I know that egoism is a meme, but does anyone actually have any arguments against it...

I know that egoism is a meme, but does anyone actually have any arguments against it, other than that it's impractical/useless?

I dunno, I haven't really read anything by Stirner, but I like its simplicity in my mind. But, it's only good for me because I'm not an egomaniac, who cares for nothing and no one other than himself. In my mind it's just "I do things because they make me happy". It is useless for informing decisions, I guess.

One problem philosophically with his version of egoism and Objectivism is that you cant really know whats going on in a persons mind, so an axiom to the effect that people always act in their own self interest isn't really provable in a scientific sense (at least not now) and as an axiom it isn't that useful as a building block for a grander philosophy. Nietzsche realized this the hard way when he kept trying to build on egoism and failing and Rand just pretended it fit her shit without really thinking about it but it pretty much destroys her attempts at ethics/aesthetics/etc, because I can just constantly ask why one of the other tenets in her philosophy is really necessary by constantly alluding to the fact that I don't think it's in my self interest.

Egoism is mostly a word game that tries to assert self interest to every act possible, but ala philosophical zombies/alternate worlds, as a point it isn't really that important whether or not something really is in our "self interest," the point is we do the act(s). So it ends up being a useless descriptor and not really that useful of a term or an idea as it applies to human action.

The thing about Stirner is he doesn't really make many positive assertions outside of an absolute negation of other ideas. It's not easy to disprove someone who isn't really asserting anything in the first place but it's also not really worth it either.

the german ideology by marx

Marx either badly misread or blatantly strawmanned Stirner many times in his critiques

people who say this have most likely read neither and just /r/anarchism-tier shitposts from users who are obviously less familiar to the entirety of stirner's arguments than the two men who were close to the current of the Young Hegelians which Stirner also was.

I'm not sure if this is true, because the entire field of psychology says otherwise.

You know as well as I do that this observation was not originally or predominantly made by reddit posters.

Yeah but most psychologists aren't trying to prove the know they exact intent/belief of a persons actions or that they can turn this thought of theirs into a general principle about human action. At least most modern ones that aren't complete quacks don't. Most psychology is trying to find exceptions and trends that show a general make up of what a typical human behavior pattern is like. They don't really ascribe content or designated prescriptive value to those analysis like an axiom on self interest.

Also philosophically a mind is very different from what we think of it on a day to day basis. Granted I brought your criticism a bit on my self by pulling science in, but the unknowability still stands as of now.

...

ehhh, I tend to disagree. A lot of social psychology still swings in this direction. For instance, they've been trying to measure implicit biases like racism for a while now.

it's arbitrary and pointless. It's pointless because it doesn't recognize any meaning to life or any objective/transcendent truth so it resorts to a hedonistic calculus where : pleasure = good, pain = bad. Humans and the world then become instruments for your whims, tools to use and abuse as long as you can somehow justify it as having more pros than cons. Also the world becomes your adversary so does everyone else because inevitably forces will interrupt your "will to possess them" and so you're constantly frustrated.

It's arbitrary because it pretend as if some pleasures are "inauthentic" while others are "authentic"; So it wants to say "yes!" to hedonism but it also wants to say "no!" because some pleasures can destroy you and "enslave" you…yet there is no Egoist method of discerning which desire is which, the typical Egoist "philosopher" usually talks in platitudes when it comes to the method of "discernment", also they inject arbitrary requirements like "avoid X,Y,Z because X,Y,Z trigger me and are never authentic desires (!!!! i.e religion, political struggle, state power, ethical values, family bonds etc")

The problem is they remove things like truth, goodness and beauty so most Egoists are forced to talk like children about life, like animals, like how pigs might talk about life.

Stirner's egoism doesn't rely on a knowledge of another person's mind at all, it's a system of ethics not all encompassing ideology. He describes self interest not as objective but incredibly subjective.

He doesn't do this either, peoples egos and their self interest are for them to determine. There is no test of authenticity

He does, that's the general principle yet it has some parameters (arbitrary parameters).


There is the problem of being "lead by your appetites" without realizing it. The egoist has no method to tell which desires are authentic and which are inauthentic to his will because he has no objective standard, or "good" standard, or "true" standard or even a "beautiful" standard which to strive for – in fact if he adopts such ideals he has subordinated his will to something external and is alienating himself from his will/ego.
So in a sense he is stuck in his own solipsism, plus some arbitrary parameters that Stirner or other Egoists tend to inject into their philosophy "hurrr stay away from religion and uhhh political or class struggle, choosing sides is for phoneys and you'll get subordinated :^) "

Again though that is about general trends, if we asked them to determine whether a specific person truly held racist beliefs and to help us know this absolutely and they had no prior knowledge to go on, that is an entirely different question and I doubt most psychologists would even give an educated guess.

The thing about axioms is they're supposed to be ironclad and applicable in all situations, psychology doesn't really involve attaining or even looking for knowledge like that.


