Altruism is not an alternative to egoism: altruism can be egoistic, and egoism can be altruistic. Often enough, I stand accused of smuggling ethics into nihilism: there is a perceived problem with my philosophy in that it is neither egoistic in Stirner's sense nor in any other. I have been told that I fail to apply my own standards of skepticism to ethical concepts. Is Historical Nihilism a Trojan horse for conventional morality? Will you be ruined by believing in good and evil if you at first open the door to allow in my wooden promise that there is nothing to be believed in at all?
Have you ever felt angry at a lamp for failing to light up at the touch of a button and then realized, after a few moments' investigation, that you had unplugged it for some particular purpose a few days ago and then forgot to plug it back in? Have you ever reflected, "Oh, I shouldn't have been angry, because it wasn't the lamp's fault after all"? What if the lamp had been plugged in, should you have felt some other way about it? Are we going to seriously propose a philosophy of forgiveness for the failings of inanimate objects? Whether it is the lamp's fault for not working or our own fault for not plugging it in, why should we feel angry toward the lamp at all? Emotions are signals; signals must serve a purpose, no matter how ludicrous, arbitrary or self-indulgent; nothing is accomplished by letting the lamp know how you feel.
Adults make errors about the relationships between feelings and things because they enjoy confusing their feelings with the objective reality of the things themselves. This is not an error made merely due to carelessness, but because most of us enjoy it. In the absence of compulsion, people are doing what they want to do: there is some sense in which most people (i.e., some unknown percentage of people with a certain kind of character) genuinely enjoy feeling angry at a lamp —otherwise they wouldn't do it at all, as the feeling is accomplishing nothing. There is a kind of self-assertion involved in the hatred felt (however briefly) toward the nonfunctional lamp: you are demonstrating to yourself that you are not the one at fault here —although, perhaps, a few moments later you'll realize that (in fact) you are.
Egoism is self-serving: what we are discussing here is self-defeating. I once read a book-length analysis of the humor of the Navaho (Navajo): in their culture, in their language, it was normal to mock and ridicule white people for lashing out at inanimate objects, for punching the hood of a car, or for verbally reproaching a radio that "refuses" to tune in properly. The Navaho perceived this as utterly absurd, and their humor on the subject expressed consistent confidence that this is a mistake they'd never make themselves: they would never try to punish or motivate an inanimate object. But if we do not blame the car, do we blame ourselves?
"I look fat in this mirror." Presumably the mirror should be destroyed.
Whoever may be reading this article has probably heard me say many times (with many variations) that doing things for the sake of happiness entails a kind of evil and is predicated upon a kind of error: happiness, properly understood, is something that enters into our lives unexpectedly and that remains unknowable and unknown. Suppose I have a distant memory of a comic book that I read as a child and I now decide I should read it again, having thought nothing of it for more than 30 years: is this going to make me happy? Will it make me miserable? Will I respond in an entirely calm, cerebral fashion? Will I analyze how my distant memory of it differs from the newfound immediacy of the thing itself, or will I simply analyze the quality of the writing? What is utterly insane is the presumption that you can know the answer in advance and then commit to a course of action on the basis of that knowledge: if you think you know what will make you happy, you will be dragged into a life of real evil —destroying something real for the sake of something unreal, again and again. It would not be insane, by contrast, to buy a copy of this same comic book for the sake of mere curiosity: yes it is possible that reading it again will make you happy, but it's possible it will horrify you, it's possible it will make you reflect on tremendously sad memories from your own childhood tangentially linked to the object, and so on.
You can climb a mountain for the sake of the view, not knowing what that view will mean to you: it is quite another thing to presume that this mountain has the power to make you feel happy. The stakes are high: people don't just buy comic books for the sake of happiness, but raise children and then force their children to read the same comic books that they once read themselves.
Egoism cannot exist in the aftermath of this critique of happiness: architecture cannot exist in a world without solid land. What the egoists think they are standing on, from my perspective, instead, they are drowning in. They are drowning in misery misperceived as happiness. The darkness comes not from the lamp but our expectation of it —and yet we blame the lamp for the darkness.
The common conceit of pseudo-nihilistic philosophers (who have lived before) is that egoistic self-interest is this tremendously powerful wind, forever blowing in one direction: we must steer our little sailboat assiduously to accomplish anything altruistic despite this gale force. I say, instead, that good and evil turn on one hinge, as one and the same door. An open door is neither good nor evil. If you wanted the door to be locked shut, but in fact you've left it open, then you call that an evil; and, conversely, if you wanted the door to be open (or unlocked) to let someone else in while you were away, but you forgot to do so, then you'd complain that was an evil as well. It swings open when you want it to be open: that's good. However, it is a false inference to say that when it's locked shut it is therefore evil.
Egoism does not exist: good and evil are equally effortless —as painting with one color is neither more nor less work than another, although it may be quite a lot of work if you're not an experienced painter and haven't yet developed the skill, meaning only that you'll struggle with each color equally or not at all. The tree neither serves the forest nor rebels against it. The tree cannot subtract itself from the forest nor add anything more to the collective sum than it has already given simply "in being itself". The egoism of the tree cannot be contrasted to an altruism that is subordinated to the egoism of the forest: neither tree nor forest have any ego at all.
