self and selfhood – GV Loewen

With a Fitting Confidence?

Introduction: With a Fitting Confidence?

The unexamined self is not worth being. But in saying this, are we not also aggrandizing that very selfhood, comparing it to life in general, also to be examined? How much of a life is, in other words, worthy of examination in the same way we might attempt to explicate life in general? This other level is surely more a question for the sciences, especially those of nature. For though living is of the human, life itself is not. Life is shared by vast minions of species, all of whom live within its natural embrace. But living-on in the manner we humans accomplish it is something quite different from any other known form of life. This is so because we have to live life as a self.

What does it mean to be a self, and a self which lives? At first, we would seek to alter the ‘which’ into a ‘who’, giving us the sense not only of agency but also of individuality and even perhaps that of purpose. Who is the self who lives? But a distinction must be immediately made; that between self and selfhood. For if we share life with other creatures grand and miniscule, we also share the conception of self with all other persons, and extending in two directions; those predecessors to me who are now passed and constitute the once-living component of the past, as well as those successors, those to come who will also live as human selves. At least unless or until we develop into a new species which has no need for either self or selfhood, this is what human life is as existence and not merely life. Existence is ipsissimous, life, only autochthonous. The one belongs to itself and is also ‘owned’, while the other simply arises from itself and thenceforth is only as it could ever be.

Yet given that my predecessors are passed and my successors yet to come, I must inevitably but also compassionately turn to my contemporaries to gain an understanding of not only what it means to live a human life, but also the purpose of being a human self; the meaningfulness of selfhood. After all, I live with them if not as them. And they live with me though not as myself. We share both life and self but never living nor selfhood. We imagine that it is through love alone that our nascent but wondrous contiguity of beings become as Being. Yet even here, being in love prompting a more existential rendering as being-in-love, or the being-which I am in love, distracts us from its more ontological marker, being-as-love, or being as is the love we imagine transfigures the mere quantities of a human life and thereby gives it its unique quality.

We are challenged in our own time by such quantities, perhaps as never before. It often appears we are content to rest within the selvedges of self, perhaps salvaging a modicum of objective grace but losing anything to do with the challenge which mortal being confers upon us. The window-dressing of the self can never lead to selfhood, just as identifying with a group or a structural variable such as race or class can never lead to the person who I am. It is an ethical error to imagine that the personal is only the political; such an idea rests upon the conflation of self and selfhood. A ‘self’, by itself, that which is shared through a ‘Das-Manic’ dynamic, if you will, gives us the impression that it is wholly defined by its life-chances and through the gaze of the generalized other. It is intent on avoiding intention. It is an agent of the agency at large and thus has none of its ownmost. We have rather a bifurcation of self in lieu of selfhood, and the question for each of us thus is, how do I navigate what are entanglements for the Dasein which is both mine own but also mine ownmost selfhood?

This book is, in the face of this question, itself divided into two parts. The ‘examined political self’ contains essays and queries about the relationship, strained as it so often is, between who I am in the world and how that same world frames my being within its objective ambit. Here, the ‘who’ tends to retreat in front of forces which seem to it larger than life. Yet because they are historical and political, they have long since been divorced from the life of nature, so much so that we cannot even identity precisely when this parting of ways occurred. Culture is, for us, larger than nature, and has been so at least since the domestication of fire. Just so, it is also larger than any single selfhood, since it is made up of the total quantity of selves, living and dead, that there may ever have been, though the vast majority of these remain unknown to us in any personal sense. This too is a factor, and, I believe, a perduring one; we cannot know the dead as they knew themselves. They once were as I am now, and for now, and I am to be as they now are. I am now a selfhood to myself and perhaps to a few intimate others, and as well, seen as a self politically and in the world, but my destiny is to repeat the dissolution of the former and the ascendency of the latter. In death, mine ownmost life as a selfhood abruptly vanishes, and the memory of me as a mere self in the world takes on the mantle of life which is no longer living.

This process is an element of the facticity of Dasein, yet we overdo it whilst still alive by engaging in the entangled pretense, as well as the simply tangled pretension, of seeing ourselves as augmented selfhoods, extended by the same basic, if brute, ‘practitioning’ of the habitus of ‘identities’. This volume argues stringently against this fashionable practice, which is at once a flaneur and a regression. We play at being anachronists, imagining that the Enlightenment never occurred, and that we can, or even should, be better off living as if it actually did not. In part two, the ‘examined social selfhood’, the second set of essays speaks more directly to the ‘who’ of whom I am. If the first part’s tone is itself pitched politically and critically, the second’s cleaves to us at a most personal level, intruding upon our intimate spaces and clearing not so much a ‘lighted space’ but the more so; a spatiality alit with self-understanding, for that is the ultimate aim of this brief collection. Selbstverstandnis is the outcome of an hermeneutic interrogation, both of the self, its more public thesis, as well as the selfhood, its more private antithesis. The synthetic sensibility that arises from all authentic attempts at self-understanding is a Phronesis of the political and the personal. Neither, as stated above, can wholly be identified with the other, and beyond either we are called to action by both the collective conscience and our own Anxiety-impressed ethical compasses to respond to their conflicting presence.

