/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10586835]

>ATHENIAN: My dear fellow, the first thing these people say about the gods is that they are artificial concepts corresponding to nothing in nature; they are legal fictions, which moreover vary very widely according to the different conventions people agree on when they produce a legal code. In particular, goodness according to nature and goodness according to the law are two different things, and there is no natural standard of justice at all. On the contrary, men are always wrangling about their moral standards and altering them, and every change introduced becomes binding from the moment it’s made, regardless of the fact that it is entirely artificial, [890] and based on convention, not nature in the slightest degree. All this, my friends, is the theme of experts—as our young people regard them—who in their prose and poetry maintain that anything one can get away with by force is absolutely justified. This is why we experience outbreaks of impiety among the young, who assume that the kind of gods the law tells them to believe in do not exist; this is why we get treasonable efforts to convert people to the ‘true natural life’, which is essentially nothing but a life of conquest over others, not one of service to your neighbor as the law enjoins.

>mfw I realize that Stirner never died, he discovered a time machine and went back to Ancient Greece for bantz with Plato