If you want to apply egoism to people it involves minds. I guess you can have a solipsistic conception of egoism, but then why would we even be on a political forum discussing the idea? Part of the problem with Stirner's philosophy is he formulated it and died right a time we saw sweeping changes in the concepts of mind and agency. In that sense Nietzsche and even shitty Rand were slight improvements because they had to move beyond the basic negations of Stirner and actually try to apply egoism to more situations than just things he did personally. Notice that a lot of the the Ego and It's own is written in the first person because Stirner never really thought to apply his philosophy socially and he didn't think to do that because idealism was the implicit philosophy of the day on the continent and he just took for granted that he didn't need to apply his philosophy to the actual world and instead tried to pull a Descartes and rebuild things from his ego up. There is a lot of implicit cartesianism in Stirnerite philosophy but it gets masked by the things he refused to affirm and that Descartes did like god, souls, societies rules, etc.

...

Tbh Stirner doesn't say that he is the only person that matters, egoism is actually universalist. It recognizes the inherent uniqueness of every individual, and even advocates cooperation in pursuit of mutual self interest.

I'm only part way through the ego and his own, but he seems to not just be advocating hedonistic decadence, he implicitly talks about the need to nurture he spirit as well as the body. He was originally a Hegelian after all, and he seems to have adopted the Hegelian idea of humanity as being disembodied in a sense, and the body is just a physical tool for the will.

its just feuerbachian vulgar materialism with some extra edgy

If you're going full positivist, I raise against you this argument: the explanation only has to be useful. One cannot ignore subjective utility because a change in such utility corresponds with a change in the actions of an individual. Stirner's psychological egoism is immediate and compatibilist. His ethical egoism is far freer; as an example, 'truths' must be useful to the given individual and it follows that one can determine what is 'most useful' to some extent (think of it as being like the resolution of a scientific experiment). One can deny science but it won't be as useful as embracing it for it is the most rigorous explanation of our experiences. Stirner simply points out things for what they are and doesn't intend to screech as a dogmatist does while they cross the is-ought gap without a permit.


This is an argument which is dealt with in The Ego and His Own and Stirner's Critics. Stirner's egoist is not a nihilist as you claim; they recognise their truths, the ones which are useful to them. The world is only an adversary to a given individual as much as other factors which have an impact on that individual harm them; mutual aid is also desired. Next, you have presupposed 'destruction' and negative valuation in saying "some pleasures can destroy you", thus doing exactly what an egoist wouldn't. Context is the key, and certainly there is no possible way to make a perfect calculus of what is most 'egoistic'. Stirner's philosophical-psychological analysis is part of his negative crusade! To that, you say that he does with no evidence.

As for your 'objective standard': at the psychological level, it is the agency of the individual and nothing more. At the ethical level, it is utility. Yet I raise a third proposition in place: people are chaotic and unique, even if only slightly so. They will not fulfil the interests of other people all the time.

But of course, you assume that the egoist has to be 'free' in some arbitrary sense, just like the right-libertarians. No, the egoist only has to have the world work in their favour and satisfy them in all terms of time. Autonomy secures pleasure: if the universe acted in my favour all the time, I would be extremely autonomous; the models which I subscribe to say that it doesn't.

egoism is self-mastery, not hedonism. it's not about being blind to any point of reference, but about finding these points on your own instead of being forcefed by some steaming pile of shit ideology

Begging the question.

How am I assuming the conclusion? Where does Stirner's egoist shrink into denying every single spook?

There are no arguments against pure rational self-interest.
The closest thing to a counter-argument is nihilism, but that is a shitty argument which can be used against everything.

He himself warns of the ego not being enslaved to appetites and interests and be detached as shit

You could make the argument that's the closest we can get to a "natural" state. All other living things act in such a way to avoid pain and pursue pleasure.
But it doesn't matter because Stirner wasn't a hedonist. Self-interest and short-term pleasure aren't the same thing.

His argument against them is that things like the church, the nation, the family, the state, etc, are egoistic in and of themselves. They subordinate the individual to preserve and propagate themselves, and ultimately don't serve a greater good besides themselves. For the nation, the nation is the greatest good, and so on.

You mean objective truth, objective goodness, and objective beauty. This isn't a problem unless you want people to be unquestioning, dogmatic ideologues with no critical thinking skills.

Its good for the individual but bad for the collective. I know my morality is "spooky" but i feel like shit if im egoistical.

There is no such thing as the collective, just a multitude of individuals.

I'm pretty sure somewhere in his book he describes how selfishness and altruism aren't antithetical

...

If you are a genuine Marxist and materialist, then you believe in praxis; that is, the idea that ideas are only useful if they are materially and practically useful (and, to note, useful is not the same thing as interesting - and interest value is a use in itself, so like all things it is grey). The fundamental point here is, though, that the impracticality and uselessness of egoism is in itself an argument against it. Whether or not it is "correct" is only a side-note of interest-value. Even if you take it to be correct, the collective nature of genuine Marxism is the only thing that can practically realize and make actual the desires of the egoist.

