An interview with Svein Olav Nyberg

Mr. Nyberg, could you briefly tell us your definition of Egoism? What authors have inspired your writing?

My direct inspirations have been few. Perhaps only Max Stirner should be mentioned, since I more or less considered myself a disciple of his in my active years. But there have been other minor inspirations, and some of them even by contradiction. It is, for instance, very hard to get past Ayn Rand when you mention “egoism” in our time, and she has of sorts inspired me, but very much via negativa, by that I honed my own understanding of the word in contrast to hers. Not that I am all in disagreement, either, but where we had our differences is perhaps where I was most clarified. Other than that, smaller inspirations from popular psychology and even eastern culture (chuang tzu) have of course had their say. And much in the way of Rand, so have also Nietzsche and Socrates been useful.

My definition? As an old acolyte for Stirner, I have of course not just one. Stirner uses the term “egoist” in at least two ways, so I think I am guilty of at least three. So let me give you three simple ones: 1) The egoist as the moral philosophical disproof, the ad absurdum, is the man who does not act “as man” according to the moral philosopher, and who therefore ends up being the paradoxical “man who is not a man”. Of course, it is the philosophy that dies as a result of this contradiction, not the man. 2) “The creative nothing”. This is what Stirner’s definitions boil down to, and is perhaps the most alluring statement of egoism. It also borders on mysticism, which is another one of my long-time interests. 3) A man whose actions follow from his own interest. This leaves the word “interest” inherently undefined, and for my part at least, an examination of this leads to #2. But I notice others examine it differently and end up with egoisms much closer to the common derogatory term of someone who cares shit about others.

When did you become interested in Egoism?

In my mid teens, after a bit of a philosophical crisis. I had hoped that ethics was somehow logically provable, and of course preferably that these ethics equalled the ones I subscribed to at the time. But the more I tried, the farther away that goal became, until I discovered what all young thinkers discover sooner or later: that we cannot think so hard that we manage to materialize a bridge to “ought”. Not from “is”, but nor from anywhere else we might feel comfortably safe to start. That was when I discovered the trio of Stirner, Nietzsche and Rand, and in the former I found a positive spin on what had seemed like doom.

You have written about what egoism is not, misconceptions of what Egoism is. Could you tell us about this?

That’s an interesting question, and as you saw above, even a single person such as myself often work with several conceptions of that single word. So I won’t go the route of Rand who defines the word, and then everyone else are wrong – by definition.

What is common to most understandings of egoisms, though, is that it is an “ism” of the self, so it means to be “for yourself” in some way. I think where it goes wrong is when someone imposes an external constraint on the meaning. Say, for instance, that they insist that all of existence is a power struggle. With that constraint, being “for yourself” automatically implies “being against the other”. You see where this is going? Other pathways may also end up precisely there, equating being for yourself with somehow wanting ill fortune for others or preying on them. If that was all there was to egoism, then egoists would shun each other’s company! In essence, these people have defined the “egoist” as a predatory character, a near synonym for a “sociopath”. And aside from Sherlock Holmes in the new TV series, not many would defend that. I would not, and Stirner would not. But the sociopath *does* serve one philosophical function: that of being a counter-example to the ethical theorist’s “man”.

But yet, I meet people who argue that philosophical egoists are simply sociopaths in philosophical clothing. This is usually based on a sample of zero persons.

So perhaps just as important as clarifying what egoism is not, is to clarify what self-professed egoists in practice are not. The ones I have met have interestingly enough been very kind people, and open and generous to boot. Quite opposite of the stereotype people have of the reclusive miser scheming others’ misfortune. They actively care about people in their surroundings, and they profess philosophical egoism because they think it will help these others.

At this point, someone may well interject “But what about the non-philosophical egoists, the ones who don’t use the word but who simply act the way we mean when we say ‘egoist’?” And to that, is there really anything to answer? They have already defined “egoist” to mean what they mean, and are thus using the word in the rather common but unreflected and stereotypical way. They really want to reserve that word as a synonym for the predatory and the sociopath. Well, that’s fine too, but they do limit their understandings of the world if they insist that theirs is the only meaning, being dark mirror images of Ayn Rand, in my world.

For those who may not know, could you tell us who Max Stirner was, and why his writing is important in discussing Egoism?

