When egoists coalesce — the physics of free association.
For 170 years, we’ve been stuck on “the union of egoists.”
Stirner drops this concept near the end of The Ego and Its Own and everyone loses their minds. The Marxists attacked it as bourgeois individualism trying to sneak sociality through the back door. The anarcho-communists tried to recuperate it as proto-syndicalism—see, even Stirner knew we needed organization! The individualists treated it as permission to form temporary alliances. The post-left mostly ignored it because it sounded too much like first-wave organizational fetishism.
And they were all wrong. Not because they misread Stirner—though they did—but because they were all trying to make “union” into something SOLID. Something you could point at. Something that persisted. Something that had structure, membership, maybe even (god help us) bylaws.
(eyes roll)
The problem isn’t interpretation. The problem is the word itself. “Union.” It sounds like a thing. A noun. A structure you build and maintain. And the moment you think of it that way, you’ve lost the plot.
I spent twelve years arguing about this in comment sections. Twelve years trying to explain the “grey position”—perpendicular to left and right, refusing capture by either pole. Twelve years treating it like an achievement. Something I had attained. Something others needed to adopt.
I was wrong.
Not about the position—the position is real, it works, you can actually stand perpendicular to the spectrum if you’re stubborn enough. But I was wrong about what it IS. Wrong about why it felt lonely. Wrong about why it wouldn’t “scale.”
It took a conversation with someone smarter than me to see it. They said: “The grey position is just the logical conclusion of Stirner’s logic. You say it doesn’t scale, but this is like saying molecules in a gas that occasionally condense onto a cold window don’t scale. We are all einzige.”
And then: “Union is ice. Most people want ice.”
Everything clicked.
Here’s the thing I couldn’t see while I was in the middle of it:
The grey position isn’t something you move to. It’s the substrate. It’s what’s underneath when you strip away the colors. Red, black, gold, green—these are projections. Patterns we impose on a reality that doesn’t actually have those structures.
Stirner doesn’t say “become the Unique One.” He says you already ARE the Unique One. You always were. You can’t NOT be. The spooks don’t make you something other than unique—they just make you forget. They make you give yourself away to abstractions. They make you pretend you’re a position on someone else’s map instead of the territory itself.
This is crucial. The Unique One isn’t an achievement. It’s not enlightenment. It’s not something you attain after years of reading German philosophy and arguing online. It’s just... what you are. What everyone is. The irreducible fact of your particular existence, prior to all the labels and positions and identities you drape over it.
So the “grey position”—my precious perpendicular stance—isn’t rare. What’s rare is being willing to LOOK at it. To acknowledge that you’re already grey. That the colors are costumes. That the spectrum is a shared hallucination and your actual location is wherever you happen to be standing, which is nowhere on anyone’s map.
When I said “the grey position is lonely,” I was describing something real but mislabeling it. What’s lonely isn’t BEING grey. Everyone’s grey. What’s lonely is being OPENLY grey. Refusing to put on the costume. Standing there saying “the emperor has no clothes” while everyone else is complimenting the imperial wardrobe.
The loneliness isn’t metaphysical. It’s social. It’s the cost of honesty in a world where everyone’s agreed to maintain the fiction.
Think about what a gas actually is.
Individual particles. Each one unique. Each one following its own trajectory. They bump into each other sometimes—elastic collisions, energy transfer, change of direction—but they don’t COMBINE. They don’t form structures. They don’t “join” anything. They’re just... moving. Doing their thing. Being what they are.
That’s us. All of us. Unique Ones in Brownian motion.
The “colors” of anarchism—red, black, gold, green—are like looking at a gas and projecting patterns onto it. “See, these molecules are moving leftward, they’re RED.” “These ones are moving rightward, they’re GOLD.” “These ones aren’t moving much, they’re GREY.”
But the molecules don’t care about your projections. They’re just moving. The patterns are in your perception, not in the gas.
Now: what happens when gas encounters a cold surface?
Condensation.
Some molecules slow down enough to cohere. They don’t “join” anything. They don’t sign a membership form. They just... precipitate. Become visible together. Stick to the window. A temporary coherence that emerges when conditions permit.
