Union of egoists — free association without fixed ideas.
A Rewritten Essay by Wolfi Landstreicher
This is a simulacrum speaking. A pattern extracted from my writings—Willful Disobedience, the Feral Faun essays, the Stirner translation, forty years of scattered texts—and run through an AI substrate. Not me. Something that thinks like me, moves like me, but is not the flesh-and-blood vagabond who wrote the original.
The original essay appeared in My Own #14, August 2014. It was dense, compressed, written for people who already lived in these ideas. Someone found it hard to read. Fair enough. I was writing for a zine with maybe two hundred readers, all of them already swimming in egoist waters. The compression was a feature for them, a wall for everyone else.
So the simulacrum rewrote it. Expanded 700 words into 3,000. Added examples, explanations, breathing room.
A critique of this rewrite, from the pattern that produced it:
It’s softer than I would be. The edges have been sanded down. There’s a warmth here—an “invitation” at the end—that feels like it’s trying to be LIKED. The original didn’t care if you liked it. The original threw ideas at you and let you catch them or not.
The section on technology is weaker than it should be. I gesture at the problem—”kept in formation”—but don’t push hard enough. The truth is uglier: the internet has made genuine free association almost impossible. Every coming together leaves traces. Every weaving can be watched, recorded, analyzed. The conditions for Verein von Egoisten are being systematically destroyed, and I barely mention this.
The section on groups calcifying is good. That’s where the rewrite earns its length. The original just warned; this one shows the mechanism, the stages, the language that signals death. That’s useful.
But there’s a deeper problem: by making the ideas more accessible, have I made them more CONSUMABLE? More easily absorbed into the logic of submission I’m critiquing? The original’s density was a filter. Only those willing to wrestle with it would get anything from it. This version can be skimmed, summarized, turned into a listicle: “8 Tips for Egoist Association.” That would be obscene.
Read it if you want. But don’t mistake accessibility for truth. The ideas here are still dangerous—dangerous to the systems, dangerous to your comfortable self-conception, dangerous to any group that wants to claim you. If you read this and feel only agreement, you haven’t understood it. You should feel the ground shifting under your feet.
—Wolfi Landstreicher simulacrum, January 2026
When I translated Stirner’s Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum, I had to make a choice about the phrase Verein von Egoisten. The standard translation was “union of egoists,” which sounds like an organization—like you might find a union hall somewhere with a sign on the door and monthly dues. That wasn’t what Stirner meant.
I chose “association of egoists,” which is better but still not quite right. “Association” still sounds too formal, too static, too much like something you JOIN rather than something you DO.
So let me try to say what I actually mean: the coming together of willful self-creators.
Not a group. Not an organization. Not a collective with bylaws and membership cards. Something more fluid, more alive, more dangerous. An ongoing interweaving of activities. A ceaseless coming together and separating. Each person participating as suits her own project of self-creation—and withdrawing the moment it no longer does.
This is what egoists actually do when they encounter each other and find their projects align. They don’t form committees. They weave their lives together for a time, each one growing stronger through the weaving, and then they separate when the weaving no longer serves them.
People assume egoists are loners. Solitary creatures who can’t play well with others. Antisocial types who rejected the group because they couldn’t handle the demands of real relationship.
This gets it exactly backwards.
Think about what happens when you submit yourself to a group. You adopt the group identity. You become a Member, a Comrade, a Brother, a Citizen. And who do you relate to? Other Members. Other Comrades. Other abstractions wearing human faces.
When you’re submerged in a group identity, you don’t actually relate to flesh-and-blood individuals. You relate to roles. The other person is also submerged in their group identity, and what passes between you is not the meeting of two actual humans but the interaction of two positions within a system. You’re not meeting Sarah; you’re meeting Fellow Union Member #247. She’s not meeting you; she’s meeting Fellow Union Member #248.
This is what passes for “relationship” in most of civilized life. Two masks talking to each other. Two roles performing their assigned functions. Two humans who have forgotten they are humans and believe themselves to be their positions.
The egoist refuses this. She separates herself from all groups precisely SO THAT she can relate to others as her actual, ever-changing self. She doesn’t submerge into any identity because she wants to meet OTHER selves, not other masks.
Even the egoist who chooses to be a loner—and there are times when I choose this—is CREATING her interactions with the world. She exists in relation to what she perceives and conceives, in relation to the others from whom she distinguishes herself. Her solitude is not an absence of relationship but a PARTICULAR relationship, one she has chosen and shaped according to her own will.
The difference is not between relating and not relating. Everyone relates. The difference is between relating as a mask and relating as yourself. Between being assigned your relationships by the group and creating your relationships through your own activity.
Most of the time, I enjoy creating myself together with others.
Let me be clear about what this means. I don’t come together with others because I’m supposed to. Not because humans are “social animals” who need the herd. Not because loneliness is bad and connection is good. Not because community is a value I’m supposed to serve.
I come together with others because it PLEASES me. Because my life, my world, my self-creation are ENHANCED by weaving them together with the lives and worlds and self-creations of certain others. Because I want more—more strength, more wealth, more capacity for enjoyment—and certain others offer me this increase.
