Mischaracterized

 

There is much confusion and mischaracterization adrift in social circles, popular but baseless generalizations spread generation after generation about the nature of joiners and loners. These injurious myths are now accepted as cultural facts about individuals and groups, and their respective attributes. These myths need debunking, and I shall debunk them below

 

Common Myth: individualists and loners are selfish, cold, narcissistic people, without social intelligence or warmth. They exhibit their deformed inability to relate to others.

 

Reality: there are petty, delusional, unreflective, or monstrous individuals that are selfish and indulge their urges and desires with no regard to others. I suggest that most of these small-minded individuals are actually groupists.

 

By comparison, the ethical egoism demonstrated and lived by rational egoists reveals to the world their enlightened self-interest, practiced, and understood by these individualists and loners that love God, themselves, and others. They are self-interested because it is their right and duty to so be, but being selfish, is unacceptable for them. Most of them are not selfish. Indeed, under my Mavellonialist egoism, I prescribe that each individuators treat others customarily with courtesy, dignity and respect as ends in themselves. Any departure from this decent treatment of others is hypocritical, a failure to treat the self well, because hurting, hating, mistreating, disrespecting, and ripping off others does hurt these others, and fills the mean, sinful individualist doer with spiritual evil, and that is not taking care of the self at all.

 

The individual cannot hurt himself or others, without hurting the self and hurting all people. The joiner cannot hurt herself, those in her pack, or those in a rival pack without undermining and ultimately destroying herself and all the selves around her. Moral egoism is enlightened self-interest as a moral priority, but it must be done in such a way as to encourage and undergird the power, chance, and efforts of neighboring self-interested individuators to have the energy, space and opportunity to be doing their own thing. A community or society, a complex, functioning operational interaction, a moral, formal union of egoists of maverizers, is ideal per person and for the collective good.

 

What is beneficial to the private individual should be beneficial to the community. What is beneficial to the collective must be beneficial to most or all of the individuals within that group, community or society. This is the application of the Golden Rule.

 

Individuators pursue their personal interests most of the time in a way that is helpful to them and to others around them—even if it means that by example they suggest their neighbors pursue their own self-interest too busy to interfere with or micromanage the lives and initiate affairs of their neighbors. As much as they can, each is to provide for herself and developing her many talents.

 

Individualists, especially as individuators, are rather intellectual (original thinkers) and rational, but their will and logic are not without empathy—just the opposite. When they feel or share their feelings with themselves or others, it is a warm sentiment, not autistic and devoid of feeling.

 

Usually, undeveloped individualists and loners as well as self-realizing individuators and loners are not narcissistic or sick from a stunted fascination with themselves, leaping forward into a rich mental life of twisted self-absorption and self-obsessing.

 

Rather, these people are introspective, inner-reflective, self-conscious, and self-aware, seeking to know themselves, to experiment, self-evaluate and take immediate corrective efforts to improve, smooth out flaws and character defects to grow morally, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, physical, aesthetically, and socially. They group-live most of the time but they live in the truth: they know themselves as they are not as they wish to fantasize about some unreal, alien version of the self. Because they have objective or rather objectively certain in their connections to God, the self, and the world, they are anti-narcissistic which is an illusory state of self-conceiving, not an attribute of advanced individuators, but narcissism is the sick, slimy, self-appreciation and personal self-narrative spun by group-livers and collectivists to justify their hiding from life in the pack or clique in which they are snugly ensconced.

 

Corresponding Myth: groupists and joiners are generous, warm, emotionally healthy people objectively oriented to the social world outside of themselves: they are able to escape the solipsism trap by admitting that others out there exist, and that it is enjoyable, healthy and productive to engage with others, and that they do.

 

Reality: There is without a doubt a friendliness, warmth, even kindness and mutual enjoyment enjoyed by insiders, joiners and groupists. There is also much sadomasochistic games galore permeating their hierarchical structures where each sucks up to a psychological often verbal and sometimes physical abuser from above while being snotty, domineering and cutting down those below who are abused by the ones with higher rank that invade subordinate joiners’ privacy, tell them how to live, ordering them how to live.

 

 Where members are nonindividuators, group oriented, their altruist ethics makes them self-denying or self-loathing so this is not emotionally healthy They are non-individual with little or no self-esteem. All nonindividuators in the groups serve the abstraction or guru at the head of the pack. Only the ideal or its leader are allowed to be the egoists with the self-esteem of a sociopath. This explanation that joiners lose their self-esteem and personhood as joiners in service of a leader or cause—this is close to what Max Stirner is criticizing when people followed the king, sultan, fatherland or any other abstraction.

 

When people run in packs they are lying. And lying makes statements and status fraudulent and false. The inner reality of such people is hollowed out. The self and everything about it is a pose and a fake. Myrmidons reveal their extreme, sickened altruistic self when praising allies too favorably by over-evaluating their pluses and underrating their sins and flaws.

 

People in packs also are fanatical and extreme in that packs worship an abstraction or cause, and that allegiance is very partial requiring total unquestioning obedience and adherence, and they claim it is the one true faith or cause, and those with it are saints and those with rival beliefs are completely erroneous, and are devils to be trounced.

 

 

These joined extremists announce: our pack is all true, all good and always correct and beautiful, and our opposite pack and maverick, dissenting individuals are all bad, all erroneous, all mistaken and ugly so we are justified in exercising our hatred towards and intolerance upon them for they are already damned in need to abuse, harassing even extermination.

 

Pack members are also more emotional and loners are more rational. Good is individual and moderate and loving. Bad is groupist, hateful and hating and extreme (too much or too little of any predicate). Being emotional makes the joiners more fanatical.

 

Individualists and individuators are more rational so they feel more love for God, themselves, and others, so this makes them more moderate, more tolerant, more impartial, more objective.