“Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have made you believe you are not egoists but are called to be idealists (‘good men’). Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely deprive you of yourselves, in ‘self-denial’; but seek for yourselves, become egoists, become each of you an almighty ego. Or, more clearly: Just recognize yourselves again, just recognize what you really are, and let go your hypocritical endeavours, your foolish mania to be something else than you are. Hypocritical I call them because you have yet remained egoists all these thousands of years, but sleeping, self-deceiving, crazy egoists, you heautontimorumenoses, you self­-tormentors. Never yet has a religion been able to dispense with ‘promises’, whether they referred us to the other world or to this (‘long life’, etc.); for man is mercenary and does nothing ‘gratis’. But how about that ‘doing the good for the good's sake’ without prospect of reward? As if here too the pay was not contained in the satisfaction that it is to afford. Even religion, therefore, is founded on our egoism and – exploits it; calculated for our desires, it stifles many others for the sake of one. This then gives the phenomenon of cheated egoism, where I satisfy, not myself, but one of my desires, such as the impulse toward blessedness. Religion promises me the – ‘supreme good’; to gain this I no longer regard any other of my desires, and do not slake them. – All your doings are unconfessed, secret, covert, and concealed egoism. But because they are egoism that you are unwilling to confess to yourselves, that you keep secret from yourselves, hence not mani­fest and public egoism, consequently unconscious egoism, therefore they are not egoism, but thraldom, service, self-renunciation; you are egoists, and you are not, since you renounce egoism. Where you seem most to be such, you have drawn upon the word ‘egoist’ – loathing and contempt.”

— Max Stirner

“I secure my freedom with regard to the world in the degree that I make the world my own, ‘gain it and take possession of it’ for myself, by whatever might, by that of persuasion, of petition, of categorical demand, yes, even by hypocrisy, cheating, etc.; for the means that I use for it are determined by what I am. If I am weak, I have only weak means, like the aforesaid, which yet are good enough for a considerable part of the world. Besides, cheating, hypocrisy, lying, look worse than they are. Who has not cheated the police, the law? Who has not quickly taken on an air of honourable loyalty before the sheriff's officer who meets him, in order to conceal an illegality that may have been committed? He who has not done it has simply let violence be done to him; he was a weakling from – conscience. I know that my freedom is diminished even by not being able to carry out my will on another object, be this other something without will, like a rock, or something with will, like a government, an individual; I deny my ownness when – in presence of another – I give myself up, give way, desist, submit; therefore by loyalty, submission. For it is one thing when I give up my previous course because it does not lead to the goal, and therefore turn out of a wrong road; it is another when I yield myself a prisoner. I get around a rock that stands in my way, until I have powder enough to blast it; I get around the laws of a people, until I have gathered strength to overthrow them. Because I cannot grasp the moon, is it therefore to be ‘sacred’ to me, an Astarte? If I only could grasp you, I surely would, and, if I only find a means to get up to you, you shall not frighten me! You inapprehensible one, you shall remain inapprehensible to me only until I have acquired the might for apprehension and call you my own; I do not give myself up before you, but only bide my time. Even if for the present I put up with my inability to touch you, I yet remember it against you.

Vigorous men have always done so. When the ‘loyal’ had exalted an unsubdued power to be their master and had adored it, when they had demanded adoration from all, then there came some such son of nature who would not loyally submit, and drove the adored power from its inaccessible Olympus. He cried his ‘stand still’ to the rolling sun, and made the earth go round; the loyal had to make the best of it; he laid his axe to the sacred oaks, and the ‘loyal’ were astonished that no heavenly fire consumed him; he threw the Pope off Peter's chair, and the ‘loyal’ had no way to hinder it; he is tearing down the divine-right business, and the ‘loyal’ croak in vain, and at last are silent.”

— Max Stirner

Ontology vs teleology of freedom

Stirner on money and work

Two classic introductions to anarchism

Anarchy by Errico Malatesta:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchy

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/Emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays

“Even a quick assesment shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than they have: that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests – if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.

Culture and the state – one should not deceive oneself about this – are antagonists: ‘Culture-State’ [‚Kultur-Staat‘] is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§8. 4)

Whether philosophy comforts

A friendly suggestion to post-structutalists and post-modernists:
Go read some actual anarchist literature instead of forming your opinion about so-called "classical anarchism" based on the writings of a few "post-anarchist" writers who, it seems, have to distort and misrepresent anarchism in order to sell "post"-anarchism — depicting a vast, highly diverse philosophy and movement as some simplistic monolith...

(I'm not criticizing post-structutalist/post-modernist philosophy here... this is not about that philosophy itself. But only about what I perceived to be a rather common tendency among "post-anarchists")

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jesse-cohn-and-shawn-wilbur-what-s-wrong-with-postanarchism

“The state practices ‘violence’, the individual must not do so. The state's behaviour is violence, and it calls its violence ‘law’; that of the individ­ual, 'crime’.”

— Max Stirner

Scientists then vs now (on philosophy)

„Verhasst ist mir das Folgen und das Führen.
Gehorchen? Nein! Und aber nein – Regieren!“

“Despicable to me are following and leading.
Commanding? Even worse to me than heeding!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
(The Gay Science; Prelude. 33)


(Regieren = to govern, to rule;
Gehorchen = to obey)

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

— Voltaire

“Anti-Darwin. — As for the famous ‘struggle for existence,’ so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity or starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering — and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power. One should not mistake Malthus for nature.

Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence — and, indeed, it occurs — its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin's school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them — namely, in favor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent. Darwin forgot the spirit (that is English!); the weak have more spirit. One must need spirit to acquire spirit; one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (‘Let it go!’ they think in Germany today; ‘the Reich must still remain to us’). It will be noted that by ‘spirit’ I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 14)

virgin reactionary empiricist vs chad critical theorist

“Schopenhauer. — Schopenhauer, the last German worthy of consideration (who represents a European event like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich Heine, and not merely a local event, a ‘national’ one), is for a psychologist a first-rate case: namely, as a maliciously ingenious attempt to adduce in favor of a nihilistic total depreciation of life precisely the counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the ‘will to life,’ life's forms of exuberance. He has interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth, and tragedy, in turn, as consequences of ‘negation’ or of the ‘will's’ need to negate — the greatest psychological counterfeit in all history, not counting Christianity. On closer inspection, he is at this point merely the heir of the Christian interpretation: only he knew how to approve that which Christianity had repudiated, the great cultural facts of humanity — albeit in a Christian, that is, nihilistic, manner (namely, as ways of ‘redemption,’ as anticipations of ‘redemption,’ as stimuli of the need for ‘redemption’).

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§9. 21)

Anti-natalist vs Nietzschad

„Ob Hedonismus, ob Pessimismus, ob Utilitarismus, ob Eudämonismus: alle diese Denkweisen, welche nach Lust und Leid, das heißt nach Begleitzuständen und Nebensachen den Werth der Dinge messen, sind Vordergrunds-Denkweisen und Naivetäten, auf welche ein Jeder, der sich gestaltender Kräfte und eines Künstler-Gewissens bewusst ist, nicht ohne Spott, auch nicht ohne Mitleid herabblicken wird.“

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jenseits von Gut und Böse (225)

“Power [Gewalt; might] is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for ‘one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right’. You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself. See, one who has might ‘stands above the law’. How does this prospect taste to you, you ‘law-abiding’ people? But you have no taste!”

— Max Stirner

“The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science (341)

Das ist wahrscheinlich das Schönste, was ich in meinem ganzen Leben gelesen habe!