The nihilists (now alive) who complain that I am not nihilistic enough still imagine their own lives as if they were divided between egoism and altruism: they assume that altruism is motivated by belief whereas the extirpation of belief will return them to their natural state of self-indulgence and inertia. This division does not exist: the real division is between the life of an adult and the life of a child. Overcoming belief will not return you to the simple (selfish) pleasures of childhood, nor will it liberate you from the temptation of exclusively adult forms of ambition and self-sacrifice. Can you remember how amusing it once was just to play with a light switch? Can you remember how amusing it once was to hide beneath a blanket? To crawl through a tunnel? To be tickled? The happiness you remember from your childhood is something to which you can never return: nihilism is a kind of purification, yes, but the purified adult cannot enjoy childish self-indulgence any more than the contaminated true believer —on the contrary, less.
What if a man believes in nothing but becomes incredibly passionate about (i) stand up comedy, (ii) foreign language education or (iii) architecture? If he starts serving this passion, will he be sacrificing his self-interest for the sake of a greater whole? What if, instead of even trying to be happy, he sacrifices everything for the advancement of foreign language education: will you claim that he still secretly prays to unseen gods because of his lack of egoism? As miserable as it may be to pour your time and money into a foreign language institute, trust me, operating a stand up comedy club is worse: you must spend many hours listening to examples of what other people think is funny, but you do not. And you must hear the same jokes performed again and again. Either you're passionate about comedy or you're not: either you're willing to hear a hundred bad jokes for the sake of a few moments of brilliance, or else you're doing this for nothing at all. Either you're willing to endure the company of a hundred bad students (who are learning the language for the wrong reasons, etc.) for the sake of a few brilliant ones, or else you're doing this for nothing at all. Do you therefore "believe in" a language because you're enduring such misery? Do you "believe in" comedy? There is no viable distinction between egoism and altruism: the tree is not something totally separable from the forest and the architect is not totally separable from architecture —not even if he perceives himself as living in a state of rebellion against the intransigence of architecture (as I see myself in a kind of rebellion against the intransigence of stand up comedy, and the intransigence of language education, etc.).
I have shifted the question (and its answer) from the struggle of altruism against egoism to the struggle of this man for his passion —which is neither egoistic nor altruistic nor both. If he suffers for the sake of education it is because he is an educator; if he suffers for the sake of architecture it is because he's an architect; if he suffers for the sake of comedy it is because he is a comedian. And even then, it is only "his own" notion of education, architecture and comedy, hm? And this is not a relationship to an abstraction: the farmer does not relate to farming as an abstraction, but as a series of manual and mental tasks that are entirely real (so too for the educator, architect and comedian).
So why would anyone rage against the lamp and the mirror? Making excuses for the evils of Communism: this is a declaration of who you are, it is a declaration of what kind of person you aspire to be, and it is a kind of advertisement for the friends and lovers you wish to have. The social and psychological mechanism I'm describing here works in much the same way with Satanism: you start making excuses for one kind of evil or another, publicly, and soon enough you discover you've created a crossroads for everyone who has a certain set of unspecified desires in common with you. Look at the utilitarians who make excuses for paying prostitutes: this serves a real function in their lives and isn't merely a matter of crafting an ideological identity for the satisfaction of judging oneself when standing in front of the mirror. When we indulge in feeling angry at the lamp we are asserting (on a childishly simple level) that our feelings are more real than the things that inspire them: what matters is not the reality of the bourgeois class, for example, but the feelings the Communist assigns to them and then "finds" in them as if they were actually existing. He blames them for how he feels about them, and this functions as a declaration of his own moral identity. In the condemnation of witches the Christian becomes confident that his own barbaric beliefs are something better than witchcraft; when he prays and conducts his own magical rituals he is becoming something quite different from a witch himself. The fault in the lamp, dear reader, is a fault we must find within ourselves: as shallow and obvious as that may be, it is a riddle the majority of humanity never will solve.
Personal desire for personal identity perpetually creates and recreates a false system of morality: the majority of people caught in this cycle of asserting feelings to be innate in the real things that surround them can never break out of the cycle. The bourgeois class is a lamp that you, yourself, failed to plug in: it is not broken and cannot be fixed. It is a door that you yourself left unlocked. It is a mirror showing you how fat and ugly you are. And yet for the vast majority of people, the feelings they have arising from these hated and reviled objects (social classes, lamps and mirrors alike) are so seemingly real that they inspire one moral system after another, crowding out doubt, filling the world with false certainties.
I have said it is a personal desire for personal identity: what is it that the Communist wants? To be a good person while regarding others as bad, perhaps? To feel that they, personally, know the esoteric truth, while so many others labor in ignorance? Moral superiority, intellectual superiority, physical superiority, sexual superiority: common, animal desires. People make use of abstractions to serve these carnal interests, as if they could use a pencil and an eraser to edit human nature. Wanting to be loved isn't evil: wanting to believe, and wanting others to believe as you do, so that you can be loved, is the greatest evil of all.
If the Christians say, "These Communists are climbing the wrong mountain, trying to get to happiness", we all can understand what they mean well enough. The Communists from their side could say the same: they see the Christians doing all sorts of Communist things, such as caring for the poor and living in voluntary poverty themselves, to then remark on how unfortunate it is that this hiking instinct is being applied to the wrong mountain. What if you genuinely do not believe there is any mountain, anywhere, that could make you happy? What if the whole sport of mountain climbing relies on a cycle of self-deception no less pathetic than gambling and drug addiction? What if the view from the top and the view from the bottom are one and the same? That is where nihilism escapes from the ancient, narrow path: where the bottom and top of the mountain meet and become equal, where climbing begins and ends, forever.
