Egoism
Self-interest as a tool of resistance
The egoism that I am interested in exploring here is both an anarchistic political ideology based on the primacy of self-interest, and a philosophy about the existential nature of human experience. It traces its source to a book titled The Ego and Its Own (sometimes translated as The Unique and Its Property) published in 1844 by Max Stirner.
As a philosophical view, Stirner’s egoism shines a light on a psychological truth that should be obvious. All human experience, without exception, is first-person experience. There is no experience with a capital ‘E’ but rather uncountable and unmeasurably varied individual loci of experience. Outside of this, there is nothing at all. Or, rather, anything that an experiencing being can conceive about what is outside of their own experience is itself part of their experience. There is simply no way to get outside of your own skin to view what the world looks like without you looking at it.
Within this always personal experience, all interests are self-interests. They have to be because there is no other kind of interest possible. We can imagine outside interests, of course. As socially interdependent beings, it is vital that I am able to think about your self-interests as well as my own. And we can align our self-interest with our beliefs about the interests of others—if we believe it is in our interest to do so. Cooperative social intercourse would be impossible otherwise. Yet even in those situations where I act specifically to accommodate you as you pursue your own interests, I am still acting in terms of my own self-interest. According to Stirner, we are all egoists in this respect, whether or not we recognize that fact.
The same analytic tools of symbolic thought and abstract representation that allow me to think about outside interests and to reflect on your self-interests also allow me to organize the objects and events in the world around me in terms of abstract categories rather than as an open-ended iteration of irreducibly unique individual things. This is a profoundly useful cognitive ability from a survival standpoint. But there is a potentially deadly downside to it as well. The world around me really does consist of irreducibly unique individual things, not categories. Categories are useful tools of thought, but they do not participate in the causal interactions of the world we experience. It is the entities themselves, the category exemplars, that are real in this sense. And each concrete member of a category is a unique occurrence in possession of qualities that simply cannot be abstracted and rendered symbolically. Knowing to which categories a particular entity belongs is not knowledge of the entity itself. This problem is particularly evident with stereotypes related to demographic categories such as race, gender, political party affiliation, etc. Even when the stereotype in question has some statistical relevance when applied to the group as a whole, it has little or no relevance when applied to any specific individual member of the group. I have personally never met a demographic category or spoken to a probability or walked alongside a statistical average.
Stirner’s egoism shows these abstractions to be what they are, artificial, and ultimately arbitrary constructs that may or may not have any relevance with respect to our actual self-interests. Even worse, many of these abstract constructs are reified, and we are encouraged to think of them as having actual concrete interests of their own, then convinced to serve the imagined interests of these make-believe entities as if it is in our self-interest to do so. For example we are told our vote is important for “the future of our democracy” or “the moral integrity of our nation” or “the health of the economy.” Democracy, nation, and economy are reified abstractions. They are not at all the kind of thing that can have actual needs relating to their future, their moral integrity, or their health and wellbeing.
Abstract categories and transcendent entities are given priority over concrete objects and experienced events—and our perceived self-interest is dragged along for the ride. We are even made to consider our continued existence to be of less value than the contrived needs of these nonexistent entities. As a result, we are willing to sacrifice our lives in the name of mere ideas. We fight to protect our “property;” we die in the service of our “country” and our “ideals” to preserve our “way of life;” we perform our various “duties” as “citizens;” we exchange the finite hours of our lives for a paycheck so that we can live up to various consumptive expectations and material aspirations such as home ownership; we exhaust our energy pursuing goals of position and status that have no substance. Stirner called these transcendent notions and reified constructs “spooks.” And any thoughts or actions based on these spooks are not truly in our own self-interest, but in the interest of fictional entities that cannot in fact have interests at all.
As an anarchistic ideology based on the primacy of self-interest, Stirner’s view provides insight into how power operates through the use of spooks, and on potential ways of resisting power by recognizing these fictional beings and treating them as the ghosts that they really are, and reorienting our focus on those goals and actions that are congruous with our actual self-interest. An egoistic posture, then, can serve as a prophylactic, helping us to distinguish our own interests from those that have been externally concocted, and preventing us from squandering our time and energy in pursuit of goals and causes that are not really our own, let alone human.