Interesting question. While you could always look him up in some encyclopaedia, the entry writers seem to at best rely on second hand sources, which means they are often off-target by a near 180˚. You may also wonder how it is possible to confuse ethical egoism with epistemological solipsism without a decent dose of absinthe.

Anyway, Max himself. His lived in Germany in the first half of the 1800s, and was a student of Hegel’s. But of course, the name of the teacher does not say it all. What matters at least as much is what the student himself brings into the equation, and Max seems to have had a particularly strong individualist streak. So the short version of who Max Stirner was, was that he was the one to breathe individualism onto Hegelianism – or possibly Hegelianism into individualism.

The result of mixing the Hegelian toolcase with individualism was a very potent kind of individualism that not only asserted the individual in its nakedness, but which also used the intellectual aikido of Hegelianism to swing its oppositions arguments around and against them. This is what Stirner did so successfully: the ethical philosophers of his time tried to subdue real humans by labelling them inhuman, or “un-man”, if they did not do what the ethical theory commanded. Stirner turned that very “un-man” as a club against the philosophies themselves. A dialectical turn, an intellectual aikido, which broke his opponents.

And break his opponents he did. The Young Hegelian club from which Stirner sprang did indeed wither, and I say much as a result of his attacks. One particular weed from that club escaped, though. Not intellectually, for it was nothing but Feuerbachianism (Feuerbach was a prominent Young Hegelian) expounded with lots of gusto. But that gusto let it survive, even though its gardener Karl Marx had to let off steam against Stirner through a few hundred pages of ad hominem attacks on Stirner in The German Ideology.

And that is perhaps the most important reason why Stirner still is important: Marx and Stirner were opposites, and Stirner had the stronger case. Marx won through back then because he had the stronger personality and financial backing. But Stirner still has the stronger case. To anyone wanting to promote egoism – or any other reasonable stripe of individualism – using Stirner’s appropriation of Hegel’s toolbox will prove very valuable.

And it might even be as Hegelian philosopher Lawrence Stepelevich has suggested, that Stirner not only appropriated Hegel’s toolbox for individualism, but even did his philosophical aikido so thoroughly that he showed that Hegel’s toolbox really belonged to Stirner all the time. Stirner was the ultimate Hegelian.

** New additions from The Independent Ego @worthy248

• The Failure of Christianity by Emma Goldman
• The Rebel by Camus
• Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises
• How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne
• The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
• **Mein zwanzigstes Jahrhundert by Ludwig Marcuse
• **Society and the Spectacle by Guy Debord 
• **Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power by Saul Newman
• **Eumeswil by Ernst Junger

The Failure of Christianity by Emma Goldman

First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth journal:

Our age has given birth to two intellectual giants, who have undertaken to transvalue the dead social and moral values of the past, especially those contained in Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner have hurled blow upon blow against the portals of Christianity, because they saw in it a pernicious slave morality, the denial of life, the destroyer of all the elements that make for strength and character. True, Nietzsche has opposed the slave-morality idea inherent in Christianity in behalf of a master morality for the privileged few. But I venture to suggest that his master idea had nothing to do with the vulgarity of station, caste, or wealth. Rather did it mean the masterful in human possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful things.

Both Nietzsche and Stirner saw in Christianity the leveler of the human race, the breaker of man’s will to dare and to do. They saw in every movement built on Christian morality and ethics attempts not at the emancipation from slavery, but for the perpetuation thereof. Hence they opposed these movements with might and main.

The Rebel by Camus

In The Rebel the second chapter on “Metaphysical Rebellion” has a section on “Absolute Affirmation” – which has a subsection on Stirner entitled “The Unique”. In the American Vintage Book edition this comprises pages 62-65 inclusive. There is also a brief reference to Stirner on page 154.

Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises

pg. 151

If one assumes that there exists above and beyond the individual’s actions an imperishable entity aiming at its own ends, different from those of mortal men, one has already constructed the concept of a superhuman being. The one cannot evade the question whose ends take precedence whenever an antagonism arises, those of the state or society or those of the individual. The answer to this question is already implied in the very concept of state or society as conceived by collectivism and universalism. If one postulates the existence of an entity which ex definitione is higher, nobler, and better than the individuals, then there cannot be any doubt that the aims of this eminent being must tower above those of the wretched individuals. (It is true that some lovers of paradox-for instance, Max Stirner- took pleasure in turning the matter upside down and for all that asserted the precedence of the individual.) If society or state is an entity endowed with volition and intention and all the other qualities attributed to it by the collectivist doctrine, then it is simply nonsensical to set the shabby individual’s trivial aims against its lofty designs.

