The Ego and his Own by Max Stirner (most read books txt) 📕

it. Let your

competence take effect, collect yourselves, and there will be no lack of money

-- of your money, the money of your stamp. But working I do not call

"letting your competence take effect." Those who are only "looking for work"

and "willing to work hard" are preparing for their own selves the infallible

upshot -- to be out of work.

Good and bad luck depend on money. It is a power in the bourgeois period for

this reason, that it is only wooed on all hands like a girl, indissolubly

wedded by nobody. All the romance and chivalry of wooing for a dear object

come to life again in competition. Money, an object of longing, is carried off

by the bold "knights of industry."(81)

He who has luck takes home the bride. The ragamuffin has luck; he takes her

into his household, "society," and destroys the virgin. In his house she is no

longer bride, but wife; and with her virginity her family name is also lost.

As housewife the maiden Money is called "Labor," for "Labor" is her husband's

name. She is a possession of her husband's.

To bring this figure to an end, the child of Labor and Money is again a girl,

an unwedded one and therefore Money but with the certain descent from Labor,

her father. The form of the face, the "effigy," bears another stamp.

Finally, as regards competition once more, it has a continued existence by

this very means, that all do not attend to their affair and come to an

understanding with each other about it. Bread e. g. is a need of all the

inhabitants of a city; therefore they might easily agree on setting up a

public bakery. Instead of this, they leave the furnishing of the needful to

the competing bakers. Just so meat to the butchers, wine to wine-dealers, etc.

Abolishing competition is not equivalent to favoring the guild. The difference

is this: In the guild baking, etc., is the affair of the guild-brothers; in

competition, the affair of chance competitors; in the union, of those who

require baked goods, and therefore my affair, yours, the affair of neither the

guildic nor the concessionary baker, but the affair of the united.

If I do not trouble myself about my affair, I must be content with what it

pleases others to vouchsafe me. To have bread is my affair, my wish and

desire, and yet people leave that to the bakers and hope at most to obtain

through their wrangling, their getting ahead of each other, their rivalry --in

short, their competition -- an advantage which one could not count on in the

case of the guild-brothers who were lodged entirely and alone in the

proprietorship of the baking franchise. -- What every one requires, every one

should also take a hand in procuring and producing; it is his affair, his

property, not the property of the guildic or concessionary master.

Let us look back once more. The world belongs to the children of this world,

the children of men; it is no longer God's world, but man's. As much as every

man can procure of it, let him call his; only the true man, the State, human

society or mankind, will look to it that each shall make nothing else his own

than what he appropriates as man, i.e. in human fashion. Unhuman

appropriation is that which is not consented to by man, i.e., it is a

"criminal" appropriation, as the human, vice versa, is a "rightful" one, one

acquired in the "way of law."

So they talk since the Revolution.

But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me;

only my might is my own. Not this tree, but my might or control over it, is

what is mine.

Now, how is this might perversely expressed? They say I have a right to this

tree, or it is my rightful property. So I have earned it by might. That

the might must last in order that the tree may also be held -- or better,

that the might is not a thing existing of itself, but has existence solely in

the mighty ego, in me the mighty -- is forgotten. Might, like other of my

qualities (e. g. humanity, majesty, etc.), is exalted to something

existing of itself, so that it still exists long after it has ceased to be

my might. Thus transformed into a ghost, might is -- right. This

eternalized might is not extinguished even with my death, but is transferred

to "bequeathed."

Things now really belong not to me, but to right.

On the other side, this is nothing but a hallucination of vision. For the

individual's might becomes permanent and a right only by others joining their

might with his. The delusion consists in their believing that they cannot

withdraw their might. The same phenomenon over again; might is separated from

me. I cannot take back the might that I gave to the possessor. One has

"granted power of attorney," has given away his power, has renounced coming to

a better mind.

The proprietor can give up his might and his right to a thing by giving the

thing away, squandering it, etc. And we should not be able likewise to let

go the might that we lend to him?

The rightful man, the just, desires to call nothing his own that he does not

have "rightly" or have the right to, and therefore only legitimate property.

