , or in the “tie” that conjoins him with others, in the ties of blood, of nationality, of humanity.

If we disregard the fact that pride may mean conceit, and take it for consciousness alone, there is found to be a vast difference between pride in “belonging to” a nation and therefore being its property, and that in calling a nationality one’s property. Nationality is my quality, but the nation my owner and mistress. If you have bodily strength, you can apply it at a suitable place and have a self- consciousness or pride of it; if, on the contrary, your strong body has you, then it pricks you everywhere, and at the most unsuitable place, to show its strength: you can give nobody your hand without squeezing his.

The Nationals are in the right; one cannot deny his nationality: and the humanitarians are in the right; one must not remain in the narrowness of the national. In uniqueness256 the contradiction is solved; the national is my quality. But I am not swallowed up in my quality—as the human too is my quality, but I give to man his existence first through my uniqueness. History seeks for Man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as Man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one. I am owner of humanity, am humanity, and do nothing for the good of another humanity. Fool, you who are a unique humanity, that you make a merit of wanting to live for another than you are.

What a man as such cannot defend of bodily goods, we may take from him: this is the meaning of competition, of freedom of occupation. What he cannot defend of spiritual goods falls a prey to us likewise: so far goes the liberty of discussion, of science, of criticism.

But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man “entitles” him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the “sanctuary of his inner nature” (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my—might.

I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I need to “respect” nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!

property is the expression for unlimited dominion over somewhat (thing, beast, man) which “I can judge and dispose of as seems good to me.” According to Roman law, indeed, jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur, an exclusive and unlimited right; but property is conditioned by might. What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing; if it gets away from me again, no matter by what power, as through my recognition of a title of others to the thing—then the property is extinct. Thus property and possession coincide. It is not a right lying outside my might that legitimizes me, but solely my might: if I no longer have this, the thing vanishes away from me.

Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him it belongs till it is again taken from him, as liberty belongs to him who takes it.