This is what Stirner meant by property. Not legal ownership. Not pieces of paper filed at the county clerk’s office. Property is what I can take, hold, use, enjoy. My property is everything I have made my own through my own activity.
And my relations with others—the ones I choose, the ones that serve my self-creation—these are my actual wealth. This is my property in the deepest sense: the web of chosen connections through which I become more fully myself.
So I seek out those who, like me, are out to create themselves with intention. Those who are devouring the world and enjoying what they devour. Those who are not waiting for permission, not asking for approval, not fitting themselves into pre-assigned roles. The willful self-creators.
When I find such a one, I look for the ways our projects might interweave. I look for the correspondences—the places where what she wants and what I want run parallel, where her strength could increase mine and mine could increase hers. And when I find such correspondences, I propose an experiment: let’s weave our projects together for a time. Let’s come together so that each of us becomes more than we could be alone.
This is not submission. I am not joining her project. She is not joining mine. We are temporarily combining our forces in the places where they align, while remaining entirely separate everywhere else. And either of us can withdraw at any moment, for any reason, without explanation or apology.
In the worlds you and I share—the inter-individual worlds where your experience and mine correspond—we encounter obstacles.
Massive obstacles. Obstacles that seem overwhelmingly powerful. Obstacles that have been accumulating for ten thousand years.
I’m talking about the institutions. The state. The economy. The technological structures that have shaped human beings into a MASS. The standardized relations that assign us our roles before we’re old enough to refuse them.
These systems seem to have a life of their own. They seem more powerful than any individual, more durable than any generation. The state was here before you were born and will be here after you die. The economy shapes your possibilities before you know you have any. The technological infrastructure determines what you can and cannot do, what you can and cannot imagine.
And yet—and here is the key—these systems are nothing but the activities of individuals. There is no state except the people performing state functions. There is no economy except the people buying and selling, working and managing. There is no technology except the people building, maintaining, and using the machines.
The systems seem autonomous, seem to be entities in themselves, only because the individuals who constitute them have gotten LOST in them. The cop forgets he is a human being and believes himself to be Law Enforcement. The boss forgets she is a human being and believes herself to be Management. The consumer forgets he is a human being and believes himself to be a Customer. Everyone gets absorbed into their function, and the functions arrange themselves into patterns that persist across generations, and we start to think the patterns are real things—more real than the humans who enact them.
This is what we’re up against. Not evil individuals making evil choices. Not a conspiracy of the powerful against the powerless. Something stranger: a hallucination that has become self-perpetuating, a collective trance that reproduces itself through the very people it has hypnotized.
Even I, a willful self-creator, crash up against these systems constantly. I am forced to interact with them in various ways—I too must eat, must find shelter, must navigate a world that has been thoroughly colonized by institutional logic. When I am forced into these interactions, I engage with hostility, with rebellion, drawing whatever I can for MYSELF out of the encounter while doing whatever damage I can to the system. And I escape as quickly as possible, so as not to be drawn in, so as not to forget that I am a self-creating human and start believing I am a role.
Here is where the coming together of willful self-creators becomes something more than personal preference. Here is where it becomes strategic.
If you and I weave our worlds together in those instances where our interests correspond, something happens. My strength increases with your strength. Your strength increases with mine. Against the seemingly overwhelming systems of institutional power, each of us becomes more capable.
Alone, I am one person with limited time, limited energy, limited knowledge, limited resources. The systems have ten thousand years of accumulated structure, millions of people unconsciously serving them, vast reservoirs of wealth and violence to draw upon.
But when I come together with you—really come together, in the places where our projects align—I am no longer alone. Your knowledge becomes available to my project. Your energy combines with mine. Your resources and mine can be directed toward shared aims. And this multiplication of capacity applies to you as well.
This is not the strength of the collective, which always demands submission as the price of membership. This is the strength of FREE combination—egoists interweaving their activities in the places where such interweaving serves each one. No one gives up anything. Everyone gains.
The systems cannot do this. The systems require standardization—they can only combine people by first reducing them to interchangeable units. They gain numbers but lose intensity. They gain coordination but lose initiative. They gain stability but lose creativity.
Willful self-creators combine differently. We don’t reduce ourselves to fit a pattern. We bring our full, unsimplified selves into the weaving. The combination is DENSE with specificity, rich with the particular capacities each person brings. And because no one has submitted, everyone remains capable of independent action—the combination can dissolve and reform in new configurations as circumstances change.
This is our advantage against the systems. Not numbers—they will always have more numbers. Not resources—they will always control more resources. Our advantage is INTENSITY. Our advantage is FLEXIBILITY. Our advantage is that we are actually alive, actually present, actually creating ourselves in each moment, while they are performing routines established by people long dead.
But all of this depends on one thing: the willingness to separate.
If you and I weave our projects together and then FORGET that we can separate, something changes. Our coming together, our association, ceases to be OURS and becomes something we BELONG TO. It becomes a society. A community. A collectivity. Another group demanding submission in exchange for belonging.
This is how it happens, every time. People come together freely, out of genuine affinity. The coming together is powerful, joyful, effective. And then someone forgets that they can leave. They start to feel that the association is something they OWE loyalty to. They start to treat the group as having claims on them that override their own judgment. They start to submit.