So the ideology of egoism finds itself redundant, regardless of its potential truth, in the present situation. Your political ideology should not be grounded in some idealist and abstract "truth", but in material reality. What you believe to be true about existence is a part of, but not the determining factor, in this question.

...

I'm not a positivist at all, in fact my criticism of egoism comes from a well know critique of materialist and positivist conceptions of mind. I just added that science cant currently confirm it as icing on the cake, in actuality even if we had a complete map of a minds actions people could always find some way to doubt absolutes and qualitative analysis in terms of human actions. Sophistry and graying the grey matter will always be helped by the lack of concrete conclusions in scientific analysis. So there will always be a place for doubting assholes like myself.

As to the rest of your point, I don't really think use-value or the pragmatic view of knowledge is a good standard for truth, but the reasons why I think that would go well beyond the scope of this thread and I frankly don't give enough of a shit enough right now. Although I guess you could apply my initial language games critique of egoism to use value as well, it's essentially a useless descriptor that I can ascribe to everything and nothing in hindsight so ironically it's use value as a hypothetical basis for knowledge is not very useful at all.

In the part I've read so far he basically says that there is nothing wrong with caring for other people, what needs to happen is that people need to do away with the fixed ideas and spooks like humanity. We instead need to recognize the inherently egotistical nature of our actions if we want to make our thoughts our own and free ourselves from spooks. So sure, love another person, even engage in self sacrifice, but do it because it makes you happy, not because of your devotion to spooks.

That is itself the utility of materialist thought. The egoist annihilates all, even belief in the material - but this does not stop the egoist from believing in that which is useful, just as Marx's style of analysis has proven to be. Egoism is to form the basis of the communist programme's theory because it annihilates the imagined certainties which the liberal clings to; positive values and programmes are now chosen our of their utility.

I'll admit that this is entirely new territory for me and my reasoning will be extremely shaky.

The pragmatism which I'm using is essentially logical and 'broadly'-hedonistic. I ask: what pleasures me and secures my pleasure given that I am to some extent a chaotic and ill-defined/undefined individual? Scientific (and perhaps logical) analysis of my psychology, physiology and external circumstances only tell me what my limits are for different levels of exertion and effort with regards to different goals, beyond that, what assumptions can we make? Stirner's egoism has a positive programme of which the individual is the axiom because the individual cannot ignore their own utility at the psychological level; they will pursue whatever they believe to be of use to them. With regards to the ability to pursue what is useful, one is required to use models to understand how to maintain and manipulate this ability (i.e. enhance or lose it depending on desired outcome). The most useful and rigorous model is that of the materialists' creation; while a spook because of its self-referential nature (I must presuppose that the model is valid to prove its utility(?)), it cannot instantly be discarded just like any other spook.

Full image and explanation: "it cannot instantly be discarded just like any other spook" should've been "just like any other spook it cannot be discarded because the individual can form the basis of the justification as an axiom".

It's not a meme, it's unique, it's me.

No there are no arguments. Nothing can beat my realest self interest except bullets, the only way to oppress me is killing me. Because there is no master individual or idea over me.

My enemas are pretty simple. I am a FFer so I want and need a deep, total cleanout. I want my ass clean for 12 hours if need be.
use a fleet enema bottle. Just my preference. I use the larger size, there is a very small fleet enema that can be used but it requires several more bottles shot up my ass. The larger size 5oz is quicker. I shoot 4 of those up my ass. I then get down on all 4's. I then drop down on my shoulders while keeping my ass high in the air and let that water run deep in my colon. Trust me, this will take practice as you will have the major urge to release it.
For the sake of keeping your bathroom floor clean, STAY NEAR YOUR TOILET! You will have a major urge to release but it will subside if you can hold it. I then stand up and shoot 4 more(another 20oz) of water up me and yes it gets really hard to hold it in but I once again get down on my shoulders, ass up and let that water run deep in my colon.
By that point I am SO FUCKING ready to release. It feels so good to plop down on the toilet and let that eruption go from my ass. I feel like it cleanses my soul!
I gently push all the water out. BUT IN NO WAY AM I FULLY CLEANED OUT YET. The worst has yet to come out and needs to be lured out. That nasty shitty water that if not cleaned out will likely come out while later getting fucked.
Inserting a dildo makes quick work of luring out all of that shitty nastiness. As deep as you can take the dildo will lure out the water faster. Any good bottom at that point should be inserting a dildo, just for hole prep for fucking. It is a good way to open up your hole anyway, to get it ready for a good hard cock pounding.
But it also serves the purpose of luring out that final shitty water. IMO I can't get that dirty water out unless I insert a dildo for a few minutes. While I insert the dildo, I hold it in and brush my teeth, shave etc and get ready for the shower. I leave the dildo in for at least 10 minutes while brushing teeth etc. I pull it out and out comes the remaining dirty water. One more quick fleet bottle to rinse and into the shower I go.
It takes me 10 minutes to enema and push it out. Another 10 minutes or so of dildoing to get the water out while prepping, shaving etc.
I can be fully enemad, showered and out the door in under an hour and be 100% confident of my hole being clean for up to 12 hours after the enema.