New piece on Max Stirner and Guy Debord

Hope everyone is doing well as we approach the fall equinox. I have a new one for the good folks at CounterPunch magazine, and you may be pleased to learn that it’s not behind the pay wall (but please consider subscribing to CP+ if you can—independent media desperately needs your support, and CounterPunch will not disappoint). I discuss the ideas of Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) and Max Stirner (The Ego and Its Own). Here’s an excerpt—I hope you’ll go check it out and share it with your family and friends if you like it:

Both Debord and Stirner point out that we bear much of the responsibility for our own alienation and subjugation. It is not just that we are complicit in our own oppression; we actively uphold and perpetuate it by loudly trumpeting and recreating the ideological paradigms that make it possible. Debord beckons us to examine our internalization of the spectacle and our role in regenerating it. He sees us as dominating ourselves by tacitly accepting the false and mediated as real and immediate. Stirner’s approach, while similar, presents a more fundamental challenge to the methods of philosophy and to the idea of collective, revolutionary efforts to overturn the existing order. Stirner sees fixed ideas (or “spooks”) as “vestigial theological abstraction[s],” attempts to identify and freeze in place universal essences that exist nowhere.

As always, thanks very much for your time,

Dave