Radical elitist egalitarianism

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.

It is the same narrow attitude which sees in Max Stirner naught but the apostle of the theory “each for himself, the devil take the hind one.” That Stirner’s individualism contains the greatest social possibilities is utterly ignored. Yet, it is nevertheless true that if society is ever to become free, it will be so through liberated individuals, whose free efforts make society.

— Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

The true elitist desires that all become elites. What better way is there, if you believe that some truly are better — stronger, more interesting, more capable, more full developments of their potentialities as human beings, more like the Ubermensch, (and those that fall under this for me are not who you think, you eagle-eyed always watching puritans!) — to have an interesting life, full of seeing, talking to, and fucking interesting people, full of admiring what they do, than ensuring all have the space and encouragement to become interesting?

Currently there are many obstacles in the way of all of us becoming interesting: poverty — from the poverty that someone in the United States might experience, which might prevent them from learning what they would otherwise learn, studying what they would otherwise study, thinking and creating the values they would otherwise think or create, and achieving the artistic heights they might otherwise achieve; to the poverty that those in the Global South face, which stunts growth and exhausts mind — lack of time due to work, stress, deprivation, incarceration, unfree access to information and the tools to use it, lack of autonomy and control, social pressure against free thinking, free experimentation, and free discussion, death and its worse cousin herd mentality, mental illness. Defeating these is the task of the anarchist, and also the elitist who believes within all of us, given the chance, is the capacity to be an aristocrate.

The task of the anarchist thus is not to tear down greatness — to deny and belittle it, to reject and ignore it, to treat it as dangerous — but to create the conditions that will allow as many people as possible to achieve it, in all the different ways it could possibly be achieved (because, if the Ubermensch is to create their own values from nothing, there could not possibly be only one picture of achieving such a state!), and this requires a program of individualist, anticapitalist accelerationist anarchism such as the one I am committed to.