Worlding and the sentimental theory of value part two- ideals/idylls/idles/idols & Max Stirner
When we blame the system what are we are crediting what exactly? Something going according to plan? Something orchestrated to end up in someone's favour at our cost? A cost to us all? We gain a soul at the cost of the world? A lesson learned, put it down to experience?
If something is systemic is it just cancerous? An overgrowth? A doubling-down of a good thing, which becomes then, too good to be kind?
Zero-sum games are not how the world operates of course, it’s more romantic than that. The world is romantic without being actually romantic. It is some urge to ideal, a shortcut to the future. It's just another way or worlding, a way of feeling that being organisaed and co-ordinated is a good thing, an inclination that without shoulding there would be no order, no survival. Its some sort of antidote to existential fears, not quite hope, but could be. How do you feel about that, Virginia, what are your thoughts on the matter?
This post assumes a certain familiarity with the words: ideals, idyll, idle, idol. I've created a chatGPT cheatsheet here (cheatGPT?).
In fiction we can read and idle away the hours. It's worlding in a sandbox. A plaything, a childish example of potential, this is why it is an idyll. The play has to take place in a safe place. Where the real world is both explored and held at bay through transitional objects and older kin. Until we grow up into it.
Narcissists never get there of course, they are sweorlfds.
If systems are complexifications of evening meal conversation about tomorrow, how do they end up as idols?
When I was about twenty, I was reading some anarchist literature, which generally is not about bomb-making, and it referred to some post-Hegelian proto-anarchist and precursor of Nietzsche call Max Stirner.
So I read some English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, called The ego and it's own. I discovered what a bliss section is in a library. A place books go when they are not currently used very much. That was the middle 80s, now there are Stirner memes everywhere by people I often disagree with. Disciples often are the ones who double-down and produce dogma.
Returning the book to the bliss section, I followed up by seeking some secondary literature and finding John Carrol's Break-out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, which was about a decade old at the time I was a science major.
So, I read Stirner before I read any Nietzsche, and well before any Stirner based memes appeared. Before the word meme appeared. Before I saw Richard Dawkins' neologism by after buying a paperback of his The Extended Phenotype in a bookshop in Schull, West Cork in the early 90s.
I've read other Stirner related stuff since then. I'll put them in the references.
I mention all this because it was by reflecting on my ancient memories of reading those two books which put me on this blogging spree. It starting as a hand-writing spree in some notebooks first, often, reflecting on those memories of reading Stirner as a 20 year old.
At about that time of reflection I discovered neo-Pyrrhonism which put a whole new spin on the matter of ideals/idylls/idles/idols and proved a very fruitful direction with what began with the why we should essay.
What I am trying to say is that whenever you hear me use the words ideal/idyll/idle/idol, it is because I am channeling a translation from Max Stirner's German into English:
"wheels in your head"
A neo-Pyrrhonist or Buddhist might call them attachments or dogmas, that Duḥkha thing. That unbalanced thing.
That doubling-down we do when we compensate for lack of apparent power our worlding has when we feel we should, as we should, when and where we fail to notice we have just succeeded, and the doctrine is not required, but we over-compensate, we over-extend. We step awkwardly, and suffer for it.
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Wheeling-in-our-mind, or fetishizing, supplies the romantic magical import we feel entitled to, at least as children. Play-acting, make-believe. This is not adulting, this is bad worlding when we refuse to grow up into the world.
What all these have in common (ideals/idylls/idles/idols/wheelies) is a doubling-down on some aspect or practice and turns a moment into dogma/doctrine/obsessive-strictures. The idyll becomes an idol, it is marketed as an ideal, our true agency is idled. The world is fixed into self, the self wastes away, unable to move.
I first met it in Stirner though.
"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!" https://theegoandhisown.org/wheels-in-the-head/ | The Ego and His Own
To move from here to a systems view, to blame or credit the system, especially if we are accusing it of power, we have to somehow get from the individual to the everything else (groups, society, bunch of individuals, herds, collective individual or other). This solution space is a mess of mazes. The thickets of metaphysics and 'wheels in our heads' are elaborately gloriously grown as thickets around our goal, the castle of our inadequate desires.
I put it forward that our missing analysis in seeking cause (follow the money, show me the money) is the same lack we see in the pathology of the narcissist; a lack of empathy. This turns an individual failure into a systemic stupidity, by informing the decision we each make alone and with each other, and indeed how we 'with' with each other. We should a mistake into the world, we mistake the man for his hat, the crown for the world.
The currency is empathy, not selfishness. Negotiation, not gain. We've been blinded by a psychopathic frame, to our detriment.
If we have a wheel in our heads, then we have failed to have compassion for ourselves. We should ourselves into stupidity. And when we seek to impose the same idols/ideals/ in others our empathy lies idle. The idyll of childhood looks too good to be true, and we put away those childish things, and still fail to do adulting.
The urge to should is entirely governed by empathy, when the urge to should continues on without it, then we get systemic abominations.
Often in the name of the order it is traducing. Empathy is more important than order.
Empathy arises out of the urge to should and once arisen must not be abandoned.
Yet systems do this all the time and the psychopath rises to the top of the hierarchy they prefer to install.
It is better to be kind than right.
Some Max Stirner links:
Some references read and forgotten:
Blumenfeld, Jacob. All Things Are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.
Carroll, John. Break-out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. London; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1974. .
Dematteis, Philip Breed. Max Stirner versus Karl Marx: Individuality and the Social Organism. United States: Stand Alone, 2019. .
Max Messer. Max Stirner. Berlin: Bard, Marquardt & Co., 1907. .
Max Stirner. The Ego And His Own: The Case Of The Individual Against Authority. ebook. Verso, 2014. Radical Thinkers Book 8
Paterson, R. W. K. The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner. London ; New York: Published for the University of Hull by Oxford University Press, 1971. University of Hull Publications
Stirner, Max. Stirner’s Critics. Trans. Wolfi Landstreicher. 1st U.S. edition. Berkeley, CA, Oakland, CA: LBC Books ; CAL Press, Columbia Alternative Library, 2012. .
Welsh, John F. Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2010.