A Word from the Wise Guy:

The Mid-Century Mysticism of Max Stirner

“While, to get greater clarity, I am thinking up a comparison, the founding of Christianity
comes unexpectedly into my mind.” – Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

In recent essays I’ve looked at the writings of Max Stirner1 and tried to determine the reason
for his increasing relevance in the internet age, and to the Dissident Right in particular.2
The more I read Stirner, however, the more I began to sense that I’ve heard these ideas before,3
in the writings and lectures of the Barbados-born Mid-Century American mystic and master of
meme magick, Neville Goddard. 4
Even leaving aside for the moment the obvious objection that Stirner, like the rest of his Left
Hegelian pals, was presumably an atheist and materialist, with no time for religion or mysticism,
the lives of the two men could hardly have less in common.
As opposed to the “dissolute life” of Stirner,5 Neville’s (he always went by one name) was
successful, even “charmed.” Emigrating from Barbados to New York City in his late teens, by his
twenties he was a Broadway star.6 True, when work dried up during the Depression, he worked
such jobs as elevator operator at Macy’s, but on finding his guru, the “black Ethiopian rabbi”
called Abdullah, he embarked on a highly successful career as a “metaphysical lecturer” on a
circuit of venues in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, published a dozen or so books
(admittedly, short ones and at his own expense), made records and TV appearances, lived in
swanky apartments and hotel suites with his second wife and daughter, and simply woke up
dead at 62.
At first glance they appear almost polar opposites. And yet… if we look at their teachings, it
seems as if there are remarkable similarities; one might almost say they were the same doctrine.
Before taking a look at this, we might ask: how can this be? The answer, I think, lies in a
comment made by his examiners after he barely qualified for a teaching position: Stirner lacked
“precise knowledge of anything but the Bible.”7 Indeed, the reader will quickly find that Stirner

1 Rather than clogging this already perhaps overstuffed little essay yet more with an overview of Stirner,
I refer the interested reader to David Leopold’s excellent account of Stirner’s life and work, here. Also, I
will dispense with page numbers for Stirner’s main work, as the classic Stephan Byington translation is
available online in various places, such as here.
2 See “Max Stirner: Marxist, Meme Master, or Mentor?”
3 “You’ve seen these films, haven’t you, my man”? Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986).
4 See “Magick for Housewives: The (not so) New (and really quite Traditional) Thought of Neville

Goddard,” in K. Deva (ed.), Aristokratia IV (Melbourne, Victoria: Manticore, 2017), and reprinted with other
relevant essays in Magick For Housewives: Essays on Alt-Gurus (Melbourne, Victoria: Manticore, 2018); see
also my Trump: The Art of the Meme (Amazon Kindle, 2017). The definitive chronicler of Neville’s life and
teaching is Mitch Horowitz; see The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality
(Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2018), reviewed here, and his forthcoming collection Infinite Potential: The
Greatest Works of Neville Goddard (New York: St. Martin’s).
5 See Keith Preston, “The Dissolute Life of an Egoist,” Attack the System, March 30, 2017.
6 As we noted before, “Max Stirner” was a pseudonym, which grew out of a childhood nickname,

Stirner, referring to his expansive forehead (Stirn); Stirner liked the similarity to Stern, or star.
7 John Carroll, Introduction to his edition of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own (New York: Harper, 1972),

p18. This was part of George Steiner’s deliriously entitled series Roots of the Right: Readings in Fascist, Racist
quotes, or even more, alludes to, the Bible as much as any preacher;8 by contrast, the Hegelian
language and structure of the book is, as we’ve seen, a purely ironic strategy.
As for Neville, he “once said that if he was stranded on an island and was allowed one book,
he would choose The Bible, without hesitation. If he could squeeze in more, he would add Charles
Fillmore’s Metaphysical Dictionary of Bible Names, William Blake 9 … and [Maurice] Nicoll’s
Commentaries. These were the books he recommended at his lectures.”10

and Elitist Ideology, alongside writings by Arthur de Gobineau, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph de Maistre,
Charles Maurras and others, uninformedly bound in, yes indeed, black. Ooh, that’s scary!
8 “The Bible, on which he was obviously a most thorough expert, always offers him anew the necessary

instances” – Mackay, Max Stirner: His Life and Work, Chapter Five; “Key passages in the work of … Stirner
… echo Christ’s parables” – John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-psychological Critique:
Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky (London: Routledge, 1974), p15.
9 Interestingly, Carroll finds “remarkable anticipation” of Blake in Stirner; see Breakout, p16; Ego p80n1.
10 There is even some historical support for placing Stirner among the New Agers. Derrida – no less! –

in a footnote buried towards the end of his own attempt to revive Marx by exploiting Stirner, quotes one
of Stirner’s editors noting “A reference to the simultaneous emergence in the 1850s of the Taiping revolt in
China and the craze for spiritualism which swept over upper-class German society. The rest of the world was
‘standing still’ in the period of reaction immediately after the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions.” … It is certain,
for example, that the texts of Stirner, Marx, and Engels to which we are referring correspond—and respond—
in their own time to a powerful “craze” that could summarily be called “mediumistic.” One can find social,
philosophical, and literary signs of this (let us recall Stirner’s interest in Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, the
“spiritualist” temptations of Victor Hugo and a few others) and one can try to isolate, or even explain up
to a certain point its historical singularity. But one must not fail to reinscribe it in a much larger
spectrological sequence.” Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International (London: Routledge, 1993), p242n21. For a discussion of Derrida’s book that brings out its
importance for both parapsychology and the Dissident Right, see Jason R. Jorjani, Prometheus and Atlas
(London: Arktos Media, 2017), Chapter Two. As for Eugène Sue, we can also “recall” Neville’s use of that
other text of 19th century French bestsellerdom, The Count of Monte Cristo; see Mitch Horowitz, ed., The
Power of Imagination: The Neville Goddard Treasury (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015). This not only collects
10 of Neville’s short books, but reprints the relevant chapter from Israel Regardie’s The Romance of
Metaphysics (1946); Neville interprets The Count in Chapter 24 of Your Faith is Your Fortune (1941) and
Regardie discusses Neville’s take on pp.7-8.
 It would seem, then, that Stirner had stumbled upon the same esoteric teaching, 11 supposedly
encoded in the Bible, which Neville acquired from his guru, Abdullah.12
What, then, is this teaching? It would be appropriate to begin with Stirner, since he not only
wrote first, but provides the key at the end of the Preface to his first and only book:

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out
of which I myself as creator create everything.