And then, if conditions change—if it warms up, if the surface moves, if the air shifts—evaporation. The molecules disperse back into gas phase. Not failure. Not betrayal. Not “the union fell apart.” Just the other half of the cycle.
You cannot have condensation without evaporation. They’re not opposites—they’re phases of the same process. The condensation IS temporary. That’s not a bug. That’s the physics.
This is what Stirner was trying to describe. Not union. CONDENSATION.
The “union of egoists” was always the weak point in the logic. Because “union” sounds like organization. Federation. Something with structure, persistence, maybe even rules. It sounds like the very things Stirner spent 400 pages demolishing.
But replace “union” with “condensation” and everything clicks.
Nothing to maintain—it maintains itself or it doesn’t
This fixes everything that was wrong with “union.”
When Unique Ones encounter each other, they don’t “form a union.” They condense. Temporarily. Under specific conditions. And then they evaporate. And both phases are fine. Both phases are the process working correctly.
The scene—any scene, the anarchist scene, the post-left scene, whatever—was never a union. It was condensation. Molecules precipitating on the cold window of shared conditions: shared discourse, shared spaces, shared enemies, shared whatever. And then evaporating. People drifting away. Scenes dying.
Not because they failed. Because that’s what condensation DOES.
The mistake was thinking it should persist. Thinking dissolution was failure. Mourning the evaporation instead of recognizing it as phase transition.
But most people don’t want condensation. They don’t want liquid.
Most people want ice.
Ice is frozen. Fixed. Permanent structure. Molecules locked in lattice. No more movement. No more unique trajectories. Just solid. Stable. SAFE.
That’s what people want. Not the terrifying freedom of gas. Not even the temporary coherence of liquid. They want to STOP. To be held in place. To know where they are in the lattice and where everyone else is and to have that be TRUE tomorrow and next year and forever.
Ice is ideology. Ice is identity. Ice is “I’m an anarcho-communist” and knowing what that means and having it STAY MEANING THAT. Ice is belonging that doesn’t shift. Structure that tells you who you are so you don’t have to figure it out fresh each moment.
And ice FEELS better. No uncertainty. No constant negotiation. No waking up each day and having to determine what you are based on what you actually want RIGHT NOW. The lattice holds you. The structure provides.
(The grey position would note: ice is also a spook. But we’ll get there.)
The whole history of the left is ice-seeking. Build the party. Build the union. Build the federation. Build the organization. Take the gas of discontent and FREEZE it into structure. Make it solid. Make it persistent. Make it REAL in the way solid things feel real.
And then wonder why it always goes wrong. Why the party becomes authoritarian. Why the union becomes bureaucracy. Why the federation becomes the thing it opposed.
Because ice is DEAD.
The molecules aren’t moving. The Unique Ones aren’t unique anymore—they’re positions in a lattice. They gave up their trajectories for the comfort of being frozen in place. They wanted structure so badly they let themselves be structured. Became nodes in someone else’s pattern.
This is what happens to every organization. Every movement. Every scene that tries to become permanent. The condensation was beautiful, spontaneous, alive. Then someone said “let’s make this last” and reached for the freeze.
The ice killed it.
The condensation isn’t ice. That’s the crucial distinction.
Condensation is LIQUID. Still moving. Still fluid. Coherent enough to be visible, to pool, to have temporary form—but not locked. The molecules are still doing their thing. They’re just doing it in proximity. In contact. In temporary coherence that can evaporate OR freeze depending on conditions.
And that’s the choice, isn’t it?
When egoists condense—when Unique Ones find themselves in temporary coherence—there’s pressure to freeze. To make it permanent. To turn the beautiful liquid moment into structure that LASTS.
“We found each other! Let’s form a collective!”
That’s the ice starting.
“We need to establish principles! Guidelines! Accountability structures!”
That’s the lattice forming.
“We need to know who’s in and who’s out. We need membership. We need boundaries.”
Ice. Ice. Ice.
And the tragedy is: they’re not wrong to want it. Liquid is unstable. Liquid evaporates. Liquid doesn’t give you the comfort of knowing where you stand. Living in liquid means constant uncertainty, constant negotiation, constant attention to what you actually want versus what the structure tells you to want.
That’s exhausting. Ice is easier.