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

pg. 19

It is not realized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom
is essentially self-liberation—that I can have only so much freedom
as I procure for myself by my ownness.
—Max Stirner

pg. 114

Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for “one goes
further with a handful of might than a bagful of right.”
—Max Stirner

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

Too often, the ethical-political meaning of individualism is held to be: doing whatever one wishes, regardless of the rights of others. Writers such as Nietzsche and Max Stirner are sometimes quoted in support of this interpretation. Altruists and collectivists have an obvious vested interest in persuading men that such is the meaning of individualism, that the man who refuses to be sacrificed intends to sacrifice others.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

“The Eye in the Pyramid”, “The Golden Apple”, “Leviathan”

pg. 53

Anarchism was frequently associated with assassinations. It had an appeal for freethinkers, such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, but also for religious idealists, like Tolstoy and Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Most anarchists hoped, Joachim-like, to redistribute the wealth, but Rebecca had once told him about a classic of anarchist literature, Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which had been called “the Billionaire’s Bible” because it stressed the advantages the rugged individualist would gain in a stateless society-and Cecil Rhodes was an adventurer before he was a banker. The Illuminati were anarchists.

pg. 495

The next day, he had burned his naturalization papers and put the ashes in an envelope addressed to the President of the United States, with a brief note: “Everything relevant is ruled irrelevant. Everything material is ruled immaterial. An ex-citizen.” The ashes of hie Army Reserve discharge went to the Secretary of Defense with a briefer note: “Non Serviam. An ex-slave.” That year’s income tax form went to the Secretary of the Treasury, after he wiped his ass on it; the note said: “Try robbing a poor box. Der Einziege.” His fury still mounting, he grabbed his copy of Das Kapital off the bookshelf, smiling bitterly at the memory of his sarcastic marginal notes, scrawled “Without private property there is no private life” on the flyleaf, and mailed it to Josef Stalin in the Kremlin.

pg. 577 –

TO BE A BAT'S A BUM THING
A SILLY AND A DUMB THING
BUT AT LEAST A BAT IS SOMETHING
AND YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL

YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL

YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING
NOTHING BUT A NOTHING

YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NOTHING

YOU'RE NOT A THING AT ALL

YOU'RE NOT A      THING     AT ALL

New additions:

Mein zwanzigstes Jahrhundert by Ludwig Marcuse

“[Horkheimer] was a Hegelian and militant sociologist, believing in the objective spirit, and had expected a study from me which would have worked on Jahn as an illustration of the Left Hegelian science of society. I, on the other hand, belonged at an early age to the diverse opposition: the early Romantics, Stirner, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. . . . I had a warm inclination toward Pollock and Horkheimer, a high respect for their Zeitschrift and their collective volume, “Authority and Family,” which the Institut had published- and was sad not to be able to work with them.”
–Ludwig Marcuse, Mein zwanzigstes Jahrhundert (Munich, 1960), pp. 239-240

Society and the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power by Saul Newman

“Stirner, like Nietzsche who was clearly influenced by him, has been interpreted in many different ways.152 One possible interpretation of Stirner is that he is an anarchist. Indeed, he has much in common with the anarchist position—particularly in his rejection of the state and political authority. Stirner argues that the state is an apparatus that denies the individual the right of self realization, the expression of his value: “The State does not let me come to my value, and continues to exist only through my valuelessness.”153 It is a despotism wielded over the individual: “The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual—to make him subject to some generality or other.”154 For Stirner, the state is the new church—the new place of power, the new authority wielded over the individual. Moreover, it operates through the same moral hypocrisy—now shrouded in legal codes.155 Stirner, therefore, displays an anti-authoritarianism that shares much with anarchism. He wants to lay bare the vicious, oppressive nature of political power: to unmask its underlying morality that might is right, and to examine its effect—to stultify and alienate the individual, instilling in him a dependence on the state.”