For Stirner, all general ideas are my own creations; almost universally, we forget this, and
these ideas – God, State, Mankind, Good, etc. – then instead become oppressive Spooks. I myself
am none of these things, I am only – the Unique One. And thus, as goes the Goethe quote with
which Stirner bookends his book, “All things are nothing to me.” Or rather, ought to be; here is
the nut of the thing: while all things have their origin in the creative nothingness that I am, I have
forgotten this, and treat things as objective “realities” which have control over me – as “spooks,”
or “bats in your belfry.”

The thought of right [or anything else] is originally my thought; or, it has its origin in me.
But, when it has sprung from me, when the “Word” is out,13 then it has “become flesh,” it is
a fixed idea. Now I no longer get rid of the thought; however I turn, it stands before me. Thus
men have not become masters again of the thought “right,” which they themselves created;

11 It is just within the realm of possibility that Hegel, whose lectures Stirner attended during his brief
career in Berlin, may have performed, perhaps unconsciously, the same role as guru. On Hegel’s supposed
connection to the Hermetic Tradition, see Michael Faust, Hegel: The Man Who Would Be God (Hyperreality
Books, 2010), and Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell, 2008). In the Introduction to his
new translation (reviewed here) Wolfi Landstreicher says that “I realized on my first reading of Byington’s
translation of Stirner that there were many parallels between Stirner’s ideas and aspects of Taoism and
Buddhism,” and that Hegel did give lectures on “eastern philosophy.” (Max Stirner, The Unique and Its
Property; translated and with a new Introduction by Wolfi Landstreicher [Baltimore: Underworld
Amusements, 2017], pp14-14. The earlier New Thought writers were keen to claim a lineage not just to
Emerson, inspired as he was by Hegel, but to Hegel himself; See, for example, Wallace Wattles, The Science
of Getting Rich (1910 and innumerable editions since), Preface: ”The monistic theory of the universe the
theory that One is All, and that All is One; That one Substance manifests itself as the seeming many
elements of the material world -is of Hindu origin, and has been gradually winning its way into the thought
of the western world for two hundred years. It is the foundation of all the Oriental philosophies, and of
those of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Emerson. The reader who would dig to
the philosophical foundations of this is advised to read Hegel and Emerson for himself.”
12 “We have cut into a line of communication between the Tooth Fairy and Lecktor.” (Manhunter). This

is consistent with Evola’s view that the Hermetic tradition survived centuries of Christian heresy-hunting
by being hidden among the rabbis, re-emerging during the Enlightenment; as for Judaism itself, Evola
states in “The Jewish Question in the Spiritual World” that “The Old Testament does contain elements and
symbols of metaphysical, and hence universal value, even if they were borrowed from other sources.” For
what it’s worth, there are persistent legends of the Ark of the Covenant residing secretly in Abdullah’s
Ethiopia; is this a cover story for the secreted Tradition?
13 Replying to Feuerbach’s criticism, that the Unique was an empty predicate, Stirner says that “The

Unique One is the straightforward, sincere, plain-phrase. It is the end point of our phrase world, of this
world in whose ‘beginning was the Word.’” From his 1845 essay "Stirner's Critics," written in response
to Feuerbach and others (in custom with the time, he refers to himself in the third person); one of the helpful
excerpts that Carroll adds to his edition. There is a translation by Wolfi Landstreicher, with an Introduction
by Jason McQuin (LBC Books/CAL Press, 2013).
 their creature is running away with them. This is absolute right, that which is absolved or
unfastened from me. We, revering it as absolute, cannot devour it again, and it takes from
us the creative power: the creature is more than the creator, it is “in and for itself.”

Once you no longer let right run around free, once you draw it back into its origin, into you,
it is your right; and that is right which suits you.

The Biblical language – the Word becomes flesh -- is the clue, the key, which hooks us back
into Neville, who simply extended this notion to everything. The “objective” world is only my
own inner world, “out-pictured.” Neville begins his first book, Your Faith is Your Fortune (1941),
thus:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I AM.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”

In the beginning was the unconditioned awareness of being, and the unconditioned
awareness of being became conditioned by imagining itself to be something, and the
unconditioned awareness of being became that which it had imagined itself to be; so did
creation begin.

By this law, first conceiving, then becoming that conceived, all things evolve out of nothing;
and without this sequence there is not anything made that is made.

“Before Abraham or the world was, I AM.” “When all of time shall cease to be, I AM.”

I AM the formless awareness of being conceiving myself to be man. By my everlasting law

of being I AM compelled to be and to express all that I believe myself to be.

I AM the eternal Nothingness containing within my formless self the capacity to be all
things. I AM that in which all my conceptions of myself live and move and have their being,
and apart from which they are not.

I dwell within every conception of myself; from this withinness, I ever seek to transcend all
conceptions of myself. By the very law of my being, I transcend my conceptions of myself,
only as I believe myself to be that which does transcend.

I AM the law of being and beside ME there is no law.

I AM that I AM.

Neville taught that God, the Biblical “I AM,” is indeed “I”, or “your own wonderful human
imagination.” To access the power of this imagination, one must detach oneself from whatever
identity one has created for oneself and return to the original no-thing of “I AM”:

Here is a simple formula for successful fishing. First decide what it is you want to express
or possess. This is essential. You must definitely know what you want of life before you can
fish for it. After your decision is made, turn from the world of sense, remove your attention
 from the problem and place it on just being by repeating quietly but with feeling,14 “I AM.”
As your attention is removed from the world round about you and placed upon the I AM so that you
are lost in the feeling of simply being, [The Unique One], you will find yourself slipping the
anchor that tied you to the shallows of your problem; and effortlessly you will find yourself
moving out into the deep.15

Neville often calls this the “first person singular, present tense” standpoint, and Stirner
similarly contrasts the traditional standpoint -- where I am seen as a poor sinner, or,
philosophically, somehow incomplete and needing to become something else by living up to an
ideal (not realizing this ideal is in origin only my own idea) in the future -- with the rich specificity
of the Ego, the Unique One, where “I am – present.”16
Stirner, like Neville, disdains the acquiescence to mere “facts” which must be either
surrendered to or laboriously worked against; this is to be haunted by a spook, which is really
my own creation which I can change at will:

Can State and people still be reformed and bettered now? As little as the nobility, the
clergy, the church, etc.: they can be abrogated, annihilated, done away with, not reformed.
Can I change a piece of nonsense into sense by reforming it, or must I drop it outright?

