What exactly is a spook? From what I've read, it means social institutions like the state and religion...

What exactly is a spook? From what I've read, it means social institutions like the state and religion. Why didn't he use the word social construct and what is the difference between a social construct and a spook?

He used a few different words, like "the sacred", "absolutes", "fixed ideas" among others.

Good to know.

But what exactly does it entail?

It's a "fixed idea". It means that you have some abstract belief that exists independent of reality. This is contrasted by real objects (property) that you have a conception of. The badge a police officer wears is a physical object that is real, but the idea that police are a righteous authority is a spook.

Thanks. But doesn't that mean that all thoughts are spooks? Because they don't exist physically?

No. Thoughts are signifiers. Think of a person's mind like a simulation of the outside world. Some of those thoughts relate to real things in the world - objects, events, patterns, etc. Other thoughts pertain to things that exist only in the abstract, i.e. within a mind. The latter are spooks. This includes things like morality and a lot of religious ideas like sin. Does it physically exist? If not, they are spooks. This is in the theoretical sense, btw. Dinosaurs no longer exist, but they are not spooks. Souls do not exist but the idea of a soul is something that would physically exist, so that's not a spook either (just a lie).

Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world is “empty,” is “naught,” is only glamorous “semblance”; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a spirit.

Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; you are always having “apparitions” or visions. Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly “apparition”; the world is to you only a “world of appearances,” behind which the spirit walks. You “see spirits.”


Anything that is not a material thing is a spook.
This comprehends social constructs but not only.
Social constructs such as nationality, family, God are spooks, but also ideas such as the self, private property, civil rights, laws, etc.

Every thought CAN become a spook. If you completely surrender to that thought, if you put it above yourself and demand that everyone bow to that thought, then it become a thought. If you subordinate this thought to your self interest it's not a spook.
ISIS members are spooked by Islam
Holla Forums is spooked by their race
feminist are sppoked by their idea of strong woman
Stirner even argued that Mankind or Humanity was the ultimate spook.

I think its important to know that spooks are not necessarily harmful, as long as you recognise they are spooks, so that you dont cling on to them if they are detrimental to you.

if you put it above yourself and demand that everyone bow to that thought, then it become a spook*

One day i'll read my posts before posting i swer on me mum.

here

Piggybacking off of this
Race is real in the sense that people have ancestry and they can be (arbitrarily) dividing into groups based on that fact. Racism or racial supremacy is a spook even though it's based on a fact because it's also based on the idea of superiority, which is itself a spook. The idea that humans have some "value" other than their descriptive characteristics is itself a spook, so the idea that some people have greater value than others is a spook by extension.

this is what triggered Marx right? That Feuerbach and him were basically still humanists, even though they had a materialist understanding of religion.

It's important to note that "spirits" is metaphorical here. Literal spirits are not spooks, just false beliefs in the same way that believing in unicorns is a false belief.

Gonna trigga some niggas by posting this, but basically yes - it was that Stirner was more materialist than Marx.

stirnir btfo

Idk about that. Stirner seems like an idealist to me. I've only read secondary sources on him, but basically from what I've read, he was more of a Hegelian than Marx and Feuerbach were.

His position is that you are the only real person to you (basically solipsism) and that as far as you're concerned everyone else is no different from animals or unliving matter but for sophistication. That doesn't preclude co-operation or love for your fellow man, just that those things have to pass through the filter of your own self-interest. Working with others helps you achieve what you want and helping others makes you feel good, because even though you cannot know their mind, you can reasonably suppose that it has an experience and supposing that another suffers brings you pain while supposing that they are happy brings you happiness. If it's idealism, it's very indirect idealism and recognizes that such ideals are really just a part of your perception.

Whoops, forgot the last line.

This is what is meant when people meme that you are their property. Because people are external to their minds, they are part of the material landscape and property like anything else.

...

I was going to be a smartarse and say "So race is one of the few things about people that isn't a spook?" but then someone pointed out Holla Forumss pedestal placement of it made it a spook.

Bit how the hell is the concept of a soul not a spook? It's immaterial and a highly treasured thought.

And what's with the 'my property' meme attached to Stirner?

Actually, that's interesting.
From the believer's perspective, God is a real guy who can send him to Hel or Heaven. Acting religiously only to go to Heaven, would not being spooked.
If however he is ready to do things that could send him to hell for the greater glory of God, or for the sake of fellow believer, then it would be a spook.
From an outside perspective, the beleiver is Spooked either way because God is nothing but a tought.

