A Partly Discarded Egotism (1908)

The highest heights to which ever man can attain are those of liberty of thought, freedom of action, and the service of one's fellows. The successful ascent of these heights alone brings the happiness which makes for human betterment. As yet, they have been climbed only by those who have realized that short of an Atheistic basis, and Communistically expressed aspirations after individual freedom, there can be no social progress. “And I am such. ln my heresy rests my salvation. My happiness is assured. Can the same be said of all my readers happiness?

For the rest, let me add that I have come to look partly upon the world with the critical, if at times passionately remorseful, eyes of the cynic and from the sincere reformer I have emerged into the temporary egotist and egoist, not entirely removed from an occupancy of so large a place in the revolutionary movement as to see in myself the possessor of virtues which, if found in a weaker soul, could only pass for vices. My refusal to make any apology for such characteristics as those to which I refer will be interpreted by my opponents, I know, into a further evidence of my egotism. Knowing no masters, I have a supreme contempt for all who are less than masters, i.e., masters in the sense of having a natural force of character and dignity of bearing, unconsciously impressive, but devoid of either ostentations, self-assertion, or the self-shrinking tendencies of the slave; and hence I have learned to be the recipient of my own bouquets, caring neither for the praise nor the condemnation of lesser mortals possessed of more conventional proclivities.

It may be that I do not possess the hypocritical rhetoric of the politician, the malicious slanderous piety of the blaspheming beetle of the Most High, nor that acquaintance with weak verse and weaker sense of the twentieth century poet laureate; that I lack that knowledge of several tongues which the professional tutor should possess, have not been a senior wrangler, and am not a technical scientist. Such professional qualifications as I here enumerate I plead guilty to being devoid of; but nevertheless, however much praise I may bestow on others for their acquirements of arts I am not an expert in, the sole object of my praise—were it not that the said object of such praise was too critical in his analysis of all praise, and superior to the acceptance of any—is that individual who is potentially the culmination of the highest tendencies of evolution on the psychical plane, and the accompanying virtues on the physical; in whom the processes termed mendelism and natural selection have united to produce their greatest resultant; a supra-god and a superman, in whom are synthesized and reincarnated the virtues and wisdom of all the ages; the stoicism of Zeno and the nirvanic egoism of Buddha; the persistency of Hannibal and the ascetism, without the renunciation of the Oriental mendicant; nature’s epitome of wisdom whose greatness knows naught of that false modesty that would cause him to deny the truth of the charge that he was capable of learning more m order that a wider scope might be given to his potentialities. Having thus described the object of my reference, I have but to add—if such addition be necessary that it is only because I but rarely glance at the mirror that I do not see its physical reflection more often. For mv experience of the various movements with which I have been associated has taught me to rely on myself, and neither to entirely trust the power nor purpose of one's supporters, thus leading me to feel that alike m my potentialities and the actual expression of those potentalities there is to be found, among my compeers and predecessors none greater, That my judgment may be a little biased I do not question; that all critics' and all writers’ efforts, however involved their phraseology, implies a similar bias I do most confidently assert; and I have at least the redeeming virtue of natural frankness. Modesty, that vice of small philosophers and smaller financiers, if hard to find in the character of cabinet ministers, is unknown to the superman.

The swiftest forked radish that ever progressed from the cradle to the grave, I never bother myself about such trivial questions as morality as do most bipedian moochers. Self congratulation upon one's morality is a custom among a people whose potential and moral courage rarely changes into kinetic valor. And it is to be feared that the morality of many a moralist is as abstract as his courage. That is where my morality obtrudes itself. I am moral enough to be conventionally immoral if needs be, and honest enough to dare to be dishonest if my nature requires that I should. A decadent humanity talks of ethics; the conceited fop relates without tiring what his bored hearers, without much guessing or calculating, can easily see are but “tall" stories about himself; and the politician prates of principles. But the super-man has no need to talk of aught but that of which he thinks—the inherent revolt of his higher self against the hypocrisy of this world of cant and vale of hypocritical tears, the elimination of those sordid factors in his environment which hide from view the glory of a social horizon illumined by the rising sun of a brighter individual and communal morn.