Henceforth what is to be done is no longer about the State (the form of the State, etc.), but
about me. With this all questions about the prince’s power, the constitution, etc., sink into
their true abyss and their true nothingness. I, this nothing, shall put forth my creations from
myself.

Neville simply – simply! – expands this idea to include the contents, not only of our mental
world, but the physical world as well.
Now we can address two minor, but apparently fatal, objections. First, clearly Stirner is an
atheist. Well, Alistair Crowley’s private secretary, Israel Regardie, who hung out with Neville at
the start of his career, and wrote the first serious account of his teaching, stated bluntly that
“Neville is an atheist.”17 Perhaps we could call him an “a-theist;” his radical identification of
“God” with Man’s own Imagination leaves no room for any worship or prayer to some distant,
foreign entity.18
This a-theism also entails the idea that the Bible is not a historical document in any sense;
Neville constantly reiterates that “All the bibles are psychological documents” and that we project
them out as historical accounts of other people in order to avoid work on ourselves. 19

14 This will become important.

15 Neville Goddard, Your Faith is Your Fortune (1941), Chapter Six.
16 Dasein? We’ll later see a parallel to Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” as well.
17 See The Power of Imagination, op. cit., p.10.
18 As Neville says, with that mordant humor he often brings to such discussions, “Men think prayer

doesn’t work, because they are praying to a god that doesn’t exist.” But prayer does work if directed to
your own Imagination. In a way this continues the idea of Feuerbach, which Stirner criticized so
mercilessly: rather than replacing the worship of God with the worship of Man, one assumes the identity
of God and the Unique One, the creative nothing.
19 See, for instance, “You Shall Decree” in Your Faith is Your Fortune (1941).
 Just as we mistakenly think – or have been taught – that the world around us “just is,” rather
than being “our own imagination out-pictured,” so we think the bibles are stories about people
who lived a long time ago, over there. 20
One might also address the claim that Stirner is anti-clerical; so is Neville.

Stirner typifies the religious nature as residing in the 'cleric'. The cleric is afraid that the
flesh and its worldly lusts might gain mastery over him, so he suppresses them, glorifies
the spirit, and devotes himself to good causes. His life is regulated and judged in terms of
God, the idealist's projection of the sinless, perfectly selfless man. Like all great caricatures,
Stirner's cleric becomes a universal character-type on closer acquaintance ; Christianity, in
this critique, is a paradigm for all moral and religious bodies of doctrine; the problems that
confront its priests and the means they employ to cope with them are particular forms of
the general problems which face men when they are orienting themselves to ideals and to
values.21

Stirner and Nietzsche both locate the essence of Christianity in the clerical type: the
cautious, calculating, rigid moralist who is devoted to ideals, principles, concepts, and
numbers, but not to individual people.22

For Neville, the cleric is less of a sinister figure, more a figure of fun; he is, after all, as deluded
as his parishioners. By the same reasoning we just saw -- that “all the bibles are psychological
documents,” not objective accounts of historical figures -- Neville concludes that there is no need
for an external establishment of church and clergy to intermediate between oneself and some
supposed other called “God.” In both cases, one ignores hard work on self – the “one thing
needful” -- and instead dilly-dallies among irrelevant externalities.

20 This view, which perhaps originates with Spinoza, has always been anathema to not only “believers”
but pious academics, who as usual serve as guardians of the status quo. In recent years, it has gradually
become respectable and even mainstream; see Thomas Romer, The Invention of God (Harvard University
Press, 2016). Needless to say, this also knocks the props out from under Zionism, Christian and Jewish: “Of
course, not everything in the historical books is pure invention: ancient materials were used, but the main
narrative that aggregates them is built on a post-exilic ideological construct. When Ben-Gurion declared
before the Knesset three days after invading the Sinai in 1956, that what was at stake was ‘the restoration
of the kingdom of David and Solomon,’ and when Israeli leaders continue to dream of a ‘Greater Israel’ of
biblical proportions, they are simply perpetuating a two-thousand-year-old deception—self-deception
perhaps, but deception all the same." Laurent Guyenot, “Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax.”
21 Carroll, Breakout, p23. Carroll, who is always quick to locate Stirner’s key role in the origin of

modernity, adds that Nietzsche was to choose the same character-type (asketische Priester) for the central
role in his Zur Genealogie der Moral: he identified the development of contemporary decadence with the
historical figure of the priest. Julien Benda was to title a highly influential book La Trahison des clercs (1927);
he argued that the hitherto aristocratic, free-willed and strong-principled intellectual had degenerated into
the clerk/cleric” (loc. cit.). Later: “Stirner here suggests a Nietzschean theme … that the last phase of
intense religious moralizing is concomitant with the rise of nihilism, that both are symptoms of the same
cultural malaise. (p.25).
22 Op. cit., p26
 Neville’s amusement is ecumenical: he relentlessly mocks Jews who believe rabbis telling them
not to mix milk and meat,23 Catholics who think a St. Christopher medal saves lives,24 and,
perhaps especially, his sort-of home church, the Episcopalian:

My father would never go to church. He didn’t like the minister at all. What wonderful
stories we have of my father and the minister. One day the minister said to my father: “I
am one of the chosen.” My father looked at him and said: “I wouldn’t have chosen you.”
He was just as brash as that with everything he did. He had no respect for the man. He
never saw the inside of a church, except when we children were baptized. When my sixth
brother was to be baptized – by this same minister – my father took two sea captains as
godfathers.25 At the last moment the minister asked if the two gentlemen were
Episcopalians, and when one claimed to be a Presbyterian and the other a Methodist, the
minister informed my father that the child could not be baptized with these men as
godfathers. With that my father said: “Give me my son. I will baptize him myself.” He took
the child out of the minister’s arms, dipped his free hand in the water, sprinkled it on the
child’s face and said: “In the name of Jesus, your name is Fred” and walked out. And that’s
his name Fred Goddard.