That is the correct thing to do if you belief the brain in the vat theory

it is a spook.

Thanks, man. This is interesting stuff.

The self is part of the external world. Your body, including your brain are material and your property. Your mind is basically software to your brain's hardware and is separate in that everything that exists in it is an abstraction. The ego is your mind itself. Property is everything outside of your mind. Spooks are ideas in your mind that represent things that are not actually real, i.e. not property. Stirner advocates your mind representing reality (property) as closely as possible.


God is not a spook. Hell is not a spook. They are lies. In the same way that you can point a gun at someone and tell them it's loaded and that's a lie. The bullets not existing doesn't make them spooks.

But how is ownership not a spook? If I'm drinking from a can of beer and put it down and someone picks it up and starts to drink it, haven't I just spooked myself?

Idk. I think pretty much all the religions are against believing in God for the sake of just going into heaven. But even atheist Christianity, or atheist religions are a thing and I wouldn't even know where to start about how spooky that is (or isn't).

Haven't realy finished the Ego and his own yet. From what i have understood, It means attributing value to things according to your own interest, as opposed to attributing value to them according to your spooks.
Ex: Liking people because they are Human beans vs liking people because you enjoy their company.
Sort of

I can't answer that, but Proudhon at least makes the distinction between property (as an artificial right) and something being in your possession (where that's an undeniable fact). So maybe it is a spook.

So here he talks about empathy. The key is to realize that empathizing and caring for others is good (i.e. preferable from your perspective) because you like it. It doesn't make love righteous or noble, just in your self-interest.

Here's another pic about class consciousness. It's nothing to do with right or wrong, just what's in the interest of yourself (which involves considering what's in the interest of other people, who are your property).

Property rights are a spook. Your stuff is your stuff only because a might is preventing others to take it (either you or the State…)

Is there any evidence he believed that?

Ownership is a spook. When Max says "X is my property" he means that X is some part of the material world and as such it is his to interact with as pleases him. The notion that somebody is allowed to do with X as they please and others are not is a spook. But then you have to ask the question - does it please you to take and use something that is another's? Does it please you when another takes and uses something that you are using? It pleases you more when you have an X but so do others who want an X. If somebody else lacks an X and takes yours because they want it, you should recognize they were wanting for an X (and now you are) and this wanting should displease you.

Doubtfull, because neuroscience didnt exist, but Descartes thought something similar, that you can't trust your own senses (and thus the outside world) and can only be certain that you *are*. Thus you must differentiate between the outside world and yourself.

Did he ever have anything to say about eudaimonist theories of ethics?

Far as I can recall he mostly just characterizes philosophy through history as a maturation process. I don't remember if he goes into specifics too much on the ancients. Been a while since I read Ego and Its Own.

From what i read, Antiquity philosophers busied themselves with "how being free from things", that's pretty the most of what he said about Antiquity.
Nothing beat the source material

Top zozzles


Isn't the concept of a state a spook? Or is it a spook that has transcended spookdom?


Wouldn't this be more Stirner looking at his beliefs through his own eyes? Wouldn't the thoughts and feelings of other people be a spook in the eyes of a psychopath?

I cringe every time someone says "spook" here.

Didn't Marx think his ideas were trash? So why is Stirneer so omnipresent on Holla Forums ?

It was for teh lulz at first.

Always starts that way…

To be blunt:

Psychopaths are aware of other people's feelings and usually understand them quite well, they just don't care. You're thinking of a narcissist, who isn't aware of other people's minds. To a psychopath, there isn't a self-interest in empathy because there is none. There is self-interest in cooperation to a psychopath, though.

Not really. A narcissist being unaware that other people's feelings exist doesn't make them spooks any more than a particular island in the Pacific ocean is a spook because I don't know it exists.

Stirner's concept of spook match very well the obsession of Idpol of all kind, hence why he is popular here.


The State can be a spook. But most of the time, it's more a instrument to enforce spooks (property rights, god's rule and so on…). People are more likely to serve the state in the name of the People than in the name of the State itself.

No. People grouping together to function as a single entity is as real a phenomenon as cells grouping together to function as a single organism. The idea that a state is "legitimate" or an "authority" is where the spook comes in.

Because Stirner is a /lit/ meme, and Holla Forums is /lit/'s child, so it got some of much of its genes memes

I've not been here long and I always thought it was pretty clear it's a joke/thought experiment/used to troll braindead Holla Forumsacks who would never actually look it up, rather than a deeply held belief.