“Revolutionary action has been trapped, according to Stirner, by the paradigm of the state—it has remained caught within the dialectic of place. Revolutions have only succeeded in replacing one form of authority with another. This is because, as Stirner argues, they do not question the very condition, the category, the idea of state authority and, therefore, remain within its hold.159 The state can never be reformed, Stirner argues, because it can never be trusted and this is why the place of power itself must be destroyed. Stirner rejects Bruno Bauer’s notion of a democratic state which grows out of the “power of the people” and which is always subordinated to the people. For Stirner, the state can never really be brought under the control of people—it always has its own logic, and it will soon turn against the will of the people.” Pg.55

“Stirner reveals himself as an anti-authoritarian thinker par excellence. Moreover, his critique of the politics of place is useful in a number of ways. Not only does he continue the critique of Marxism elaborated in the first chapter, he also applies the same logic to anarchism itself—he allows us to think beyond the epistemological categories which inform anarchism” Pg.56

“However, Stirner argues that by seeking the sacred in “human essence,” by positing an essential man and attributing to him certain qualities that had hitherto been attributed to God, Feuerbach has merely reintroduced religious alienation. The individual finds himself alienated within the symbolic order: he is subjected to a series of signifiers—man, human essence—that imposes an identity on him which only half represents him, and which is not of his own creation or choosing. This is similar to Lacan’s theory of subjectification, and will be discussed in later chapters. Stirner shows that by making certain characteristics and qualities essential to man, Feuerbach has alienated those in whom these qualities are not found. And so man becomes like God, and just as man was debased under God, so the concrete individual is debased beneath this perfect being, man. Like the Marxist revolution that only reaffirmed state power, Feuerbach’s “insurrection” has not destroyed the place of religious Chapter Three authority—it has merely installed man within it, replacing God. For Stirner, man is just as oppressive, if not more so, than God: “Feuerbach thinks, that if he humanizes the divine, he has found truth. No, if God has given us pain, ‘Man’ is capable of pinching us still more torturingly.”167 The essential man of Feuerbachian humanism is a new ideological construct, a new deception which, according to Stirner, oppresses and denies the individual. It is a mutilating, alienating idea—a “spook,” or a “fixed idea,” as Stirner calls it—something that desecrates the uniqueness of the individual by comparing him to an ideal which is not of his own creation. This is Christian alienation all over again, according to Stirner: “To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name ‘Our Essence.’ Can we put up with this, that ‘Our Essence’ is brought into opposition to us—that we are split into an essential and unessential self? Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?”168” Pgs.57-58

Eumeswil by Ernst Junger

“Now just what are the cardinal points or the axioms of Stirner’s system, if one cares to call it that? There are only two, but they suffice for thorough reflection:

1. That is not My business.
2. Nothing is more important than I.

Quoted from Eumeswil, regarding Max Stirner’s concept of “Der Einziger”

Part of the problem with Zube’s LMP project is the sheer volume of material. He’s put over 500,000 pages onto microfiche, and I have to rely on archived version of his indexes, and not everything was indexed digitally… and then, really, you have to know you’d be interested in something to search for it. And even then, and index is only so complete.

So, while I was scanning pages from egoist journals The Storm (1976) and Minus One (1963), I stumbled across INVICTU$. Subtitled “A Journal of Objectivist and Libertarian Opinion” and “Published by the CSCLA Students of Objectivism”.

“We’ll that’s neat” I thought, and I scanned the first page. I was there for other stuff, but I scanned it to remind myself that it existed and I should go back to it.

And then today, while looknig at my scans, I decided I might post this anomaly, even though I’d only scanned one page. AND THEN I SAW IT: LOIS ROLLINS

Of course, beginning on PAGE TWO, is an aticle titled “F.C.C.: FASCIST CENSORSHIP COMMISSION by Louis Rollins.” And the name made a light bulb go off, and it was a few keystrokes over to The Hoover Hog blog, run by my comrade Chip Smith to reread his eulogy for L.A. Rollins.

L.A. Rollins received his B.A. degree in philosophy from California State College at Los Angeles in 1970, which happens to be the year I was born. Throughout the glorious decade that followed he edited and published a sporadic fringe-libertarian newsletter called Invictus: A Journal of Individualist Thought (Good luck finding a copy).

Well, no luck needed at all, just a second generation German anarchist in Australia who obsessed over putting out 1,770+ microfiche with amazing material on them for many decades.

And every time this happens, and it happens every time I look at the microfiche, I cringe thinking about Zube dying and only having a partial collection of his fiche to reference. And I’ve considered holding a fundraiser to obtain the full set (Kickstarter? Patreon? Does anyone care about those?). In a recent e-mail with Zube I asked him about it:

You could have the total series of 1779 issues for the equivalent of US $ 1779, less the issues you already have, or those, you do not really want.

