Ebook: Confessions of a Failed Egoist

"Egoism builds a shanty, not a shelter, on the plateau of heresy. Egoism stakes a claim and keeps moving. Most people muddle through the day. A minority seek to rule the muddle. A smaller minority still seek to reform the rulers, and a smaller number seek revolution, and a very small number repudiate the revolution, the reform and the rulers alike. Egoism is in that smallest minority, the imp of the perverse and the bur under the saddle, nobody’s friend and its own worst enemy. Egoism isn’t the boy who laughs and points at the naked emperor, it’s the boy who laughs and points at a naked empire." - Trevor Blake

Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays is a difficult book, not because it’s hard to understand, but because it gives no leeway to anyone. With surgical wit and wisdom, Trevor deconstructs every pretty lie of modern America, even the pretty lies that he himself is susceptible to. Organized religion and atheism, feminism and patriarchy, anarchism and statism; nothing is off-limits. Like a modern-day Socrates, Trevor Blake chucks dynamite at sacred icons just because, because one spoonful of truth is worth a bucketful of lies.

Explication, rumination and fulmination from Portland author Trevor Blake. Sixteen selections range from a critique of Objectivism to the career of filmmaker Nabil Shaban (focusing on The Skin Horse, a documentary on the sex lives of cripples). In addition there is a history and usage of Multiple Names (popular from obscure art movements like Neoism to common folk mythologies), a biographical sketch of Baltimore native and mutant tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, among other topics. Putting the “I” in “history”, the author touches on a cultural history of Egoism, a personal “trajectory” through Anarchism, and his personal shift on 9/11 are also detailed herein.