How does that work?

Theism is the belief in a deity. You can have a religion that doesn't believe in deities if you worship nature or spirits or some general universal force. Christian atheism is where people think Christian values are good ideas but that the religious teachings aren't true (but good metaphors/parables). Christian atheism is the anarcho-capitalism of religion.

Because not everyone on this board is a Marxist, and not every Marxist agrees 100% with Marx.

That's why all of Holla Forums believes in the labor theory of value, which makes the most autistic shitposters on Holla Forums are just as valuable as bleeding-edge scientists, right? Ayy lmao.

Do anyone have the quote about looting the supermarket of ideas?

...

Someone said earlier that race is only a spook when you start attaching intangible concepts to it, so I was exploring emotion as this to a narcissist. I'm just trying to iron out the points of contention in my mind.

I think I'm getting there though. My analogy is like someone who is colourblind saying that red and green are spooks because they can see only brown. The colourblind person has spooked spooks itself, by not grasping that the flaw is tangible and on him.

I think I've got it. Everything is a spook bar tangible objects, phenomena and forces. The state isn't a spook because it has the power to exercise its will but believing a random act was divine intervention would be a spook. Race exists, but the majority of subjects around it are spooks.

Authority exists in the mind, and is therefore a spook, but the power to enforce said authority no matter how spooky is very real.

I've been up for quite some time so I probably have butchered some of this, but I feel like I'll wake up tomorrow with a better grasp of it. I think Stirner's belief that he's allowed to call dibs on things is pretty spooky though.


Stirner is great, he's like Holla Forums's answer to cucked, but with added infuriation to Holla Forums because it involves thinking and reading as a primer rather than watching Blacked, and we all know which one they'd prefer.

Nah thats classcucked, where you knowingly work against the interests of your class.

In a 'cucked by x' 'x is a spook' way, rather than a carbon copy.

Stormcucks needs to catch on more, since they're just shilling for stormfront because they fell for their memes.

Caring about other people, i.e. empathy is only a spook if you apply some kind of abstraction to it beyond "it makes me feel good" or to be more technical "I'm biologically wired to have emotional responses to my perception of others' emotions." Recognizing the biological reality of yourself is not a spook.

Basically.
No, that's not a spook. Divine intervention is a concrete concept: god did some magic and altered reality. It's a false belief. Now if you believe something happened because of some moral fabric like karma, that would be a spook. The idea of a cause/effect relationship isn't a spook, just an error - the idea that there is some moral underpinning is a spook. If you believe in god, then god acts according to god's motivations, which isn't spooky, just untrue.

Yes. This even includes a lot of ideas about where lines between races should be drawn.

Yes, but it's less the power to enforce authority per se and more the power to impose one's will.

That's basically a meme version of his ideology. When he says something is his property, he doesn't mean it in the same sense that people think of personal property or private property. Everything is his property because from his perspective he is the only person, so there is nobody else to hold property. Just because something is his property doesn't mean that in reality he controls it or that he would want to.

I think that in the ego and it's own stirner basically said that a god's only power is in actual power to control things, not moral authority.

I think I've got it, that's what I was trying to get at with biological reality. The divine intervention and karma is a helpful comparison I'll hold onto if I ever find myself explaining it, too.

I thought 'my property' was a solipsistic thing at first but I got confused with - it's back making sense for me now. That's why the Rand comic cracked me up.

Thanks for explaining famalam.

It sort of is and isn't. To an egoist, there is just "me" and "everything else," which "I" interact with as I please. It's not really an ownership thing so much as "It's not me but I can interact with it." Other people fall into this category, but an egoist still recognizes they have minds of their own. The point is that you can only really know your own mind, but you should act in accordance with how others' minds appear to be because those people are a part of the real world (your property) as much as gravity is.

NP

holy shit that image

I believed something like that had happened for a while, soon as I saw someone finally confirmed my suspicions I fukken saved it at the speed of light.

I think it would be worthy of a thread if we had a good old archaeological dig.

Holla Forums EXPOSED!

I love how even stormfags think of Holla Forums as beneath them too.

Phantasm sounds better than spook or at least if it is not repeated a million times over.

Forgot my qualityposting name.

kill me now

People are stupid and predictable, more at 11.

Should we just be completely unoriginal cunts and download BUGS Buddy?

The fuck is BUGS Buddy?

Read this picture
Holla Forums have been cucked right from the top.