Max: Cut Him Some Slack

I have been noticing the contempt, putdowns and dismissal that intellectuals express toward Max Stirner for his gentle, quiet, nerd-like, middle class existence and loser status (poor, in debt, unable to support his wives and devious about running up debts and seeking to avoid creditors, dying alone in penniless poverty).

The detractors mock Max, noting how his loser, wimpy real life performance starkly contradicts his bold, masterful proclamations about the egoist that owns the whole world, for his own enjoyment, confidently performing and experiencing all in accordance with his own internally-authored code, boasting aggressively that all is his property if he has the power and wields that power to grab all that he can. Right is might and one is mighty and well-propertied by grabbing all that one can without qualm, without apology. To contrast this ideal with the actual Max is to contrast Captain America with some meek, quiet librarian, leading his plain, uneventful life, working second shift for life that the local, branch library.

My response: the critics have a point and the stark contrast is remarkable. Only God knows the human heart and its secret motivations, so only God can judge us. We can judge performance, and accurately and righteously praise or condemn it, for example complaining that Stirner did not practice what he preached.

I am more merciful, because we do not know how strong, how willful, now much spare psychic confidence and energy Stirner retained, after writing his books, to realize his ideals in personal life. It may well have taken every ounce of talent, money, energy and focus to get as far as he could before he wore out, stopped cold, and coasted for the rest of his life.

I know that we great souls are so alone, and so socially ostrasized, that the enormous psychological energy required just to keep sane, keep positive, keep going, to want to live and not commit suicide, to stand so alone against silence, nothingness, and, to bare, alone, the constant, conscious, surface-realized encountering of immediately present, exposed meaninglessness from Being seeming like death, eternity, eerie nothingness and a cold impersonal universe--all of this wears on the self, grinding it down into gloom, the desire to conform, to obey "the they", to no longer serve God, to maverize no longer, going no further.

What impresses me is that Max got as far as he did, not how he failed to practice what he preaches.