In doing so, this Phronetic sense gradually becomes itself ascendant, expressing the Aufheben of being-there as lensed through Polis and Psyche the both. In doing so, perhaps we can engender for ourselves a fitting confidence in our responses, if not directly to any ‘great questioner’ who may yet exist, then at least to the great questions posed by human existence itself; those surrounding notions of its purpose or its lack thereof, that regarding its ultimate destiny as both a species and as individuals, the character of its species-essence and, more incisively, mine ownmost ethical character; who am I and how can I know this? And it is not so much self-knowledge that is at stake, because of course that selfsame being undergoes much change over its brief tenure as a selfhood, but rather what develops is an ongoing process of self-understanding; here, the method is, as it were, more important than the truth. For the truth of our being-present is never yet the presence of Being, never larger than the life which is granted to the who that I am. Let us hope that our present penchant for conflating self and selfhood, the political and the personal, and even nature and culture, are but passing testaments to an age wherein the truth of selfhood may seem to some to be an overburden of that very Being to which we owe both our human conscience and our historical calling.

– GVL, Winnipeg, May 2024.

Nature, Nurture and the Mature Future

Nature, Nurture and the Mature Future (On Avoiding Ourselves)

Though selfhood is not thinghood, we have placed in our way a number of distractions that help us avoid the basic challenge of ongoingness. The fabric of this temporal vestment we are compelled, as living beings, to don and to wear and thence wear out, is such that while it admits entry to several kinds of origins, it is nevertheless something placed upon us, and which does not have as its source who we are as persons. In short, though only at first glance, the difference between nature and nurture is the same difference as exists between the what and the who. If one is content only to be a thing, then natural selection can suffice. But if one wishes to develop their fuller humanity, to become a who and not merely a what, then it is to culture we must turn, and in a sense, turn into. For it is only culture which provides an identity beyond that mammalian, and this in turn is a species-shared identity, quite apart from all of its diverse guises. Yes, there are a number of ‘sources of the self’, as it were, most of them outside of our ken and afar from our reflection, but at the same time we, with a gritty panache, come to embody and even to ‘own’ much of this source material, even if we as often feel that it also possesses us.

This veteran selfhood, ‘mature being’ as Gadamer has referred to it, represents the dialectical pinion resting uplifted from both nature and nurture. The ‘debate’ between their thesis and antithesis is, unless seen dialectically, a false one. There is no either/or at work or at stake. We are at first animals which are then encultured to become human beings. That this socialization process begins perhaps even before birth is suggestive that our animal ‘nature’ is something to be overcome, something that culture takes pride in moving beyond, just as we might well take a similar sense of accomplishment away from having become our own persons yet within a culture. We are perplexed by this movement, even so, and I imagine that this is what is part of the elemental puzzle of ‘when’ a human being begins to become human, at birth or rather even at conception. For the vast majority of human existence, humanness does not appear, at least fully, until one had survived the first difficult years of life itself, say, in social contract societies, until age 6 or so. This first and most difficult accomplishment is celebrated through renaming rituals, and indeed, the infant and small child in these primordial societies were not generally given a name at all, reflecting the shocking mortality rate at large. Another new name at puberty and after perhaps a month of passage, almost immediate adulthood. Another new name with the marriage bond, and then finally a pseudonym, so that the living might still refer to the now unspeakable dead.

Van Gennep, in 1909, was the first to codify the four-square rites of passage, as he first called them – birth, puberty, marriage, death – and though they resonate with us today, we have made into signage what once were assignations. And there is yet another wrinkle; that selfhood is not identical with one’s humanness, just as one’s person is not the same as one’s culture, one’s individuality not always in line with one’s society. Hence the lazy idiom ‘human nature’, which no thinking person would ever dare to utter in response to what is in fact habitus at most, irresponsibility at worst. There is no singular nature which is human, for to be human is to be a being of both language and history, both of which change, sometimes radically, over time. What remains within our essential condition as Dasein is, on the one hand, the anxiety of our running-along, and on the other, the care which we bring to our thrown projects. The apex of this more telling triangle is concernful being, itself a prequel to the mature being noted above. And if cheap talk of human nature is one common exeunt from the confrontation with both the tradition – a weighty but wholly cultural habitus and historical inertia – and of equal import, that with myself, we hold a number of other pleasant pleasures to ourselves when avoiding the day-to-day dalliance with our ownmost demise.

