“The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

liberal democracy, social contract

Stirner here destroys the concept of a social contract—without even specifically mentioning it—by striking at its root: the concept of duty itself

And of course, social contract is a most obvious lie, it is baseless liberal nonsense

to be more precise...

"Hinduism is not a religion, it is a way of life"

“Beggars. — Beggars ought to be abolished: for one is vexed at giving to them and vexed at not giving to them.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (185)

“Business people. — Your business – is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business – but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Dawn of Day (186)

Gender Obsession Disorder

I trust that the defenders of gender binarism will ultimately lose. But at present, they keep fanning what I’ve called a gender obsession disorder: an excessive, even pathological concern with making sure that men and women remain discernibly different.

Those most obsessed with gender differences seem to believe that the slightest blurring of the binary between men and women will result in the end of civilization. This is why the ‘gendervariant’ pay such a high price, why they’re scrutinized not just at high-security venues such as airports and subways, but also at work and school, in restaurants and locker rooms, and in the general flow of daily life.

— Mari Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings (chapter 3)

“Rightful, or legitimate, property of another will be only that which you are content to recognize as such. If your content ceases, then this property has lost legitimacy for you, and you will laugh at the absolute right to it.”

— Max Stirner

Feuerbach, in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, is always harping upon being [das Sein]. In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for ‘being’ is abstraction, as is even ‘the I’. Only I am not abstraction alone: I am all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing: I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns the own, mine [das Meinige] — ‘opinion [Meinung]’. ‘Absolute thinking’ is that which forgets that it is my thinking, that I think, and that it exists only through me. But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change, annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach wants to smite Heg­el's ‘absolute thinking’ with unconquered being. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is my being, as the other is my thinking.

— Max Stirner

human nature

Every hierarchical, authoritarian system is a death machine, rooted in ressentiment and perpetuates itself through it...
A cancer...
All they do ultimately is kill life, both literally and figuratively...

Only those spirits vigorously full of life can bring the death machine to an end, so that life may flourish... so that we all may thrive

Every (wanna-be) authority, every (wanna-be) cop, every fascist manifests this desire for death within them... their will too weak to overcome it, too weak to affirm life... (but there is nothing essentialist about it, one can overcome this condition)

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are ‘immediate certainties’; for instance, ‘I think,’ or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, ‘I will’; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that ‘immediate certainty,’ as well as ‘absolute knowledge’ and the ‘thing in itself,’ involve a contradictio in adjecto;* we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, ‘I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘I’ [ego], and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I think,’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.”

In place of the ‘immediate certainty’ in which the people may believe in the given case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: “Whence did I get the notion of ‘thinking’? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ‘ego,’ and even of an ‘ego’ as cause, and finally of an ‘ego’ as cause of thought?” He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, “I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain”—will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. “Sir,” the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, “it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?”

* Latin: a logical inconsistency between a noun and its modifier

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (16)

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ One thinks;* but that this ‘one’ [es] is precisely the famous old ‘ego,’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty.’ After all, one has even gone too far with this ‘one thinks’—even the ‘one’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—“To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently”... It was pretty much on the same lines that the older atomism sought, besides the operating ‘power,’ the material particle wherein it resides and out of which it operates—the atom. More rigorous minds, however, learnt at last to get along without this ‘earth-residuum’ [Erdenrest], and perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point of view, to get along without the little ‘one’ (to which the worthy old ‘ego’ has refined itself).

* es denkt — another translator (Marion Faber) interprets this as ‘there is thinking’

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the ‘free will’ owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (17, 18)

“Not every love story is written the same way. I don’t need a happy ending. I need our ending. The one that might be messy and imperfect, but exclusively ours.”

human nature

“You're not alone. We are accomplices. If you're a witch, then I'll be your warlock.”

The guy on the left is that philosopher of cringe — Thomas Hobbes

On the right: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Marcuse, Peter Kropotkin

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? ...

Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this — and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroys stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too. That is why I am concerned with a species of man whose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare of a state, with philosophers, and with these only in relation to a world which is again fairly independent of the welfare of a state, that of culture.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)

“When [the philosopher] thinks of the haste and hurry now universal, of the increasing velocity of life, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity, he almost thinks that what he is seeing are the symptoms of a total extermination and uprooting of culture. The waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools; the nations are again drawing away from one another in the most hostile fashion and long to tear one another to pieces. The sciences, pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy. The world has never been more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness. The educated classes are no longer lighthouses or refuges in the midst of this turmoil of secularization; they themselves grow daily more restless, thoughtless and loveless. Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism. The cultured man has degenerated to the greatest enemy of culture, for he wants lyingly to deny the existence of the universal sickness and thus obstructs the physicians. They become incensed, these poor wretches, whenever one speaks of their weakness and resists their pernicious lying spirit. They would dearly like to make us believe that of all the centuries theirs has borne the prize away, and they shake with artificial merriment. Their way of hypocritically simulating happiness sometimes has something touching about it, because their happiness is something so completely incomprehensible.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations (III. §4)