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

by Max Stirner

Everything over which I have might that cannot be torn from me remains my property; well, then let might decide about property, and I will expect everything from my might! Alien might, might that I leave to another, makes me an owned slave: then let my own might make me an owner. Let me then withdraw the might that I have conceded to others out of ignorance regarding the strength of my own might! Let me say to myself, what my might reaches to is my property; and let me claim as property everything that I feel myself strong enough to attain, and let me extend my actual property as far as I entitle, that is, empower, myself to take.

Communism, by the abolition of all personal property, only presses me back still more into dependence on another, to wit, on the generality or collectivity; and, loudly as it always attacks the “State,” what it intends is itself again a State, a status, a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me. Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the collectivity.

Take hold, and take what you require! With this the war of all against all is declared. I alone decide what I will have.

If it is said socialistically, society gives me what I require—then the egoist says, I take what I require. If the Communists conduct themselves as ragamuffins, the egoist behaves as proprietor.

Property, therefore, should not and cannot be abolished; it must rather be torn from ghostly hands and become my property;

Is a competition “free” which the State, this ruler in the civic principle, hems in by a thousand barriers?

is my work then really, as the Communists suppose, my sole competence? or does not this consist rather in everything that I am competent for? And does not the workers’ society itself have to concede this, in supporting also the sick, children, old men—in short, those who are incapable of work? These are still competent for a good deal, for instance, to preserve their life instead of taking it. If they are competent to cause you to desire their continued existence, they have a power over you. To him who exercised utterly no power over you, you would vouchsafe nothing; he might perish. Therefore, what you are competent for is your competence! If you are competent to furnish pleasure to thousands, then thousands will pay you an honorarium for it; for it would stand in your power to forbear doing it, hence they must purchase your deed. If you are not competent to captivate any one, you may simply starve.

What competence does not the child possess in its smiling, its playing, its screaming! in short, in its mere existence! Are you capable of resisting its desire? Or do you not hold out to it, as mother, your breast; as father, as much of your possessions as it needs? It compels you, therefore it possesses what you call yours. If your person is of consequence to me, you pay me with your very existence; if I am concerned only with one of your qualities, then your compliance, perhaps, or your aid, has a value (a money value) for me, and I purchase it.

“All belongs to all!” This proposition springs from the same unsubstantial theory. To each belongs only what he is competent for. If I say, The world belongs to me, properly that too is empty talk, which has a meaning only in so far as I respect no alien property. But to me belongs only as much as I am competent for, or have within my competence.

But the organization of labor touches only such labors as others can do for us, slaughtering, tillage, and the like; the rest remain egoistic, because no one can in your stead elaborate your musical compositions, carry out your projects of painting, etc.; nobody can replace Raphael’s labors. The latter are labors of a unique person,275 which only he is competent to achieve, while the former deserved to be called “human,” since what is anybody’s own in them is of slight account, and almost “any man” can be trained to it.

The unique person will work himself forth out of society all right, but society brings forth no unique person.

Communism seeks to check its course, spreading the belief that the human is not worth so much discomfort, and, with sensible arrangements, could be gained without the great expense of time and powers which has hitherto seemed requisite. But for whom is time to be gained? For what does man require more time than is necessary to refresh his wearied powers of labor? Here Communism is silent. For what? To take comfort in himself as the unique, after he has done his part as man!

destroys the virgin.

Maidenhood REKT!

REKT!

If I do not trouble myself about my affair, I must be content with what it pleases others to vouchsafe me. To have bread is my affair, my wish and desire, and yet people leave that to the bakers and hope at most to obtain through their wrangling, their getting ahead of each other, their rivalry—in short, their competition—an advantage which one could not count on in the case of the guild-brothers who were lodged entirely and alone in the proprietorship of the baking franchise.—What every one requires, every one should also take a hand in procuring and producing; it is his affair, his property, not the property of the guildic or concessionary master.

But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me; only my might is my own. Not this tree, but my might or control over it, is what is mine.

the individual’s might becomes permanent and a right only by others joining their might with his. The delusion consists in their believing that they cannot withdraw their might.

There is not one among you who does not commit a crime at every moment; your speeches are crimes, and every hindrance to your freedom of speech is no less a crime. Ye are criminals altogether!