That’s the kind of man my father was and still is. Not a bone in his body lacked courage.
He found the Lord as his own wonderful human imagination, so when he wanted

23 “It is said, ‘Steep not a kid in its mother's milk.’ (King James version, "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in
his mother's milk." Exodus 23:19). Unnumbered millions of people, misunderstanding this statement, to
this very day in the enlightened age of 1948, will not eat any dairy products with a meat dish. They think
the Bible is history, and when it says, ‘Steep not a kid in its mother's milk,’ milk and the products of milk,
butter and cheese, they will not take at the same time they take the kid or any kind of meat. In fact they
even have separate dishes in which to cook their meat.” The Neville Goddard Collection, Book 1, p85.
24 “You may believe in one or more of the ninety odd so-called saints which have now been demoted,

but if you believe, they have served their purpose. Now those who formerly believed in icons on the outside
must turn around and learn to believe in themselves. It has taken a long time, for more than a thousand
years men have believed this nonsense. You don't have to cover your head any more to enter the church -
so was it ever necessary? You don't have to believe in St. Christopher any more. It never was necessary; but
man, in his child-like state, could not believe in himself, so he created something with his human hands to
believe in and his belief produced itself. The icon did not do it for the individual. His belief did it for him.
“All things are possible to him who believes and with God all things are possible, so is God not one
with the believer? His name forever and forever is I am. Do you not know that you are? Knowing that, are
you not saying: "I am"? If your name is John, you must be aware of it before you can say: "I am John." I say:
"I am Neville." I may not always say "I am" before I say "Neville," but I am aware of being Neville before I
say the word. I have given my awareness of being a name. It is Neville. I do not have to repeat the words
"I am" to define what I am aware of; but my awareness is God, the believer, and there is no other God.”
Neville, “All Things are Possible,” 5/12/69. “I have given my awareness of being a name. It is Neville”
recalls Stirner’s reply to Feuerbach’s criticism, that “the Unique” is an empty predicate: “The Unique One
is the straightforward, sincere, plain-phrase. It is the end point of our phrase world, of this world in whose
‘beginning was the Word.’” From his 1845 essay "Stirner's Critics," written in response to Feuerbach and
others (in custom with the time, he refers to himself in the third person); one of the helpful excerpts that
Carroll adds to his edition of The Ego. There is a translation by Wolfi Landstreicher, with an Introduction
by Jason McQuin (LBC Books/CAL Press, 2013).
25 The original troll?
 something he simply imagined he had it, and walked in that knowledge. 26I promise you,
when you find the Lord and really trust him, you will know a peace you have never known
before. You will never again bow before anything or anyone. Knowing that only your own
wonderful human imagination is holy, He will be the only one you will ever serve!27

This talk of clerics and clericalism is the key to another important point: if my Imagination can
create anything, if even morality is a spook, what stops me from running amok? Nothing, of
course; the creative nothing that I AM. Stirner:

If it is said that even God proceeds according to eternal laws, that too fits me, since I too
cannot get out of my skin, but have my law in my whole nature, i.e. in myself.

But one needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once. “What am
I?” each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes,
passions, a chaos without light or guiding star! How am I to obtain a correct answer, if,
without regard to God’s commandments or to the duties which morality prescribes,
without regard to the voice of reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences,
has exalted the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My
passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. — Thus each deems
himself the — devil; for, if, so far as he is unconcerned about religion, etc., he only deemed
himself a beast, he would easily find that the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as
it were, its advice), does not advise and impel itself to do the “most senseless” things, but
takes very correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind
so grievously that we are — terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has
degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils. Of course it comes
into your head at once that your calling requires you to do the “good,” the moral, the right.
Now, if you ask yourselves what is to be done, how can the right voice sound forth from
you, the voice which points the way of the good, the right, the true, etc.? What concord have
God and Belial?

Christianity has caused man to lose faith in his own impulses; with the cleric or priestly type
“emerged the reactive type; he who, in the absence of spontaneous passions to direct his actions,
applies his intellect to create a network of moral, religious and metaphysical rules [the Spook,
“Morality”] to guide his conduct.”28
And so with Neville, who rejects the idea that my inner voice is the devil:

God speaks to you through the medium of your basic desires. Your basic desires are words
of promise or prophecies that contain within themselves the plan and power of expression.

By basic desire is meant your real objective. Secondary desires deal with the manner of

26 Another irony: Neville frequently tells the story of how his father and brother Victor, using the power

of their imagination, started a grocery business that eventually became Goddard Enterprises, still the
largest conglomerate based in the Caribbean; quite a contrast to Stirner’s attempt to start a dairy delivery
service in Berlin – it failed in a week or two, since he forgot to advertise.
27 Neville Goddard 12-02-1968 GOD’S ALMIGHTY POWER.
28 Carroll, Breakout, p.89, citing Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III:10-11 and Human All Too Human,

II:ii:350.
 realization. God, your I AM, speaks to you, the conditioned conscious state, through your
basic desires. Secondary desires or ways of expression are the secrets of your I AM, the all
wise Father. Your Father, I AM, reveals the first and last – “I am the beginning and the end,”
but never does He reveal the middle or secret of His ways; that is, the first is revealed as
the word, your basic desire. The last is its fulfilment – the word made flesh. The second or
middle (the plan of unfoldment) is never revealed to man but remains forever the Father’s
secret.

God speaks to man only through the medium of his basic desires. Your desires are
determined by your conception of yourself. Of themselves they are neither good or evil. “I
know and am persuaded by the Lord Christ Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself but
to him that seeth anything to be unclean to him it is unclean.” Your desires are the natural
and automatic result of your present conception of yourself. God, you unconditioned
consciousness, is impersonal and no respecter of persons. Your unconditioned
consciousness, God, gives to your conditioned consciousness, man, through the medium of
your basic desires that which your conditioned state (your present conception of yourself)
believes it needs.

