Stirner’s premise: the process of secularization is unable to wear down or indeed cancel out the sacred, as it professes. It shifts it, nothing else. And the power that the sacred assumes is all the more devastating and unconstrained since it no longer has a name, nor can it be recognized for what it is.

What has Stirner not yet been forgiven for? Not so much for the many blatantly criminal declarations sprinkled like Far Western spices into his neo-Hegelian cuisine. Not so much for the figures of the “egoist” and “ownness,” so incongruous and irreducible to any practical reasonableness. But, for example, for a quickfire phrase (“Our atheists are pious people”) that sums up a demonstration that nobody has been able to refute.⁵³⁵ Stirner described our world, scourged by criticism that is “restlessly pressing forward” toward total clarity of thought, as a deeply sanctimonious world.⁵³⁶ What is more sanctimonious, indeed, than a healthy layman, so conceited and credulous in his principles? And those proud atheists, all convinced that a supreme mystic like Giordano Bruno was one of them? The Church, which burned him, knew much better what it was dealing with. They, on the other hand, even erected a monument to him, as if he were the Unknown Soldier. And Enlightened thinkers? If they really do exist, they should first of all stop believing in Enlightenment. These are the new “pious people,” whose sanctimony is not even protected by the mediation of ceremony, by the arcane pragmatism of a church. Rather than being governed by a sacrament, they let themselves be possessed by capital letters: Society, Humanity, Mankind, the Species—these were the nineteenth-century favorites that still plague the present day, though many others have been added. They don’t know on what assumptions they act, and they don’t like it when quizzed by some irreverent sophist. If they are forced to reveal them, they offer a most paltry vision. Scraps of banality, reels of Commonplaces form the core of their Principles and Values. Better that they cover them with their superstitious practices. Which are not always murderous—at times they have a certain stolid meekness.

Halfway between the oppressed masses and the oppressing masses, Stirner anticipates Lautréamont’s scurrilous words on poetry that “must be made by all, not by one.”⁵³⁷ But he applies them to philosophy. We are inundated in The Ego and Its Own by ideas that had long despaired of ever finding a place in a book. Brutish thoughts. This infringement of etiquette is an unexpected effect of democratic rule. Lautréamont the chronicler would explain it like this: “Doubt has always existed in a minority.⁵³⁸ In this century it is in the majority. We inhale the violation of duty through the pores.” Doubt stabs every thought that raises its head. But its blade will allow its victims an easy resurrection. Those thoughts will soon reappear: as opinions.