>>1665>As for egoist as dominator, a quoteOh, boy, oh, boy, do I love it when egoist secular humanists misuse that quote of Stirner as an argument. Wolfi has already warned egoist anarchists about how overquoting Stirner can turn The Unique and Its Property into a bible. We had so much expansion on the Stirnerian thought: Renzo Novatore, Emma Goldman, Dora Marsden, James L. Walker, Sidney Parker, post-leftists. Yet here we are. Regardless, the interests and passions of Stirner are not the interests and passions of every conscious egoist ever. Universalizing compassion would be trivializing the drives, desires and personality traits of egoists that are unique to them and returning to an idea of a "human nature" (or may we call it "egoist nature") that Stirner was trying to escape. Not everyone is able to leverage the same joy from compassion as others. Not everyone needs to. Heck, psychopaths aren't able to feel empathy at all, for Unique's sake. Are they somehow less egoistic than other conscious egoists? I don't think so.
>This might be true, but is it really egoism if you are haunted by `fixed idea` of being "at the top"?Good point. There's certainly something spooky about being obsessed with political power, not helped by the fact that those who became rulers by ruthlessly disposing of their rivals having some spooky idealistic vision of the future, be it Stalin or Hitler or whatever the fuck. But the opposite is also a spook, the claim that a conscious egoist must deny domination. It becomes a kind of a vice for an egoist, a moralistic taboo, which is obviously against what Stirner stands for. As Jason McQuinn put it: "Whatever you do, get away with it."
Conscious egoists ARE Machiavellian. As Walker said, the ruling class are conscious egoists who rule the world while the rest of us are in confusion. I grappled with this fact for weeks and the best objections to becoming a dictator were made by Egoism Simplified and Dr. Bones:
https://yewtu.be/embed/z2TsnpZ1WLo?start=195&end=221https://yewtu.be/embed/NcsmFQX_kDk?start=540&end=599Post too long. Click here to view the full text.