As long as you remain in your present conscious state so long will you continue desiring
that which you now desire. Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically
change the nature of your desires.29

Our basic desires are not only capable of fulfilment, but are ipso facto morally sound, being the
Word of God within us; the only task is to determine what those are.30
This talk of individuals and organizations leads to two more themes. First, the “Union of
Egoists,” Stirner’s alternative to the State and other organized structures. Just as our freely created
ideas, when accepted as “facts,” return to haunt us as “spooks,” so our freely created associations
hardened and petrify into oppressive institutions.31 As Leopold outlines the idea:

29 Freedom for All (1942), Chapter Seven: “Desire: The Word of God”.
30 “You may question whether a desire to kill or injure someone can be inspired by God. The answer is
that no man actually desires to kill or harm another. He may wish to be free from that seeming other and,
through his limited understanding, he feels that the only way he can achieve such freedom is by destroying
the other. Man does not realize that the desire for freedom contains within itself the power and the means
to fulfill itself. Because of his lack of faith, man distorts these gifts from God. He does not realize that God,
the wisdom and power within him, has ways that he, as man, knows not of and those ways are past finding
out. Learn to be grateful for the desires you have been given. They already exist and are ready for
embodiment in your world. You are not called upon to do anything to aid their realization except to free
your mind of any doubt as to how they will come about and completely accept them as you would a gift
from a loved one.” “Imagination Creates Reality,” date unknown.
31 Stirner: “A society does assuredly arise by union too, but only as a fixed idea arises by a thought –to

wit, by the vanishing of the energy of the thought (the thinking itself, this restless taking back all thoughts
that make themselves fast) from the thought. If a union [Verein] has crystallized into a society, it has ceased
to be a coalition [Vereinigung]; for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it has become a unitedness, come to
a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is – dead as a union, it is the corpse of the union or the coalition, i.e. it
is – society, community. A striking example of this kind is furnished by the party.”
 The egoistic future is said to consist not of wholly isolated individuals but rather in
relationships of ‘uniting’, that is, in impermanent connections between individuals who
themselves remain independent and self-determining. The central feature of the resulting
union of egoists is that it does not involve the subordination of the individual. The union is
… a constantly shifting alliance which enables individuals to unite without loss of
sovereignty, without swearing allegiance to anyone else’s ‘flag’. This union of egoists
constitutes a purely instrumental association whose good is solely the advantage that the
individuals concerned may derive for the pursuit of their individual goals; there are no
shared final ends and the association is not valued in itself.

In my previous essay on Stirner, I suggested that the modern online community, or the Internet
itself, would be an excellent example of a “Union of Egoists.” And here we meet with Neville
again; for although, like Stirner, his career was on a downslope at his death – for reasons we will
soon examine -- and he was largely forgotten immediately after, his fame and influence have had
a remarkable resurgence online, where Neville’s books and hundreds of transcribed lectures are
freely available, and the lectures themselves are all over YouTube.
Neville never copyrighted any of his books, and encouraged taping and sharing his lectures;
a strikingly modern attitude, reminiscent of the Grateful Dead, Mystery Science Theater (“Keep
Circulating the Tapes!”) and the general Millennial attitude that “information wants to be free.”
Indeed, this was the relation between Neville and his audience: he was no guru handing out
commandments. Instead, he offered a “simple method to change the future,” and asked them to
just go home and try it out; if it worked, come back and tell us all about it!32
To resume our line of thought: Stirner calls the Union of Egoists “the desecration of the State;”
i.e, de-sacralizing the idea, so that it no longer dominates me as a supposed holy thing or “spook.”
But how to do so? Not by revolution; that would simply be to exchange one set of masters for
another, one set of arrangements for another – the Unique One seeks not to be arranged at all.
Here Stirner introduces another key notion: Insurrection.

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists
in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society,
and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable
consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s
discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up,
without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at
new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to
arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on “institutions.” It is not a fight against the
established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth

32 Regardie (op. cit.), describes how Abdullah’s teaching enabled Neville to throw “overboard” the
ascetic practices he had been taught by the Rosicrucian cult, and “became that rare anomaly, a human
being: -- i.e., a Unique One. With further development as a teacher, “he was able to loosen his hold upon
the hem of Abdullah’s skirts, to become a teacher in his own right,” which recalls Stirner’s description of
the rise of a union by analogy to a child’s liberation from its mother’s apron strings: “The more we learn to
feel ourselves, the connection that was formerly most intimate becomes ever looser and the dissolution of
the original society more unmistakable. To have once again for herself the child that once lay under her
heart, the mother must fetch it from the street and from the midst of its playmates. The child prefers
the intercourse that it enters into with its fellows to the society that it has not entered into, but only been born
in.”
 of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay. Now,
as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it, my
purpose and deed are not a political or social but (as directed toward myself and my
ownness alone) an egoistic purpose and deed.

The revolution commands one to make arrangements, the insurrection [Empörung] demands
that he rise or exalt himself.[sich auf-oder empörzurichten] What constitution was to be chosen,
this question busied the revolutionary heads, and the whole political period foams with
constitutional fights and constitutional questions, as the social talents too were
uncommonly inventive in societary arrangements (phalansteries etc.). The
insurgent [93] strives to become constitutionless.

Neville, of course, is hardly interested in politics at all, whether revolution or insurrection; but
ironically, it is here that, by again falling back on the Bible, Stirner and Neville begin to sound the
same. At this point, Stirner unexpectedly begins to discuss the rise of the Christian uprising:

While, to get greater clearness, I am thinking up a comparison, the founding of Christianity

comes unexpectedly into my mind. On the liberal side it is noted as a bad point in the first
Christians that they preached obedience to the established heathen civil order, enjoined
recognition of the heathen authorities, and confidently delivered a command, “Give to the
emperor that which is the emperor’s.” Yet how much disturbance arose at the same time
against the Roman supremacy, how mutinous did the Jews and even the Romans show
themselves against their own temporal government! In short, how popular was “political
discontent!” Those Christians would hear nothing of it; would not side with the “liberal
tendencies.” The time was politically so agitated that, as is said in the gospels, people
thought they could not accuse the founder of Christianity more successfully than if they
arraigned him for “political intrigue,” and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely
the one who took least part in these political doings. But why was he not a revolutionist,
not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? Why was he not a liberal?
Because he expected no salvation from a change of conditions, and this whole business was
indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionist, like e.g. Caesar, but an insurgent; not a State-
overturner, but one who straightened himself up. That was why it was for him only a matter
of “Be ye wise as serpents,” which expresses the same sense as, in the special case, that
“Give to the emperor that which is the emperor’s”; for he was not carrying on any liberal
or political fight against the established authorities, but wanted to walk his own way,
untroubled about, and undisturbed by, these authorities. Not less indifferent to him than
the government were its enemies, for neither understood what he wanted, and he had only
to keep them off from him with the wisdom of the serpent. But, even though not a
ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionist, he (and every one of the
ancient Christians) was so much the more an insurgent, who lifted himself above everything
that seemed sublime to the government and its opponents, and absolved himself from
everything that they remained bound to, and who at the same time cut off the sources of
life of the whole heathen world, with which the established State must wither away as a
matter of course;33 precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he

Another sore point for Marx, no doubt. The history of how the “withering away of the State” under
33

Communism has actually proceeded again demonstrates Stirner’s prescience.

 was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it in, confidently and recklessly
carrying up the building of his temple over it, without heeding the pains of the immured.

