Stirner warns us not to live our lives for some abstraction, some incorporeal concept, a phantasm, a spook. Only the individual is unique, real and concrete. He should only live for his own cause, not some external ism that does not even exist. For example, fighting and being willing to die for one's country, an abstraction that has no existence.
Stirner has a point: I am more optimistic about capturing meaning and the worthiness of sacrificing oneself for exterior causes, than Stirner is, but his powerful repudiation, of being a true believer that will make the idealism of one's rabid ideology or cause concrete by using murder, torture, coercion, violence and force to compel people to adopt and live in accordance with the dictates of that ism, is an intellectual and moral corrective that we must heed and follow.
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