Nostalgia is perhaps the most insidious of these entanglements, but the base thrill of authority and its exertion is another commonplace instance. In the one, I am free to do nothing and let everything be done for me, as it ‘must’ have been in some imagined social horizon, dimly perceived through dimwitted lens. In the second, I am free to do everything to another, and thence have them carry out my bidding. The family unit is the crucible in which their dark alchemy is carried on, to the detriment of any and all children. In the one, the child is regressed, which is convenient for our consumer economy, and in the second, she is enslaved, which in turn produces complacency for the State. If we adults bemoan the absence of courage in our politicians, we are only ourselves to blame, since we tend to desire cowardice in our children, and some, yet more evil, even take pleasure in it.

So, let us suggest that the selfhood of self might be a way in which to distinguish the appearance, however belated, of mature being in the individual person who has also, through this same process and crossing over this same limen, moved from mere individuation to individuality. Certainly, it is a daunting prospect; this sense of aloneness, without or within the prop of aloofness or even astuteness, but the grace of adult life allows for a number of runs at it. I am unaware of anyone who has made the full hit the very first time, and perhaps it is the case that it is a cumulative affair, and after all, who’s counting? And it is doubtful that one can play the probability game with life-course maturing, as if one seeks to roll a twenty but one has five rolls of the relevant polyhedral to sum such a number before one is out of chances. So, if the looking glass self provides a basis upon which to construct a later selfhood, the elemental anxiety and care of Dasein’s thrownness develops itself upshifted into a concernful being which is the conscience of this selfhood experienced as mine ownmost compass. The cardinal directions have been exposed for what they are; if meritorious aesthetically or ethically, they are not so much thoughtlessly heeded but at least noted as benchmarks, but if they are hollow, their idols are toppled through the sheer and simple withdrawal of our specific idolatry of them. No God can exist without believers.

The question of ‘believing in oneself’ too has been adulterated in false adulation. It occurs most commonly in hortatory manuals that describe in lurid and very material terms what the ‘good life’ is supposed to be, and to be about. One has ‘arrived’ when one attains a certain status, both in one’s professional field of expertise, in one’s purchase of esteemed real estate, through one’s trophy spouse, or even in smaller instances such as the auto one drives or where one takes a vacation. All of this sounds very 1950s, but is it truly the case that we have left these markers behind us? I would hazard rather that even the more recent in-group status-seekers have their own versions of ‘arrival’, whether feminist or queerist, transist or ethnist and so on. And what of the non-European non-binary person driving the German SUV, a common sight in any urban center. Like the creationist who also drives a similar vehicle, seemingly unaware of the essential contradiction this embodies, or blithely able to ignore it, the post-colonial culture critic, through their frontage and their rewritten self-esteem, is nevertheless a novel participant in the same sources of the self which had given all those cultures ever without a conception of the self an almost ontological pause. One might proffer a simple slogan here; ‘The West is evil but by gods I want to be Western’.

In one’s own way, of course. And in working towards this renewed self-interest, the non-European will inevitably encounter the same existential challenges we ourselves have come to know so well. In adopting a self-conception, the traditional cultural suasions of kinship and tribe drop away. The entanglement here is the same one Europeans endured several centuries ago, and also explains in the fuller part the regressive temper and backsliding tempo of immigration societies; those whose ancestors left Europe never underwent the maturing their newly estranged relatives would, not unlike when a native of Paris visits Quebec and is bemused by the fact that there, the Francophones speak as if it were still the 17^th century. All of those peasants and religious fanatics thrown up on indigenous shorelines the world over! Is it any wonder that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound found solace in Europe, only to reject it through a neo-Catholic recidivism for the one, a Neo-fascist recidivism for the other. Yes, Europe has grown stale, comfortable, weak-kneed and smug, but perhaps the perduring subsistence of the querying and querulous Cossack, as well as that of the adolescent and absolutist Yankee will provide for the best of Western thought a cracked mirror, wherein it can identify the fissures of its own latter-day revolution.