Neville would certainly agree that what’s needed is a change within (in our Imagination)
rather than a change of circumstances (which are just the contents of our Imagination, out-
pictured). But the language of “render unto Caesar” was also seized upon by Neville in his
response to the usual criticism of New Thought teachings (such as the more recent “Law of
Attraction”) as mere hedonism:

What would be good for you? Tell me, because in the end every conflict will resolve itself
as the world is simply mirroring the being you are assuming that you are. One day you will
be so saturated with wealth, so saturated with power in the world of Caesar, you will turn
your back on it all and go in search of the word of God … I do believe that one must
completely saturate himself with the things of Caesar before he is hungry for the word of
God.

As Mitch Horowitz has explained it:

This passage sounds a note that resonates through various esoteric traditions: One cannot
renounce what one has not attained. To move beyond the material world, or its wealth, one
must know that wealth. But to Neville – and this became the cornerstone of his philosophy
– material attainment was merely a step toward the realization of a much greater and
ultimate truth.34

Yet more intriguingly, Stirner here also uses the language of “lifting up” or “rising up,” which
is how Neville describes the process of changing conditions by changing our consciousness:

If you are dissatisfied with your present expression in life the only way to change it, is to
take your attention away from that which seems so real to you and rise in consciousness to
that which you desire to be. You cannot serve two masters [although you can render to each
what is his], therefore to take your attention from one state of consciousness and place it
upon another is to die to one and live to the other.35

But enough of all this fruity talk of similarities! Are there no meaty differences to distinguish
these clearly different thinkers? Indeed, there are, and this idea of two masters gives us clue to
the first: Stirner’s system is radically incomplete.
After a mystical experience in 1959 (described in Horwitz’s essay) Neville’s teaching
bifurcated: in addition to The Law (which became Oprah’s “Law of Attraction”) he also began to

34 In The Miracle Club, Horowitz reiterates this: “My conviction is that the true nature of life is to be
generative. I believe that in order to be happy, human beings must exercise their fullest range of abilities –
including the exertions of outer achievement.
“I believe that the simplest and most resounding truth on the question of the inner life and attainment
appears in the dictum of Christ: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.”
“I do not view nonattachment as a workable goal for those of us raised in the West, and elsewhere,
today. Rather, I believe that the ethical pursuit of achievement holds greater depth, and summons more
from within our inner natures, than we may realize.” (op. cit., p.13)
35 At Your Command (1939).
teach The Promise. The Law was given to enable you to live in the material world; the Promise
was that you could then work to obtain union with God (“one must completely saturate himself
with the things of Caesar before he is hungry for the word of God”).
This calls to mind Evola’s criticism of Stirner. In his autobiography, Evola acknowledges the
influence of Stirner in his youth, but only – like Oscar Wilde – for his anti-bourgeois stance;36 In
his late work Ride the Tiger, Stirner epitomizes the first stage of a two-step process of emptying
modern civilization of meaning—his form of “passive nihilism” is carried forward by Nietzsche
into a New Age of spiritual realization by the New Man through “active nihilism.”37
Interestingly, then as now, Neville’s listeners were more interested in The Law than in The
Promise; they wanted him to return to stories about how people had obtained new cars and
bigger houses. As Horowitz recounts it:

Many listeners, the mystic lamented, “are not at all interested in its framework of faith, a
faith leading to the fulfillment of God’s promise,” as experienced in his vision of rebirth.
Audiences drifted away. Urged by his speaking agent to abandon this theme, “or you’ll
have no audience at all,” a student recalled Neville replying, “Then I’ll tell it to the bare
walls.”

Ironically, towards the end Neville might have drifted into just as “dissolute” a life as Stirner;
but his audiences recovered somewhat, especially in the hippie era,38 and as noted above, the
internet has provided him with something of a “resurrection.”39
And this brings us to the second difference: Neville was indeed able to use the Law to fashion
a conventionally successful life,40 while Stirner died alone, poor, in obscurity, from an infected
insect bite. How account for this?
Although details of his life are scanty, what we know – marrying a woman for her inheritance,
quitting his day job as soon as his first and only book was published, advertising for loans, and
above all, the diary delivery disaster – suggests that Stirner, like so many today, thought that the

36 The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Integral Traditions, 2009); see esp. p10.
37 See Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, trans. Joscelyn Godwin, Constance Fontana (Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions, 2003), p.18-19,
38 Horowitz notes Neville’s acknowledged influence on Detroit’s own New Age guru, Dr. Wayne Dyer,

as well as a more oblique connection to Carlos Castaneda.

39 As is the title of Neville’s last book, devoted almost entirely to expounding his experience of The

Promise through Biblical texts, published in 1967. A final irony: Neville’s vision involved an experience of
being reborn from within one’s own skull (as in Golgotha) and breaking out therefrom; Stirner chose to
remain within his own massive forehead. Neville supposedly was found dead, “bleeding from every hole
in his head,” as a devotee related it; “his head finally just exploded.” At least they didn’t assassinate him
like Howard Beale.
40 I should clarify that Neville was not some mystical huckster who got rich off his devotees. As noted,

he declined to copyright his books and speeches; there were no charges for teachings, mantras, etc. As
Horowitz says, “With Neville, there’s nothing to join, no label to wear, and little or nothing to buy. There’s
just the man and his ideas – and your option to experiment with them.” Nor was Neville filthy rich; by
“successful life” I mean the plausible American dream of the haute bourgeoise lifestyle: swanky apartments
and hotels, fine dining, well-tailored suits, etc. A couple of times Neville boasts about not needing to
become a member of all the best clubs, since the members invite him anyway. I like to think of him as
someone who would fit into the Ricardos’ lifestyle on I Love Lucy.
Law meant that he could formulate a wish, and then sit back and wait for it to come about, or “be
manifested,” to use the suspiciously passive term favored by Oprah’s listeners.41
There are two problems with this laid-back mentality: the first is the idea that mere thought is
all that is involved; this is a common misunderstanding of New Thought (and perhaps a
drawback to the name itself). As Mitch Horowitz says,

Emotion is the building block of belief and the key to influencing the subconscious. Indeed,
it is vital that our affirmation or visualization have emotional persuasiveness at the back of
it – and that it is felt with conviction and integrity. Too often in the New Thought world we
conflate thoughts and emotions. But the two are very different and function on different
tracks. Reciting an affirmation without emotional conviction achieves nothing; in fact, I may
do more harm than good by summoning disbelief and resistance.42

This is the key step in Neville’s method:

First, clarify a sincere and deeply felt desire. Second, enter a state of relaxed immobility,
bordering on sleep. Third, enact a mental scene that contains the assumption and feeling of
your wish fulfilled. Run the little drama over and over in your mind until you experience a
sense of fulfillment. Then resume your life. Evidence of your achievement will unfold at the
right moment in your outer experience.43

And here again, the Hermetic Tradition, through Evola, agrees:

Another technical detail is in order. In order for any image to act in the way I am talking about,
it must be loved. It must be assumed in a great, inner calm and then warmed up, almost
nourished, with sweetness, without bringing the will or any effort into play, and much less
without expectations. The Hermeticists called this agent “sweet fire,” “fire that does not
burn,” and even “fire of the lamp” since it really has an enlightening effect on the images.44

41 A. E. Housman, poet and classical scholar, devotes his lecture “The Application of Thought to Textual
Criticism” to eviscerating purported scholars who try to set up rules to make criticism easy: “How the
world is managed, and why it was created, I cannot tell; but it is no feather-bed for the repose of sluggards.”
“The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 18 (1922),
reprinted in J. Diggle and R.F.D. Goodyear, eds., The Classical Papers of A. E. Housman, 3 volumes
(Cambridge, 1972), vol. 3., pp.1058–1069; see also “Conservatism and Creativity in A.E. Housman” by E.
Christian Kopff.
42 The Miracle Club, p.33. Horowitz quotes one critic from the London School of Economics, no less:

“Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you are approaching your goals, which takes the
edge off the need to achieve.” (Op. cit., p.110).
43 The Miracle Club, p.133. As Neville says in the very title of his 1944 book, Oprah is wrong, Feeling is the

Secret; although there are countless editions, you would do best to consult mine, which includes an
Afterword on Neville and the Hermetic Tradition (Kindle, 2016).
44 “Commentary on the Opus Magicum,” in Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the

Magus(Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2001), p. 57. “The fire of the lamp” recalls Neville’s “You must be
like the moth in search of his idol, the flame.” Again, Dr. Lechter comes to mind: an investigator muses
over one of Buffalo Bill’s tell-tale moths: “Somebody grew this guy. Fed him honey and nightshade, kept
him warm. Somebody loved him.” Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990).
 It would seem that after conjuring the meme of Max Stirner, star thinker, into existence,
nothing else really managed to generate sufficient interest in this proto-slacker.
The first problem is subjective – it’s not enough to just imagine an outcome and wait for it to
“manifest” itself; the second problem relates to the world we seek to change – again, we can’t just
sit back: as the faux-biblical saying has it, God helps those who help themselves.
Stirner set up a dairy business and then forgot to advertise it. Victor Goddard, by contrast,
didn’t simply imagine having a successful business; he first imagined it, and then went out and
did what needed to be done, confident that it would succeed.
The contrast is perhaps best shown in what may be my favorite Neville story: how he bought
tickets to a sold-out performance of Aida.45

About 8 years ago I was in New York for a month and two of my brothers, Victor and
Laurence, came up and spent two weeks with me in New York City, they checked into the
same hotel. They wanted to see everything they could within 2 weeks and I bought them
14 shows and sometimes they went even to an afternoon show, they wanted to see
everything in the crowded two weeks. But the one thing my brother Laurence wanted to
see was the new presentation of Aida.

Well the newspapers said it was sold out from the very moment that it was stated a new
presentation, same music naturally, the same score, but new scenery, something new about
it. And this captured the imagination of all opera lovers and they all wanted to see Aida.

We got there and huge big signs on the outside, no seats for Aida available and they were
plastered all over the Metropolitan. I went in and there were 3 lines leading to the 3
windows selling tickets for the entire season and there was no seats for Aida. I got into the
first line. It was a very long line, then I saw the third line from me moving more rapidly
than the first and the second so I moved over to that line.

Then they all moved rapidly forward as we got to the window and seemingly no hope of
getting tickets, but before I left my hotel room I simply assumed that I had the tickets for
my 2 brothers. I didn’t want to go, they wanted to see it so I assumed that I gave them the
tickets. I got into this line and it moved rapidly towards the window as we got there, to the
window, a tall blonde man, he was about oh he must have been about 6, I’m 5’11, he must
have been about 6’4.

He stretched his hand up over my head and diverted the ticket seller as he asked the
question, why one in front of me is buying, it’s not for Aida for that’s completely sold out,
he is buying 2 other seats from some other opera. Then he departed after he diverted the
man’s attention. This man pushed on some bills under the window and then as the teller
looked at the money, and this man is at the door now, the tall, tall blonde fellow. And he
gave this man the ticket and then suddenly he said, well he only gave me 3 dollars he should
have given me, and he mentioned the money he should have given me.

At that he was bewildered. The teller, was bewildered. I turned around and I screamed at
that tall blonde, I said, “Sir”. I screamed so loudly he couldn’t stop but be attentive, he

45 You can hear him tell it here.

 turned around I said, “Come back here you’re wanted.” He came back like a little child
being led by the nose, he came back and he said, “What’s wrong?” And the man said, “This
is all that he gave me, 2 one dollar bills”. He said, “Oh no he didn’t, he gave you your
change.” I said, “No you didn’t I was standing right here. I saw what you did. You gave 2
one dollar bills, that’s all that you gave him.”

The man was flabbergasted. He was so completely dumbfounded he didn’t know what to
do. I said, “I am standing here, I saw exactly what was done.” Then he opened up his purse
and there was a stack of ones and he had a 20 dollar bill and 2 tens. He said to the man,
“When will you discover your mistake that I gave you 2 tens?” And the man said to him,
“At the end of the season.” And with that it was closed and the man then took out the
money and paid for the ticket and took back his 2 ones.

Then I said to him “I want 2 seats for Aida tonight and I want them in the horseshoe circle.
I want them center.” He said, “Yes Sir,” and he took from what he called the VIP, they
always keep a few out, when the house is sold out they always keep a few seats for those
who are coming called the very important people. I am certainly not a very important
person, but I saved him from the loss of 20 dollars and he quickly took the 2 seats out and
said to me,”20 dollars.” I gave him the 20 dollars, went back and gave the 2 seats to my
brothers.

Neville’s story is intended to illustrate how “God causes all things to work together for the
good”; the con man thinks he’s pulling a fast one, but he’s actually part of the mechanism that
gets Neville his tickets.46 For our purposes, though, we can ask: why didn’t Neville just imagine
having the tickets, and wait for them to “manifest”?
Mitch Horowitz calls this the “fallacy of a single cause.”

If I posit a connection between the individual and some kind of higher capacity of the mind,
that does not mean that only “one thing”—a law of mentation—is going on in your life.
Lots of events, whether biological, mechanical, or metaphysical, can be simultaneously
occurring. We live under many laws and forces, of which the impact of the mind is one. The
law of gravity is ever operative, but it is mitigated by other laws, such as mass. The
experience of gravity radically differs on the moon, Earth, and Jupiter. So it is with the
mind: surrounding events and realities matter.47

Contrary to many purveyors of spiritual self-help, I reject the notion that we can become
anything we dream of. Not all desires are realistic…. Your age, training, and education
matter—as do geography, finances, and time. These are not to be seen as barriers—but they
are serious considerations.48

The whole truth is that our lives, as vessels for the Higher and receptors of thought, are
indelibly bound up with the world and circumstances in which we find ourselves.

46 In another way, this also addresses the question of morality already addressed: the con man thinks
he’s pulling a fast one for himself, but actually he’s being prompted to assist Neville.
47 The Miracle Club, p.4.
48 Op. cit., p.63.
 Whatever higher influences we feel, and great thoughts we think or are experienced by us
through the influence of others, are like heat dissipated in the vacuum of space unless those
thoughts are directed into a structure or receptacle, whether physical, material, or in the
form of personal conduct. Thought not acted upon is like an echo whose vibratory power
quickly weakens and fades.49

Our choices take place within an already existing physical and social framework; even if in
some sense we chose or created it beforehand, it exists now as a “structure or receptacle” that
needs to be worked within. Neville emphasizes that we must “think from the end” rather than
try to imagine the process by which our desire will be realized, but this is not because the end
will be magically manifested, but because, having formulated our desired goal, we have no idea
what mechanism the universe will use to bring it about. As in the Aida example, Neville imagines
having the tickets, but still has to go down to the box office; no one could have predicted that
foiling a con man’s scheme would bring about the desired result.
Horowitz also connects this to the “render unto Caesar” motif:

We live in a world of Caesar and must abide by material demands. My friend [a CEO] will
lose the confidence of his board if he fails to act. We are called upon to perform in both
worlds: the seen and the unseen. If Neville wanted to take a train somewhere, he didn’t just
sit in his room—he went out and purchased a ticket. We are surrounded by people living
in outer life. Play the role that outer life requires. “Render unto Caesar.” But remember the
underground spring from which all creation arises.50

As Neville said about the relation of the Law and the Promise, the Law was given to us to ease
our stay in the material world; it involves not random wish fulfillment, but a means of identifying
our most basic desires (our True Will, as Crowley would say) so that can act with clarity and
confidence in the world, assured that our goal is God’s will. And God helps those who help
themselves; or, to use an actual Biblical phrase (also cited by Horowitz), “faith without works is
dead.” (James 2:17).
And again, we can turn to Evola for confirmation: speaking of “the concept of a ‘project’” in
existentialism, he notes that “Traditional doctrines accepted a predetermination that is in a way
timeless, precosmic, and prenatal, and connected with it the concept of one’s ‘own nature’.”51
Ultimately Stirner is not Neville, and a comparison of the two, especially regarding their life
outcomes, bears out the truth of Evola’s critique of Stirner. Evola himself cautions against judging
the life of a mage, such as Alistair Crowley, by normal, bourgeois standards.52 Still, Stirner’s
doctrine seem radically incomplete, and his “dissolute life” is no model for anyone who aspires
to be more than an internet troll.
In the Introduction to his translation, Wolfi points out that Stirner, recognizing that dialectics
could prove anything – and thus nothing -- declined to play the game of claiming to be a

49 Op. cit., p.73.

50 Op. cit., p.132.
51 Ride the Tiger, p.87. As another mid-century Jewish guru, Hyman Roth, says, “This is the business

we've chosen.” The Godfather, Part II (1974). Moe Green, the “genius” with a “vision,” creator of Las Vegas,
might be another example of New Thought.
52 Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (Rochester, Vt.: Inner

Traditions, 1995)., Chapter 51, “The Invisible Masters.”

philosopher, a “lover of wisdom,” and instead “chose to be a wise guy,” wising up the rest of us
with his “mocking laughter.”53
But dialectically, there is a third option, as Evola’s critique of Stirner and Nietzsche assumes:
rather than a lover of wisdom, or a wise guy, why not be a wise man.?54 If Max and Neville are
Martha and Mary, we can agree with Jesus that Mary has chosen the better course.55 Or, as David
Lynch puts it:

Cowboy: Well, stop for a little second and think about it. Can you do that for me?
Adam Kesher: [laughs] Okay, I'm thinking.
Cowboy: No, you're not thinking. You're too busy being a smart-aleck to be thinking. Now,
I want you to think and stop being a smart-aleck. Can you try that for me?56

53 Landstreicher, op. cit., pp.10-16. Compare Timothy S. Murphy, Wising up the Marks: The Amodern
William Burroughs (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998).
54 In an interesting twist, Jason Jorjani ignores the Hegelian pose of having passed beyond philosophy

(love of Wisdom) to being Wise; instead, he takes a Schopenhauerian move; just as the latter disdained
academic philosophers as “professors of professors of philosophy,” Jorjani modestly claims to have only
now become a true philosopher with his most recent book, while denying the title to both contemporary
academics and most of the canonical figures of the past; see his Lovers of Sophia (Melbourne: Manticore,
2017), Introduction.
55 “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha

opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said.
But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord,
don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’ ‘Martha, Martha,’
the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed -- or indeed
only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’” (Luke 10:38-42).
56 Mulholland Drive, 2001. Mitch Horowitz discusses this scene in relation to New Thought with David

Lynch here. For more on Mulholland Drive, see Trevor Lynch’s review, here.