Self-Enslavement

 

Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of Stirner’s Critics is introduced by Jason McQuinn. On Page 18, McQuinn is describing how humans self-enslave themselves in service of some abstraction bigger than and transcending themselves: “Do you want to subordinate your life, and prostrate yourself to God, to Nature, to Jesus, Ecology, Peace, Love or Science? Or to the Proletariat or Communism, to Free Enterprise or Capitalism, to Language, Freedom or the Void? To many people it matters much less in whom or what you believe enough to pledge your self-enslavement than that you at least believe something, anything that you imagine to be greater than yourself! The biggest tabu is non-belief.”

 

My response: McQuinn and Max Stirner are more wrong than they are right, but they are correct in warning that people must not worship any cause solely or too enthusiastically.

 

Now, we do not want to deify that cause as an ideologically pagan deity that we offer sacrifices too, including ourselves, as enslaved myrmidons and passionate robots, whose surrender and service to the vaunted cause is a gesture of self-sacrificing to please this new deity.

 

It is so that as true believers serving our cause, we are enslaved and subjugated.

 

But Stirner’s subjective idealism, the self-as a creative nothing without ideals to dedicate one’s life to, that makes self-realizing impossible and empty by McQuinn’s and Stirner’s standard.

 

We must have high ideals that we live by without reifying them into a fetish to be worshiped.