So that’s where I’m at. And I’m skeptical that there are enough people out there who would contribute to the Union of Egoists obtaining a full set of microfiche. Is it possible to find 90 people to pitch in $20 without spending a month of my time running a fund-raiser, and therefore basically negating a month of my time in actually doing research and archiving and website building?!?! It’s a sticky-wicket if there ever was one…

In an online subject index, Zube discusses some compilations of “Freedom Quotes” including his own project, and L.A. Rollins’ “Lucifer’s Lexicon”:

QUOTATIONS ON LIBERTY, see e.g. LACONICS OF LIBERTY, compiled by Sprading, PP 220/21, L.E. Read, An ABC of Freedom, Slogans for Liberty, Spencer, Sumner. See FREE MAN’S ALMANACH, The Forgotten Man’s Almanac (1093). Firstly, I would like a complete list of all such handbooks. Secondly, I would like all of them to be made available on microfilm. Thirdly, I would like these compilations scanned and integrated into a single collection, to be made available on fiche and disks. Then I would like a scanning and search of the ca. 15000 different books of quotations, for truthful ones on liberty and related subjects, to be finally added to the encyclopedia of Slogans for Liberty. Only then would we have all this proverbial wisdom sufficiently mobilized. To this ought to be added encyclopedias of definitions and of the best refutations so far found or myths, errors and prejudices that remain obstacles to progress. (Towards the latter, I do also collect A – Z handbooks.) I collected towards the quotations project e.g.: Peter’s Quotations, Seldes, The Great Quotations, Mencken’s book of quotations, Timko’s Libertarian Cartoons & Assorted Quotations, vol. I, Bachman’s Book of Freedom Quotations, Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, Berman’s Quotations from the Anarchists, Bufe’s The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations, Rollins’ Lucifer’s Lexicon, intend to buy from LFB at least: Scasz: The Untamed Tongue – A dissenting dictionary & Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon. I possess among others: Dagobert D. Runes: a) Dictionary of Thought, b) Handbook of Reason, c) Treasury of Thought, d) A Book of Contemplation. I filmed my own ABC Against Nuclear War (in pp 16-18), Read’s ABC of Freedom, Percy Greaves’ Mises Made Easier, and am always on the lookout for more such handbooks. Anyone ready to swap for some of my fiche? My own compilation, Slogans for Liberty, may come to ca. 20 fiche. So far only vol. I – IV are out, covering A to part of D, with a total of 840 pp. The rest – when I get around to do the keyboarding. – I wish libertarians would at last apply division of labour to such projects. See: SLOGANS FOR LIBERTY. – J.Z.

One of the heartbreaking aspects of Zube’s LMP project is in all the material he is pleading with others to join the cause of microfiche supremacy:

This was after the meticulous index created by Zube for a microfiche containing ALL 455 pages of this obscure anarchist journal that comprise issues 1-10. Amazing.

And, well, by trying to research the project itself (something that in itself should have someone dedicated to do), it seems like any year now it could become entirely forgotten, much less how obscure it seemed to be as it was operational.

Every LMP microfiche has an index page, sometimes simple, sometimes very elaborate. I look at just the range of material from this one from 1981:

And I’m in awe. Did anyone else save a copy of a Chummy Fleming Bookshop flyer for the ages in an archival format other than paper? Did anyone save a paper version? Does anyone care? I don’t know.

Will I turn into the 21st century John Zube, constantly making appeals to others to assist me in producing the greatest egoist resource ever produced? Christ I hope not, but is there another way to obtain an acquisitions budget as an individual unaffiliated with an academic or other non-profit entity? Do I really just funnel the meager profits from Underworld Amusements into a free resource for others? No, that can’t happen either.

Circling back to INVICTU$, I’ve taken about 10-12 hours of personal time to sit in a room with microfiche scanning equipment to digitize an amazing amount of work that will eventually see the light of day in digital or print form, emanating from the UoE project. I’ve invested hundreds of dollars into research and archival materials.

So I’m thinking I definitely need an acquisitions budget. That’s not going to be sufficiently generated from profits of selling books or other items. I’m pretty sure it needs to come from you, the person interested enough to read this far. If you have thoughts on the subject, please contact us.

If you’d like to do something very concrete to support the project, kick over some bucks. All money sent through this paypal button will be used exclusively for UoE acquisitions and project needs: