Stirner

(Disclaimer I may not agree with a lot of what Stirner says but I want to portray his views in a fair way. Also a book called the Nihilistic Egoist and Stirner‘s the Ego and his Own are the best books on the subject.Here is my video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i55lqh88_8)
 Imagine a throne of god. A new atheism comes by and god comes down from the throne. These atheists think of what to do with this throne they now have. They put all sorts of things on the throne: Love, humanity, community. Stirner is the man who plants the dynamite under the throne to blow the throne up so that nothing will ever be god like again. Stirner rejected creating concepts or ideals and then treating them as axiomatic ideals. Such ideals result in the hampering and destroying of the individuality of the ego. Stirner starts his philosophy in nihilism, rejecting everything that is held religiously. In his sense of the term anything held lofty and high over the individual is incorrect and religious. There is nothing above the individual and all things external to the individual are nothing.
 Stirner advocated a kind of nihilistic egoism in which the only cause that he excepted was his own cause. He doesn’t make himself into this new god. He does not put himself on the pedestal. Instead he sees himself as something to be used up as he sees the external world as something to be used up. It is a kind of radical hedonism based on the meaninglessness of life.
 This where the next interesting topic comes in: Stirner and existentialism. Both types of thinking start out in a nihilistic position that life is essential meaningless and the external world dubious. This is where the sameness ends. Existentialists often have a solution to over coming this nihilism. For Kierkegaard it was god, for Sartre community, etc. Not for Stirner. For Stirner, this escapism does not prove the validity of absolutes or fixed ideas as he calls them. These escapes do not give meaning to life as nothing truly can give meaning to life. In fact these are merely denials of a terrifying nihilistic truth. For Stirner the way to go is to live in this nihilism to use the creative nothing which is the self to produce and push forward the self against anything which will hold it back with its dogma. Be that a god, love, morality, or the state.
 Stirner even rejects freedom and liberty as candidates for godhood. Freedom is simply freedom from. The better alternative to freedom is owness, a kind of self ownership. A freed slave is only a freed slave unless he pushes with his owness and takes liberty. His freedom from bondage does not make him a free man, his making himself and freeing himself internally is what will truly fulfill his liberty externally.
 On property, Stirner says that power is what makes property appropriated by the ego. I own something because I can make others not use what I own. Ideas too are property of the egoist. I own an idea to use the idea. Here Stirner sounds similar to pragmatism except that truth is something to be own and used rather then something that happens to be useful. In a way this also leads to a detachment from external realty and truths to the point to were the egoist could potentially see the world apart from himself rather than see himself with in the world.
 Stirner is really in a category of his own. He really can not be placed anywhere as his ideas are so unusual that it would be difficult to find a group that would except him. Although he was an anarchist, his arguments are very different from other anarchists. He is not promoting anarchism in the name of peace like the anarcho-capitalists and he is not promoting it in the name of equality like the anarcho-socialists. He is an anarchist out of nihilism, a rejection of all moral concepts. This rejection leads to a further rejection of the states authority. His anarchism is still similar to normal anarchist thought in that it advocates replacing the state with some kind of system of groups. His argument is simply creating unions of egoists who will self-interestedly apply their self-interest and individuality in a stateless society. Like he often does, he does not develop this idea enough in order to truly be able to picture what a society would look like. Few would try such a thing with so little to go on.
 Given that he still comes up with usable ideas along the way. One of his ideas is similar to Franz Oppenheimer’s idea of the political/violent and the economic/voluntary means of attaining wealth. Stirner’s union of egoists is a voluntary organization where everyone gets to assert their self-interest and individualism. Contrasted with the state which demands the ego submit to the state. The state fights the egoist and the egoist fights the state. Again it is unclear how this kind of society would operate.
  A more radical anarchist idea that Stirner had was that crime is a good way to asset ones individuality and rebel against the state. He developed a similar concept of insurrection. Basically, insurrection is a kind of passive civil disobedience where one does not out oneself at to much risk of being arrested but rather where one asserts oneself by getting away with repelling against the systems structure and ideals(all ideals in fact)
 Stirner, an odd philosopher of the 20th century. His massive influence on Marxism, existentialism, and atheism make him important to read. His philosophy terrified the philosophic community at the time and caused a reaction to him. Stirner’s ideas strike at the very heart of the modern world. Can you read him and not be changed some how?