In ruder times than ours it was customary to demand a particular faith, and devotion to a particular sacred essence, and they did not take the gentlest way with those who believed otherwise; since, however, “freedom of belief” spread itself more and more abroad, the “jealous God and sole Lord” gradually melted into a pretty general “supreme being,” and it satisfied humane tolerance if only every one revered “something sacred.” Reduced to the most human expression, this sacred essence is “man himself” and “the human.” With the deceptive semblance as if the human were altogether our own, and free from all the otherworldliness with which the divine is tainted—yes, as if Man were as much as I or you—there may arise even the proud fancy that the talk is no longer of a “sacred essence” and that we now feel ourselves everywhere at home and no longer in the uncanny,278 in the sacred and in sacred awe: in the ecstasy over “Man discovered at last” the egoistic cry of pain passes unheard, and the spook that has become so intimate is taken for our true ego. But “Humanus is the saint’s name” (see Goethe), and the humane is only the most clarified sanctity. The egoist makes the reverse declaration. For this precise reason, because you hold something sacred, I gibe at you; and, even if I respected everything in you, your sanctuary is precisely what I should not respect.

Not in the State, but only against it, can the liberty of the press be carried through; if it is to be established, it is to be obtained not as the consequence of a petition but as the work of an insurrection.

The press, once seized by the lust for liberty, always wants to grow freer, till at last the writer says to himself, really I am not wholly free till I ask about nothing; and writing is free only when it is my own, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread; the press must not be free—that is too little—it must be mine:—ownness of the press or property in the press, that is what I will take.

Let my people, if they will, go without liberty of free press, I will manage to print by force or ruse; I get my permission to print only from—Myself and my strength.

If the press is my own, I as little need a permission of the State for employing it as I seek that permission in order to blow my nose. The press is my property from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from this moment State, Church, people, society, and the like, cease, because they have to thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they exist only when they exist above me, exist only as powers and power-holders.

The press is my own as soon as I myself am my own, a self-owned man: to the egoist belongs the world, because he belongs to no power of the world.

If I were willing to abate from the property of my press, I could easily attain the point where I might everywhere have as much printed as my fingers produced. But, as I want to assert my property, I must necessarily swindle my enemies. ‘Would you not accept their permission if it were given you?’ Certainly, with joy; for their permission would be to me a proof that I had fooled them and started them on the road to ruin. I am not concerned for their permission, but so much the more for their folly and their overthrow. I do not sue for their permission as if I flattered myself (like the political liberals) that we both, they and I, could make out peaceably alongside and with each other, yes, probably raise and prop each other; but I sue for it in order to make them bleed to death by it, that the permitters themselves may cease at last. I act as a conscious enemy, overreaching them and utilizing their heedlessness.

The press is mine when I recognize outside myself no judge whatever over its utilization, when my writing is no longer determined by morality or religion or respect for the State laws or the like, but by me and my egoism!”

Jurors, when their fixed ideas are attacked, have just as hard heads as the stiffest despots and their servile officials.

I need no concession for the liberty of the press, do not need the people’s consent to it, do not need the “right” to it, nor any “justification.” The liberty of the press too, like every liberty, I must “take”; the people, “as being the sole judge,” cannot give it to me. It can put up with me the liberty that I take, or defend itself against it; give, bestow, grant it it cannot. I exercise it despite the people, purely as an individual; I get it by fighting the people, my—enemy, and obtain it only when I really get it by such fighting, take it. But I take it because it is my property.

Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our own judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, “rancorous judgments.” But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our own? They are judgments of the love that rules us, they are “loving, lenient” judgments, they are not our own, and accordingly not real judgments at all.

God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go its own gait, and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.

The criminally arraigned man can expect no forbearance, and no one spreads a friendly veil over his unhappy nakedness. Without emotion the stern judge tears the last rags of excuse from the body of the poor accused; without compassion the jailer drags him into his damp abode; without placability, when the time of punishment has expired, he thrusts the branded man again among men, his good, Christian, loyal brethren, who contemptuously spit on him. Yes, without grace a criminal “deserving of death” is led to the scaffold, and before the eyes of a jubilating crowd the appeased moral law celebrates its sublime—revenge. For only one can live, the moral law or the criminal.

one owes it neither to himself to make anything out of himself, nor to others to make anything out of them; for one owes nothing to his essence and that of others. Intercourse resting on essence is an intercourse with the spook, not with anything real. If I hold intercourse with the supreme essence, I am not holding intercourse with myself, and, if I hold intercourse with the essence of man, I am not holding intercourse with men.

Consequently I must again vindicate love for myself, and deliver it out of the power of Man with the great M.

#SuperEgoistLove

Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are his joy and his weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of his pleasure, and I can hazard for him what without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness and his pleasure. But myself, my own self, I do not sacrifice to him, but remain an egoist and —enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice myself, nor sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my peculiar value, my ownness.

I love men too—not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.”

You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.

