For Me — crystal-clear, unclouded, ghostly, and transparent — there is nothing higher than Me. This is the cult of personal selfhood, the invincible solitude of every individual.

Some random person told me recently:

– Young man, you are too self-loving, too selfish!

I answered, immidiately and with no emotion:

– Sorry, but I have nothing except myself.

“The Ego and Its Own” — this is a song for those who have lost themselves in dialogue with the Other, in the supermarket of activity choices, in humanity and its ideals, for those lost in the labyrinth of denials of their true ‘desire,’ obsessed with negation and fixated on affirmations.”

In this song, Stirner comes to the conclusion: there is nothing outside ourselves, no states, nations, homelands, or gods. There is only the individual, who remains alone regardless of external circumstances.

Here are my favorite quotes from this brilliant book:

But since this is egoism that you do not want to acknowledge, that you carefully conceal, therefore not open and honest egoism, but unconscious egoism, then it is not egoism, but slavery, servitude, self-denial; you are egoists, and yet, by denying egoism, you are not egoists. Where you seem to be blatant egoists, you even regard the word 'egoist' with contempt and disgust.

Millennia of culture have obscured yourselves from yourselves, instilling in you the belief that you are not egoists but are meant to be idealists ('good people'). Shake this off! Do not seek freedom that deprives you of yourselves in 'self-renunciation'; seek yourselves, become egoists, let each of you become an almighty I. Go forth, clearer: know yourselves again, discover only what you truly are, reject your hypocritical aspirations, your foolish desire to be something other than what you are.

October 2014