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Title: What Sid did Author: Ken MacLeod Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: egoism, individualism, Non Serviam, Sidney E. Parker Source: Retrieved 10/04/2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/20061122104330/http://www.nonserviam.com/magazine/issues/18.html Notes: Published in Non Serviam #18, March 1, 1999.
The luckiest way to stumble across the writings of S. E. Parker is after
a long exploration of anarchism and libertarianism. What a breath of
fresh air! Especially after exploring the closed room of Objectivism. As
far as I know, Parker has written nothing about Rand — which suggests a
certain gallantry. A man big enough to criticise Ragnar Redbeard (the
mysterious author of Might Is Right) as a moralist has no need to beat
up little old ladies.
What Sid did was to drive a wedge between egoism and anarchism. Dora
Marsden — whose writings Parker has helped to rescue from obscurity —
did the same decades earlier, but in a context which is now remote, and
in a dense and allusive style. Parker writes in the plainest English.
Bakunin, Engels once said, created anarchism by combining Stirner and
Proudhon. Parker rescued Stirner from that entanglement, in which even
Tucker was snared. Nobody any longer has an excuse to combine egoism
with a muddle of economic fallacies.
I’ve heard it said, half in jest, that ‘Sid will argue that egoism is
compatible with any political philosophy — except anarchism.’ There’s a
lot of truth in that, because egoism is not about how the world should
be — it is, in part, an explanation of how the world is as it is. All
forms of anarchism, even individualist anarchism, have a moral basis in
the rejection of domination. How inconsistent to proclaim ‘the war of
all against all’ and to disdain the use of that war machine, the state,
when it acts in your interests!
The political applications of this insight are far wider than may be
apparent to those whose heads are, as Parker has aptly put it, ‘stuck in
the anarchist tar-bucket’. And they are not necessarily conservative, or
‘right-wing’, in their implications. Over the past couple of decades,
and partly as a result of libertarian argument, millions upon millions
of people have allowed their interests to be sacrificed to ‘the free
market’. Like a starving man who believes it is immoral to steal (which
it is, but the egoist will always ask ‘So?’) they have put property
rights ahead of their property.
The spooks of idealistic socialism have been thoroughly exorcised. But a
realistic socialism rests not on morals but on might — and the sovereign
franchise, as one of Heinlein’s characters puts it, is might. No egoist
should have the slightest qualm about using it, and encouraging others
to use it, if it is in his interest to do so. The spooks of
libertarianism still haunt the world, and Parker has exposed them as
rags on a stick.
At least, that’s what Sid did for me.
— Ken MacLeod