If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest till I have tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him glad, I too become glad over his joy. From this it does not follow that suffering or joy is caused in me by the same thing that brings out this effect in him, as is sufficiently proved by every bodily pain which I do not feel as he does; his tooth pains him, but his pain pains me. But, because I cannot bear the troubled crease on the beloved forehead, for that reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this person, he might go right on making creases, they would not trouble me; I am only driving away my trouble.

How now, has anybody or anything, whom and which I do not love, a right to be loved by me? Is my love...

Parents, kinsfolk, fatherland, nation, native town, etc., finally fellowmen in general (“brothers, fraternity”), assert that they have a right to my love, and lay claim to it without further ceremony. They look upon it as their property, and upon me, if I do not respect th...

If love is a commandment and law, then I must be educated into it, cultivated up to it, and, if I trespass against it, punished. Hence people will exercise as strong a “moral influence” as possible on me to bring me to love. And there is no doubt that one can work up and seduce men to love as one can to other passions—if you like, to hate. Hate runs through whole races merel...

love is not a commandment, but, like each of my feelings, my property. Acquire, purchase, my property, and then I will make it over to you. A church, a nation, a fatherland, a family, etc., that does not know how to acquire my love, I need not l...

Love becomes blind and crazy by a must taking it out of my power (infatuation), romantic by a should entering into it, by the “objects” becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it by duty, conscience, oath. Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for it.

My love is my own only when it consists altogether in a selfish and egoistic interest, and when consequently the object of my love is really my object or my property. I owe my property nothing, and have no duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye; if nevertheless I guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account.

The egoist’s love rises in selfishness, flows in the bed of selfishness, and empties into selfishness again.

Only as one of my feelings do I harbor love; but as a power above me, as a divine power, as Feuerbach says, as a passion that I am not to cast off, as a religious and moral duty, I—scorn it. As my feeling it is mine; as a principle to which I consecrate and “vow” my soul it is a dominator and divine, just as hatred as a principle is diabolical; one not better than the other. In short, egoistic love, my love, is neither holy nor unholy, neither divine nor diabolical.

can love, love with a full heart, and let the most consuming glow of passion burn in my heart, without taking the beloved one for anything else than the nourishment of my passion, on which it ever refreshes itself anew.

Let us choose another convenient example. I see how men are fretted in dark superstition by a swarm of ghosts. If to the extent of my powers I let a bit of daylight fall in on the nocturnal spookery, is it perchance because love to you inspires this in me? Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought—I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it. If your weal lay at my heart, I should act as the church did in withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments, which make it a sacred duty for themselves to “protect the common people from bad books.” But not only not for your sake, not even for truth’s sake either do I speak out what I think. No— I sing as the bird sings That on the bough alights; The song that from me springs Is pay that well requites. I sing because—I am a singer. But I use286 you for it because I—need ears.287

Those who educate us make it their concern early to break us of lying and to inculcate the principle that one must always tell the truth. If selfishness were made the basis for this rule, every one would easily understand how by lying he fools away that confidence in him which he hopes to awaken in others, and how correct the maxim proves, Nobody believes a liar even when he tells the truth. Yet, at the same time, he would also feel that he had to meet with truth only him whom he authorized to hear the truth. If a spy walks in disguise through the hostile camp, and is asked who he is, the askers are assuredly entitled to inquire after his name, but the disguised man does not give them the right to learn the truth from him; he tells them what he likes, only not the fact. And yet morality demands, “Thou shalt not lie!” By morality those persons are vested with the right to expect the truth; but by me they are not vested with that right, and I recognize only the right that I impart.

What then does on my account mean? There people immediately think of “filthy lucre.” But he who acts from love of filthy lucre does it on his own account indeed, as there is nothing anyhow that one does not do for his own sake—among other things, everything that is done for God’s glory; yet he, for whom he seeks the lucre, is a slave of lucre, not raised above lucre; he is one who belongs to lucre, the money-bag, not to himself; he is not his own. Must not a man whom the passion of avarice rules follow the commands of this master? And, if a weak goodnaturedness once beguiles him, does this not appear as simply an exceptional case of precisely the same sort as when pious believers are sometimes forsaken by their Lord’s guidance and ensnared by the arts of the “devil?” So an avaricious man is not a self-owned man, but a servant; and he can do nothing for his own sake without at the same time doing it for his lord’s sake—precisely like the godly man.

It is despicable to deceive a confidence that we voluntarily call forth; but it is no shame to egoism to let every one who wants to get us into his power by an oath bleed to death by the unsuccessfulness of his untrustful craft. If you have wanted to bind me, then learn that I know how to burst your bonds.