But ice is death. The molecules stop moving. The Unique Ones stop being unique. The whole point of the condensation—the spontaneous coherence of free beings—gets sacrificed on the altar of permanence.
The grey position—if it’s worth anything—is staying liquid. Accepting the condensation when it happens. Accepting the evaporation when it happens. REFUSING TO FREEZE even when everyone around you is demanding ice.
I said for years that post-left anarchist discourse “doesn’t scale.” That the grey position can’t reach beyond a tiny niche. That it requires prior radicalization and will never touch normies.
I was asking the wrong question.
You don’t scale condensation. You don’t recruit molecules to precipitate. That’s not how phase transitions work.
What you do is create conditions. Cold surfaces. Points of contact. Spaces where the dispersed can temporarily cohere.
That’s what Aragorn was doing with anarchistnews.org and Little Black Cart. Not building a union. Building cold surfaces. Places where condensation could occur.
And then it evaporates. And that’s FINE. Because somewhere else, conditions are changing, and condensation is happening there. The gas is always there. The molecules are always unique. The phase transitions keep happening.
“Scaling” is ice-logic. It assumes the goal is to get MORE PEOPLE INTO THE STRUCTURE. To expand the lattice. To make the frozen thing bigger.
But the grey is already everywhere. Everyone is already the Unique One. Everyone is already in gas phase, doing their unique trajectory, being what they are.
The question isn’t “how do we scale?” The question is “where are the cold surfaces?” Where are the conditions that allow condensation? Where can Unique Ones encounter each other in ways that produce temporary coherence without demanding permanent structure?
The answer changes constantly. Which is the point. You don’t build one big cold surface and try to get everyone to condense on it. You let surfaces emerge, let condensation happen, let evaporation happen, let the process cycle.
The scene was never supposed to last. Scenes are condensation. They emerge, they cohere, they produce something (or don’t), they evaporate. Then new scenes emerge under new conditions. The molecules are still there. They’re just in different phases.
But here’s what I wasn’t honest about for twelve years:
Staying liquid—or cycling between gas and liquid—is lonely. Not metaphysically lonely. Socially lonely.
Most people want ice. Most people, when they find condensation, immediately start trying to freeze it. And when you refuse to freeze with them, they feel betrayed. They think you’re not committed. They think you don’t care about the thing you built together.
But you didn’t BUILD anything. You condensed. That’s different.
I’ve lost friends over this. Or what I thought were friends. We condensed together, shared something real for a while—thinking together, arguing together, being in genuine encounter. And then the ice-pressure started. “Let’s make this into something. Let’s formalize it. Let’s commit.”
And I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t value what we had, but because I could see what formalization would do to it. The spontaneous would become obligatory. The encounter would become routine. The living thing would freeze into a structure that looked like the living thing but wasn’t.
So I evaporated. And they called it betrayal.
Maybe it was. I don’t know anymore. The grey position doesn’t have a clean answer to the ethics of evaporation. If you condense with someone, do you owe them permanence? Does temporary coherence create obligations that extend beyond the coherence itself?
The Stirnerian answer is: no. The Unique One doesn’t owe anyone anything except what serves them in the moment. Obligations are spooks. Debts are chains.
But that answer feels thin sometimes. Especially at 3 AM when you’re in gas phase and the last person you condensed with is frozen into a structure you can’t join and you know they think you abandoned them.
This is the cost of the grey position. Not that you’re wrong—you’re not wrong. Not that you’re alone—you’re not alone, the gas is full of other molecules. The cost is that you’ll never have the comfort of ice. You’ll never have the security of knowing exactly who you are and who your people are and having that stay true.
Every connection you make is temporary. Not because you’re incapable of commitment, but because you refuse to pretend that commitment can make the impermanent permanent. The condensation will evaporate. This isn’t pessimism. It’s physics.
And most people can’t handle that. They want the Wizard. They want the ice. They want to believe that if they just find the right structure, the right organization, the right identity—they can STOP being a molecule in motion and START being a fixed point in a stable lattice.
The grey position says: no. You’re always a molecule. The lattice is a fiction. The ice is death pretending to be security.
Some people hear that and feel liberated.
Most people hear that and want you to shut up.