Then there is the question of laws, which social fools and economic serfs obey, few respect, and the super-man rejects and unmakes. Valuing but my own happiness, I obey the laws and customs when they conform to my prejudices. Then it is that I exonerate the law-maker and pass a benediction upon the administration. But since laws are passed by the parasite class in defense of parasite exploitation, and I am a member of the vast proletariat, I exonerate rarely and bless seldom, more often outlawing society and ex-communicating governments for the existence of laws which excite my antagonism. For I never forget that, amid all the transient things of life, in penury and lecture rooms, the making and unmaking of laws, the fall and rise of morals, the fluctuations of finance, the passing of ancient blasphemy into New Theology—there is for me but one purpose in life--to wit, the elimination of duty from the vocabulary of humans, and applause from among those factors which animate the sincere in their sincerity.

A Present day humanity is but a knotted rope useless in itself, and possessed of diseases and criminal instincts which are useful only in that they make for their own elimination, and but afford the means whereby the pioneer of the citizens of to-morrow is enabled to expose the viciousness of to-day. Such a pioneer cannot but assert his superiority to all deities, the exteriorized creatures of diseased imaginations, and regard himself as the one concrete object of his own respect, as his contempt increases for worshipers who neither intelligently condemn nor criticize him for what he is in himself, but praise and curse him for what they lack m themselves. Such idolatry at tunes amuses, at others distresses, but at all times inspires one to eliminate its cause.

As it is, notwithstanding cheap phrases implying the contrary, the mob will continue for some time yet in their idolatry; toys to minister to the pleasure of those who despise them, social rubbish to be discarded, a mobocracy to be teased and condemned by a filthy and foul snobocracy.

In such an environment, why should the Social Revolutionist ape modesty when he feels indignant contempt and finds himself an outstanding figure in this earthly hell of corruption? ls the cat least among the mice, or the terrier least among the rats? Are not both feared by their respective prey m proportion as they assert their superiority? To the householder rats and mice are domestic parasites or vermin, the dog or cat his naturally equipped eliminators of such household pests. Without going into the justice of householders’ claims to deprive mice and rats of their food and of their existence, or the rights or wrongs of the latter objecting to be killed by the domestic feline and canine, let me apply the analogy to the real pioneer of tomorrow-the class conscious super-man, and his relations to society. The unquestionable vermin of society, the unemployable decadents of divorce-court fame, fear the pioneer of to-morrow, the class-conscious worker and socialist impossiblist, who asserts the whole of his individuality against the rotten timbers of society, its laws passed by immoral statesmen and administered by the unprincipled legal metaphysicians of the bench. The reason is not far to seek I Such a pioneer is the guardian of the joy of the socialist morrow, and his being necessitates the unbeing of the well-groomed vermin who call themselves ladies and gentlemen of independent means!

As for the world's wage-slaves, with their bowed heads and backs visible only from above, but comfortable foot-stools for such as I have described above—contemptile in their chains and puerile in their understanding the propaganda of the revolutionist passively awakes their interest on account of its novelty. For were not consciousness of wage-slavery a novelty how many divines and politicians and crowned prostitutes would not be hurried off to honest toil?

But the proletariat is a despicable and degraded mass, a contemptible and willing colony of serfs, which I despise too much to even seek to exploit. To accept its praises and to return it curses, or even to betray indifference is too much trouble. Fit only to serve and pass away, get ye and worship the prostitutes who live on you until the work of the pioneer has made your continuance an economic impossibility. And then your passing will be but a herald of the world's approximation to an inheritance by a race v/hich neither worships, nor cringes, nor praises, nor curses; neither forms governments nor founds arbitrary Iaw—dominating societies, neither reverences Mrs. Grundy nor is infatuated by Cleopatra -- a race which has but learned the purity of being natural, and the modesty, the all—embracing egotism, and the supremest egoism of but respecting itself. To being a member of that race I have evolved; and it is because I have so evolved that I am what I am, an outlaw, a Socialist, an Anarchist, an Atheist, and an Individual Revolutionary; a citizen of the bright to-morrow warring against the sordid criminality of the transient today.

Ye see me in the cell, ye see me only in the grave;

Ye see me only wandering lone beside the exile's weary wave;

Ye fools I do I not also dwell where ye have sought to p16'C€ in vain?

Rests not a niche for me in every heart, in every brain;

In every brow that brooding thinks, erect with manhood's honest pride?

Does not each bosom shelter me that beats with honor's generous tide?

Not every workshop brooding woe, not every heart that shelters A grief;

For am I not the breath of life that pants and struggles for relief?

Ferdinand Freiligafth, The Angel of Revolution

Have you thought of the tedious days

And dreary nights of your imprisonment?

The long endurance, whose monotony

No tidings come to cheer? This were the trial!

It is the detail of blank intervals--

Of patient sufferance, where no action is,

That proves our nature. Have you this thought o'er?

J. W. Marston.