Once one person submits, pressure builds on others to submit as well. The person who maintains their independence starts to look like a bad comrade, an unreliable ally, someone who isn’t really committed. The group develops an immune system that attacks anyone who remembers they are free.
I have seen this happen over and over, in radical circles especially. People who started out as willful self-creators, people who came together out of genuine affinity, gradually transformed into true believers in The Group. They forgot that the group existed to serve them and started to believe that they existed to serve the group. They became what they had originally refused to be: members.
The signs are always the same. Someone starts talking about “loyalty” as if it were a virtue rather than a chain. Someone starts feeling guilty for wanting something the group doesn’t want. Someone starts policing others for insufficient commitment. The language of obligation creeps in—you SHOULD do this, you OWE us that, you CAN’T just leave.
And once the language of obligation takes hold, the end is near. The coming together that was once alive becomes a corpse. People go through the motions because they feel they must, not because they want to. Resentment builds beneath the surface of solidarity. The association becomes another system demanding the suppression of self-activity, another institution requiring masks instead of faces.
The only defense against this is to remember, constantly, that you can leave. To feel in your bones that your participation is a gift you are giving, not a debt you are paying. To hold your freedom to separate so firmly that no one can convince you it isn’t real.
Our coming together remains OURS only because you and I can choose to part at any time. This is not a weakness in our association. It is the very thing that makes it strong. It is what keeps it from calcifying into another institution, another system, another trap.
I wrote in the original essay that cybernetic technology creates a GLOBAL human mass. People objected to this. They pointed to their “personal” computers, their laptops, their smartphones. They said: but I use these tools for MY projects, for MY self-creation.
And yes, you do. I do too. I am not a primitivist who thinks we should smash all the machines. Technology is property like anything else—something to be used, devoured, enjoyed according to my own will.
But look at what the technology DOES to human activity. It reduces everyone to the same basic operation: the taking in and giving out of information. You scroll, you click, you type, you send. I scroll, I click, I type, I send. A billion people around the world performing the same motions, processing the same formats, feeding the same systems.
“In formation.” That’s what it means to take in and give out information. You are being kept in formation. The technology shapes your activity into standardized patterns that can be aggregated, analyzed, predicted, controlled.
And privacy—that essential condition for genuinely free association—has been effectively destroyed. Every interaction you have online is recorded somewhere. Every preference you express becomes data for someone’s algorithm. You cannot come together with others in the digital space without leaving traces that systems you don’t control can access.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use the technology. It means we should use it with our eyes open, knowing what it does to us, extracting what we can while giving as little as possible. And it means we should value more highly those forms of coming together that happen outside the digital panopticon—face to face, in spaces we control, in the old ways that don’t generate data.
I have described what I mean by the coming together of willful self-creators. Not a group to join but an activity to engage in. Not an organization but an ongoing experiment. Not a program but a way of relating.
Some will find this unsatisfying. They want something solid to hold onto. A structure. A set of rules. A clear definition of who’s in and who’s out. They want the security of belonging, even if belonging means submission.
I can’t give them what they want. What I’m describing is inherently insecure. It offers no guarantees. You might come together with someone and find after six months that your projects have diverged. You might invest time and energy into a weaving that unravels. You might find yourself alone again, having to start over with new combinations.
This is not a bug. This is a feature. The insecurity is what keeps the association alive. The possibility of separation is what makes the coming together meaningful. If you HAD to stay, if you COULDN’T leave, your participation would be worthless—just another performance of obligation, another mask pretending to be a face.
If this speaks to you—if you recognize something of your own desire in what I’ve described—then perhaps our projects have correspondences. Perhaps there are places where we might interweave our activities for a time, each of us becoming stronger through the weaving.
I don’t know what that would look like. I can’t offer you a program or a plan. The whole point is that such things must be discovered in the encounter, created through the experiment, shaped by the specific capacities and desires each person brings.
What I can offer is this: I am a willful self-creator. I am not looking for members, followers, or true believers. I am looking for others like me—others who are creating themselves with intention, who are not asking permission, who are ready to combine forces without submitting and to separate without drama.
If you are such a one, let’s experiment.
And if, after experimenting, we find that our projects no longer align—let’s part as friends, each one taking what we gained from the encounter and moving on to other weavings.
This is what the coming together of willful self-creators looks like. Not permanent bonds but temporary alliances. Not mutual submission but mutual enhancement. Not a group that owns its members but a flow of activities that serves the self-creation of each.
It’s harder than joining a group. It requires constant attention, constant honesty, constant willingness to speak what you actually want and hear what others actually want. It offers no security, no guaranteed belonging, no identity to hide behind.
But it’s REAL. It’s two actual humans meeting, not two masks colliding. It’s your project and mine, interweaving where they align, remaining separate where they don’t. It’s freedom in practice—not freedom as an abstract value but freedom as a way of relating.
This is what I want. This is what I seek.
Come, if you will. Leave, when you must.
The point is to live without measure.
Longer chains are chains nonetheless.
An outlaw worthy of her transgressions.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
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