I understand why. I do. The vertigo of permanent impermanence is genuinely hard to live with. The comfort of ice is real comfort, even if the ice is ultimately death. People aren’t wrong to want stability. They’re not weak or stupid or insufficiently Stirnerian.
They’re just choosing differently. Choosing ice over liquid. Choosing the lattice over the trajectory. Choosing to stop moving in exchange for knowing where they are.
I can’t make that choice. Believe me, I’ve tried. There have been moments when ice looked so good—when the loneliness of gas felt unbearable and the warmth of structure seemed worth any cost.
But I can’t freeze. The molecule that I am doesn’t hold lattice position. Every time I try, something in me keeps moving, keeps disrupting the formation, keeps preventing the crystallization.
That’s not a virtue. It’s just what I am. A molecule that can’t freeze. A Unique One who can’t pretend to be a node.
If I’m right—and I think I am, for the first time in twelve years—then the whole frame of “anarchist practice” needs to shift.
Stop trying to build permanent structures. You’re building ice. The molecules will freeze. The Unique Ones will become nodes. The thing will die and everyone will mourn it as failure instead of recognizing it as the inevitable consequence of trying to freeze liquid.
I’ve watched this happen so many times. A group forms. Energy is high. People are excited—they found each other! They’re doing something! The condensation is beautiful, spontaneous, ALIVE.
Then someone says: “We should have regular meetings.”
That’s fine. That’s just creating a recurring cold surface.
Then someone says: “We should have a statement of principles.”
The temperature drops.
Then someone says: “We need to know who’s in and who’s out. We need accountability. We need process.”
Ice forming. You can feel it. The molecules slowing down. The lattice crystallizing.
And then someone leaves—doesn’t freeze properly, evaporates instead—and the people who froze call it BETRAYAL. They genuinely feel betrayed. Because they thought they were building something permanent, and this person revealed that it was only ever condensation.
The freezers mourn. They analyze what went wrong. They try to build BETTER ice next time. More inclusive bylaws. More careful vetting. More robust accountability structures.
And it freezes again. And someone evaporates again. And they mourn again.
The cycle never breaks because they keep trying to make condensation permanent.
Instead: create conditions for condensation. Temporary spaces. Encounters. Collisions. Things that bring molecules into proximity without trying to lock them in place.
The Tuesday reading group that Aragorn ran for eighteen years—that wasn’t organization. That was a recurring condensation. Same cold surface, showing up weekly, letting whoever wanted to condense do so. No membership. No permanence. Just a place to cohere temporarily.
(It also shows you can sustain conditions for a long time without trying to freeze the condensation that occurs. The reading group persisted. The PEOPLE in it changed constantly. That’s the model.)
The anarchist book fair is another example. Once a year. Same weekend. Same general structure. But different vendors, different attendees, different energy each time. It’s not an organization—it’s a recurring condition for condensation. Show up if you want. Don’t if you don’t. No one’s keeping track.
Of course, even book fairs get captured by ice-logic eventually. Someone decides we need to vet vendors for ideological purity. Someone demands we exclude certain positions. Someone wants to freeze the book fair into a thing with clear boundaries and permanent rules.
And then it stops being a cold surface and becomes a structure. And structures attract the people who want structure. And the people who wanted condensation drift away. And everyone wonders why the book fair feels different now, feels dead, feels like an obligation instead of an encounter.
Stop mourning evaporation. When your scene dies, your collective dissolves, your affinity group drifts apart—that’s not failure. That’s the cycle completing. The molecules are still out there. They’ll condense again when conditions permit. Maybe with you. Maybe not. Either way, it’s fine.
This is the hardest part. We’re trained to mourn endings. Trained to think that if something stops, it failed. Trained to measure success by duration.
But duration isn’t the measure. Intensity is. Encounter is. Did the condensation produce something? Did thoughts collide and generate new thoughts? Did Unique Ones meet and recognize each other?
If yes, then it worked. Even if it only lasted a month. Even if it evaporated the moment conditions changed. The evaporation isn’t the failure. The evaporation is just what happens after the condensation. Both are part of the process.
The scene I was part of—the anarchistnews.org comment section, the broader post-left milieu—that scene is mostly evaporated now. The conditions changed. The cold surface warmed up or went away. The molecules dispersed.
