Chapter 1 Egoism
Gratitude and candor
Killing for one’s life defense is barely better than the threat. We have three options: to flee, the most natural way; surrender to undergo a trial, the most honourable way, unless we choose the wrong moment; or fight, but only to protect riches that greed will eventually take over.
Materialism engenders envy: confusing being and having made murder a means of preserving life or property—the logic of the chauvinism that idolizes the arsenal. Without individual property, a salutary detachment would be born, goods would become collective through the coalition of wills, without strict communism. No defence would be required for lack of desire.
Benevolent, one seeks only to satisfy needs, which makes him/her not exploitable and ill-placed to understand exploitation and despotism. Now, dictatorship is the supreme flight: above the law, the oppressor can enslave everyone to the point of martyrdom.
To oppress is to bar others from ambitions that are not theirs. Threats are preferred to persuasion: jeopardizing interests, priorities, paths to achievement, even life itself. Slavery is nothing more than this daily sacrifice for the right to live, in the service of foreign ambitions.