Now, who is to be judge, and adjudge his right to him? At last, surely, Man,

who imparts to him the rights of man: then he can say, in an infinitely

broader sense than Terence, humani nihil a me alienum puto, e. g., *the

human is my property*. However he may go about it, so long as he occupies this

standpoint he cannot get clear of a judge; and in our time the multifarious

judges that had been selected have set themselves against each other in two

persons at deadly enmity -- to wit, in God and Man. The one party appeal to

divine right, the other to human right or the rights of man.

So much is clear, that in neither case does the individual do the entitling

himself.

Just pick me out an action today that would not be a violation of right! Every

moment the rights of man are trampled under foot by one side, while their

opponents cannot open their mouth without uttering a blasphemy against divine

right. Give an alms, you mock at a right of man, because the relation of

beggar and benefactor is an inhuman relation; utter a doubt, you sin against a

divine right. Eat dry bread with contentment, you violate the right of man by

your equanimity; eat it with discontent, you revile divine right by your

repining. There is not one among you who does not commit a crime at every

moment; your speeches are crimes, and every hindrance to your freedom of

speech is no less a crime. Ye are criminals altogether!

Yet you are so only in that you all stand on the ground of right, i.e. in

that you do not even know, and understand how to value, the fact that you are

criminals.

Inviolable or sacred property has grown on this very ground: it is a

juridical concept.

A dog sees the bone in another's power, -- and stands off only if it feels

itself too weak. But man respects the other's right to his bone. The latter

action, therefore, ranks as human, the former as brutal or "egoistic."

And as here, so in general, it is called "human" when one sees in everything

something spiritual (here right), i.e. makes everything a ghost and takes

his attitude toward it as toward a ghost, which one can indeed scare away at

its appearance, but cannot kill. It is human to look at what is individual not

as individual, but as a generality.

In nature as such I no longer respect anything, but know myself to be entitled

to everything against it; in the tree in that garden, on the other hand, I

must respect alienness (they say in one-sided fashion "property"), I must

keep my hand off it. This comes to an end only when I can indeed leave that

tree to another as I leave my stick. etc., to another, but do not in advance

regard it as alien to me, i.e. sacred. Rather, I make to myself no crime

of felling it if I will, and it remains my property, however long as I resign

it to others: it is and remains mine. In the banker's fortune I as little

see anything alien as Napoleon did in the territories of kings: we have no

dread of "conquering" it, and we look about us also for the means thereto.

We strip off from it, therefore, the spirit of alienness, of which we had

been afraid.

Therefore it is necessary that I do not lay claim to, anything more as man,

but to everything as I, this I; and accordingly to nothing human, but to mine;

i. e., nothing that pertains to me as man, but -- what I will and because I

will it.

Rightful, or legitimate, property of another will be only that which you are

content to recognize as such. If your content ceases, then this property has

lost legitimacy for you, and you will laugh at absolute right to it.

Besides the hitherto discussed property in the limited sense, there is held up

to our reverent heart another property against which we are far less "to sin."

This property consists in spiritual goods, in the "sanctuary of the inner

nature." What a man holds sacred, no other is to gibe at; because, untrue as

it may be, and zealously as one may "in loving and modest wise" seek to

convince of a true sanctity the man who adheres to it and believes in it, yet

the sacred itself is always to be honored in it: the mistaken man does

believe in the sacred, even though in an incorrect essence of it, and so his

belief in the sacred must at least be respected.

In ruder times than ours it was customary to demand a particular faith, and

devotion to a particular sacred essence, and they did not take the gentlest

way with those who believed otherwise; since, however, "freedom of belief"

spread itself more and more abroad, the "jealous God and sole Lord" gradually

melted into a pretty general "supreme being," and it satisfied humane

tolerance if only every one revered "something sacred."

Reduced to the most human expression, this sacred essence is "man himself" and

"the human." With the deceptive semblance as if the human were altogether our

own, and free from all the otherworldliness with which the divine is tainted

-- yes, as if Man were