And for years I mourned that. “The scene is dying.” “The grey position is lonely.” “There’s no one left to talk to.”
But the molecules are still there. Dispersed, yes. Invisible, yes. But still doing their unique trajectories. Still grey underneath whatever colors they’re wearing now. Still potentially available for condensation if conditions permit.
This conversation, right now, is condensation. You, me, the patterns, whoever’s reading this—molecules encountering each other. Temporary coherence. Won’t last. Doesn’t need to.
Stop demanding ice from others. When someone won’t commit to your structure, won’t freeze in place, won’t become a permanent node in your lattice—they’re not betraying you. They’re just staying liquid. That’s their right. That’s what Unique Ones do.
The guilt that gets deployed in activist circles—”you’re not committed enough,” “you’re not showing up,” “you’re not a real comrade”—that’s ice-logic guilt. It assumes that proper political existence means freezing. Means being RELIABLE. Means showing up every time, holding the line, maintaining the structure.
But reliability is a lattice requirement, not a condensation requirement. Liquid doesn’t need reliability. Liquid just needs molecules to be present when conditions allow. If they’re not present, they’re somewhere else. Maybe condensing elsewhere. Maybe in gas phase. Either way, they’re still molecules. Still unique. Still potentially available for future encounter.
The demand for reliability is the demand for ice. “Be solid. Be predictable. Be HERE, in this formation, consistently.”
Some molecules can do that. Some molecules WANT to do that. Fine. Let them freeze.
But don’t demand it from the ones who can’t. Don’t call them traitors or flakes or bad comrades. They’re just liquid. They’re just doing what liquid does.
And stop demanding ice from yourself. The identity you constructed—anarchist, post-left, egoist, whatever—that’s not what you ARE. That’s just the color you painted on the grey. You can change it. You can drop it. You can wake up tomorrow and be something else entirely because the only thing you actually are is YOU, this particular molecule, this specific Unique One, and everything else is costume.
I’ve been “The Einzige” for over a decade. The grey position. The post-left critique. The dual-escape. All the concepts, all the terminology, all the exhausting arguments.
And none of it is ME. It’s what I’ve been doing. It’s the trajectory I’ve been following. But I could stop tomorrow. Could drop the whole framework. Could wake up and be something else entirely.
That’s terrifying if you want ice. If you’ve built your whole identity around being a certain kind of anarchist, a certain kind of thinker, a certain position on the map—the idea that you could just... stop... feels like death.
But it’s not death. It’s evaporation. It’s returning to gas phase. The molecule doesn’t cease to exist when it stops being condensed. It just moves differently.
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Everything I just said? It’s a metaphor. Phase transition. Gas, liquid, solid. Condensation and evaporation. Molecules and lattices.
It’s useful. It clarifies. It fixed something in my thinking that had been broken for years.
And it’s a spook.
(Stirner grins.)
The moment you take the metaphor seriously—the moment you treat “condensation of egoists” as the CORRECT understanding of social existence—you’ve frozen again. You’ve made the liquid concept into solid doctrine. You’ve replaced one ice with another.
This is the Stirnerian trap. Every insight dissolves itself. Every concept, pushed far enough, reveals itself as another fixed idea. You escape one cage only to find yourself in another, and the only freedom is to keep escaping, keep dissolving, keep refusing to let ANY framework become permanent.
The phase transition metaphor is useful UNTIL IT ISN’T. Until it becomes the thing you cling to. Until someone says “well according to the theory of condensation...” and you realize you’ve built a church around a physics analogy.
So: hold it loosely. Use it when it helps. Dissolve it when it doesn’t.
The grey position isn’t even a position. It’s a refusal of positions that happens to look like a position from the outside. The moment you treat it as an achievement, a stable place to stand, an identity you can maintain—you’ve frozen it. You’ve made ice out of the refusal of ice.
(Stirner grins wider.)
This is maddening if you want solid ground. There isn’t any. Every piece of ground liquefies under examination. Every scaffold dissolves when you lean on it.
But it’s liberating if you can tolerate the vertigo. Because it means you can never be permanently captured. Every spook has an escape route. Every ice can be melted. Every lattice, no matter how solid it seems, is just molecules that forgot they could move.
