One great historical irony that comes to mind for me is how Max Stirner and Eric Hoffer, both either born in Germany or of German descent, early on or having lived with mass movements, emphasized these movements’ mostly negative significance, with unnerving accuracy, foregrounding the danger of mass movements, when manipulated by unscrupulous leaders to gain power, conduct wars or seek world domination: these two German men predicted what mass movements could produce, and yet such warnings were not heeded by their own people--look at what the German people allowed to happen as they submitted to the Nazi thugs running Germany, demonstrating how murderous and destructive an unleashed mass movement can become.
Let me quote from Max Stirner from the Byington translation of Stirner's book, The Ego and Its Own, pages 1 and 2: "I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?
They all have an admirable time of it when they receive zealous homage. Just observe the nation that is defended by zealous patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to 'its bloom!' The individuals have died 'for the great cause of the nation,' and the nation sends words of thanks after them and--has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism."
Rarely has the dangers, of wholesale, unrestrained, and overly enthusiastic or fanatical devotion to an empty word, abstraction, cause, or ism, been so graphically delineated and skewered.
Stirner was an arch-individualist and he intuitively recognized that indiviudal-living was the route to go, not group-living with herd power of suggestiveness plus emotional excess, making such a social dynamic ideally suited for turning an abstraction into a cause to die for and sacrifice all for.
Stirner underrates and under-values the human need for finding God, purpose, structure, and rational order to be intellectually satisfied and made meaningful by linguistically framing one's thoughts with universal words and concepts generalizing and categorizing what one has discovered and understood.
Stirner and Hoffer worry rightly that our abstractions are often distorted and perverted, by us, into a numbing, dead-end cause to serve, a false god, a graven image, an idol with feet of clay, a poor substitute for fulfilling our a priori religious appetite for meaning.
Though Max Stirner is not regarded as an ethicist, and indeed, firmly discredits and rejects prescriptive ethics as spooks, he does offer wisdom regarding mass movements.
He wants people to be egoists and not altruists. If Rand is right--and she is--that virtue is selfishness (self-interest) and vice is selflessness (collective), then Stirner is an unintentional moralist advocating that people not run in packs passionately and zealously serving a collectivist cause and the false idol or word that that symbolize that fallen cause.
Dennis Prager and I counsel that we should make decisions based more on our reasoning than on our feelings. Reasoning as an individual thinker and moral agent makes us more moderate, temperate, and sensible in our thoughts, word, and deeds. When we are calm and reasonable then the truth appears to us more readily.
Conversely feeling as a group creature makes us too enthusiastic, too judgmental, too rigid and overly confident in our conclusions. We are then unhappy, and unhappy, resentful people tear up the world as compensation for their feelings of wretchedness and unhappiness.
Stirner is wrong is completing refuting universals, but he is correct in worrying that living by or under the structure of a universal value and its accompanying attributes yields spiritual and moral benefits to its adherents if they embrace it logically, coolly, and sensibly as individuals. Their need for meaning is met by abstracting their ideas as their interface with objective reality.
Where it goes south occurs when they so group-live that the collectivist principle, that they cling to, is cemented into one ego and individual souls of followers no longer exist. That ism now is not a cause to worship but their ideology which they support in a most injudicious, totalistic way, as the absolute truth and final answer about everything and anything.
Before I forget, I wish to highlight that Stirner configures the whole world, and all conscious entities as psychological egoists. Either the self, the Unique, serves itself as its only cause and the only cause worth serving, or the self becomes selfless and serves another Egoist, be it God, the nation, the religion, the political party, the environmental movement, the Sultan, or nature itself. Either the Unique serves its own cause, or it serves the cause of another Ego, and it will do so enthusiastically, serving a cause that it does not really want to serve as the only cause worth serving.
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