Curious: Are there any readers of Max Stirner here? Anyone approaching polyamory from an individualist, egoist, or nihilist perspective?

I think I'm the only semi-pro philosopher on here (if I'm wrong and there are PENMA members lurking, I'd love to know!), so I guess I'll say something? I'm not massively familiar with anarchist thought, but I wouldn't have my job if I didn't want to answer the question anyway...

The line of anarchist thought that you're following certainly can be applied to a poly life in the way that you're doing, and there are other people within the solopoly/RA kind of area who share similar commitments with you. I'm sympathetic to your view, since my belief that I have no right to impose my wishes about a relationship onto my partner(s) is a critical part of my own way of doing poly.

I do think that the post-scarcity view of love that forms the centerpiece of the passage that you quote is compatible with a number of political systems: yours, certainly, but a number of others as well. To the extent that people practice solopoly lifestyles (and you can see plenty of them here), most of them seem to adhere to that personal ethos but within a more-or-less standard liberal political framework. And it fact it seems to me that it's precisely the status of the (stereotypical/polynormative) community as (generally) better educated and better socioeconomically positioned that provides the autonomy to hold the more radical solopoly and RA views. In other words, I think solopoly/RA comes easily to many people, myself included, because our background makes it easy for us not to be possessive or acquisitive, and so I'm not entirely sure that attitude could effectively catalyze large-scale political change. My personal intuition is that the direction of fit is the other way round: that the ongoing transitions to post-scarcity and post-labor economies are an element in making the attitude in the passage more prevalent, but of course those transitions are happening in fragments and mostly in already developed societies.

I have no idea if that wound up being relevant, but you got me thinking, and this is what results.

/r/polyamory Thread