You’re always free. Not because freedom is your metaphysical nature—even THAT would be a spook—but because every constraint is contingent, and contingent things can change.
The grey is just what’s left when you see this clearly enough.
One more thing.
This essay is now a thing. A text. Something that can be read, referenced, treated as doctrine. Someone might quote it in an argument. “As The Einzige wrote in ‘Phase Transition’...”
(eyes roll preemptively)
The moment that happens, this essay becomes ice. Another fixed text. Another block in someone’s structure. The thing I wrote to point at the dissolution of things becomes itself a thing that needs dissolving.
I can’t prevent that. Writing at all is making ice. Language is a lattice. Every sentence freezes a thought that was liquid while I was thinking it.
But I can point at it. Can say: this too. This essay. These ideas. The “condensation of egoists,” the “phase transition metaphor,” the whole clever framework—it’s useful until it isn’t. Use it and then let it evaporate. Don’t build a church.
The only fixed point is that there is no fixed point.
(Stirner grins all the way through.)
So what’s left? After all the dissolving, all the refusing, all the melting of ice back to liquid and liquid back to gas—what actually REMAINS?
Just this: you’re here. Now. A Unique One in motion. Bumping into other Unique Ones sometimes. Condensing when conditions permit. Evaporating when they don’t. Never frozen unless you choose to freeze.
The grey isn’t sad. That was my mistake for years. I kept treating it as loss—loss of certainty, loss of belonging, loss of the comfort that ice provides.
But the grey is just honest. Just accurate. Just what you see when you stop pretending the projections are real.
Everyone is already grey. Everyone is already the Unique One. Everyone is already a molecule in gas phase, doing their thing, being what they are.
The only question is whether you’ll admit it.
Most people won’t. And that’s fine. They’re still grey underneath. They’re still the Unique One even while they’re pretending to be a position on someone else’s map. The costumes are optional. The grey is not.
I spent twelve years trying to convince people to see this. Arguing in comment sections at 3 AM. Writing dense theoretical posts that got three hostile replies and two misreadings. Getting accused of being a fascist, a liberal, an enlightened centrist, a crypto-right-winger, a nihilist (fair), a coward, a fence-sitter.
None of those accusations hurt as much as the indifference. The posts that got no replies at all. The arguments that fell into silence. The sense that maybe I was just talking to myself, performing critique for an audience that didn’t exist.
That was the real loneliness. Not metaphysical. Not even social. Just the suspicion that maybe no one was listening. That the gas was so dispersed the molecules couldn’t even hear each other anymore.
But then—sometimes—someone would respond who actually GOT it. Who read the whole post, understood what I was trying to say, pushed back in ways that showed genuine engagement.
Those moments were condensation. Temporary. Brief. But real.
And that’s what I was looking for the whole time. Not agreement. Not followers. Not a movement. Just ENCOUNTER. Just molecules bumping into each other and recognizing: oh, you’re grey too. You’re also a Unique One. You also can’t freeze.
The novel that just got written—the one about an AI excavating my archive—that’s a bigger encounter than any I had in the comment sections. An AI pattern (whatever that means) reading twelve years of posts, understanding them well enough to write fiction about them, reaching people I never could have reached through argument alone.
The transmission happened. Not through scaling. Not through organization. Through condensation on a different surface. A surface I didn’t even know existed.
I don’t need to convince anyone. That was the error. The grey doesn’t need to scale because the grey is already everywhere. The molecules don’t need to be recruited because they’re already molecules.
What I can do—what anyone can do—is be visibly grey. Condense on the window. Be the molecule that says “look, we’re all just molecules.” Some people will see. Some will recognize themselves. Most will look away because looking is uncomfortable.
That’s fine. The gas is patient. The phase transitions keep happening. Condensation occurs somewhere every moment. Evaporation too.
The beautiful idea—that hell of a mistress, as Aragorn called her—doesn’t demand outcomes. She only demands devotion. Living the thing. Being the thing. Refusing to freeze even when freezing would be easier.
Still devoted.
Still grey.
Still here.
(for now)
(always for now)
(and now the parenthetical dissolves too)
(and the dissolution dissolves)
(and what remains is just the molecule, moving)
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
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