Might it not be the same thing, writ small, for the denatured yet over-nurtured self? We each of us can stand for querying, for another to question our oft-drab druthers, just as we might be enlightened, once again, by all those who did not cross over the first time. If so, if we can step aside from all that we feel we ‘need’ to maintain both our status and our esteem, we might then discover the threshold to mature culture is much closer than we would have surmised. We might indeed begin to understand that to be fully human is not to rely on any rite of passage but to have become one’s ownmost movement of being, engaging the fusion of horizons whilst engaging in concernfulness. To know this would be to know the history of Being itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Identity Fetishism

Identity Fetishism (the objectification of echoism)

In over-identifying with the generalized other, the echoist sacrifices at first self-interest, as does the traditional altruist, but also thence the very self, if the pursuit of the other’s needs and desires overcomes the one who so pursues. The echoist is commonly seen as the figure who expresses personality traits opposite to that of the narcissist, though it is not correct to assume that this latter always acts in their own best interest. The narcissist is, after all, blinded by his own blind loyalty not to the self as he actually is, but to an idealized selfhood into which he has placed a fallible reality. The echoist, on her part, denies that the self either has needs at all, or, more usually, places these needs below those claimed by the other, giving them a lesser value. The danger for psychology as a discourse when using these Greek ethical constructions is that, aside from their original caveat against extremities – the golden mean or moderation in all things was a Greek mantra – that the best kind of personality holds within it a balance of self and other, which is a mere technical manner of stating that a neo-Christian selfhood is the newer ideal. Not the Christian in the original, and more radical sense, for the neighbor figure is after all the ultimate altruist. He is, as I have stated elsewhere, simply the libertine of compassion.

Not so the ‘balanced’ self, which identifies with the generalized other as if this abstract and very much collective presence is expressed in now this individual before me, now that. Such a middle road, the fairway between La Scylla of the echoist and the Charybdis of the narcissist, and thus the fair way to adjudicate between one’s own needs and those of the other or others, always as well denies the selfhood as it is. It is a personalized way of doing the same to the world as it is. For in gifting oneself to the other, we do generally gain our own desires, be they having to do with public acclaim, a sense of personal vindication, a veneer of the virtuous, or being a model citizen, in no order and perhaps also in toto. Augustine is himself cautious about self-sacrifice, not due to Jesus becoming the Christ through so enacting it, but rather because for lesser beings, it would be a challenge to sort out one’s intents. Are we truly selfless in our actions? Did we actually put the other before ourselves? Do we rather seek to become an echo of the savior; to ‘borrow status’, to use a sociological turn of phrase.

The narcissist seeks all such things, and in spades. In this, he is by far the easier to identify, and perhaps somewhat perversely, to identity with as well. He is unsure of his own person and thus desires to build around it a persona, the bastion against self-doubt constructed of that same anxious architecture. A persona is, however, still a more authentic expression of the lack of selfhood than is the fullest leap into the generalized other. A persona, though a mask, yet must be carried by its wearer. Not so otherness, of course, for it is irruptive, if rare, and especially in modernity. Not so the Other, capital ‘O’, which is alien and we would suggest, generally incomprehensible even if fully present to our senses bemused. But the case is different when it comes to echoism. This otherness, generalized in G.H. Mead’s sense that one has by a certain age internalized social norms and is able to exemplify them in one’s day to day or quotidian conduct – something which the over-identification with specific guises of the generalized other ironically allows one as a person, and even as a citizen, to forego – is not taken on as one does a costume of oneself, as in narcissism, but is rather slipped bodily into as if one were able to simply up and transfer one’s being into a ready-made vessel. Anyone who has adopted for themselves a form of identity politics has indulged in this fantasy.

This is why one might suggest that there has been an objectification of echoism. The classic echoist, whom one might recognize casually as a ‘doormat’ or even a masochist, gears herself into the needs of singular others, usually serially and repetitively. It is these persons who are at most risk for domestic abuse, for example. The echoist internalizes the sense that she is of little value, or that her only value is in being a servant of another, aggrandizing his needs if he has no merit, or, if authentic value is present, then aiding his genuine quest. Either way, the echoist denies the self. It is a pressing weakness of the genius that he demands an echo; first from a person, then a community, and thence from the world itself. When Mahler consulted Freud in the Netherlands in 1910, the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams had recently appeared and its author was by then as world-famous as was the celebrity composer and conductor. Aside from uttering the expected ‘what a meeting of giants, wish I could have been there’, we can more seriously remind ourselves that no archaeologies of selfhood, no high-flying hermeneutics, no ambitious analyses were involved. No, Freud simply told Mahler that he was being a prick, hmm. For Mahler’s marriage had been shipwrecked by his demand that Alma, once the hottest young woman in Vienna and an aspiring composer in her own right, should utterly sacrifice her own needs and desires to his superior gifts. And as challenging as it would be to compete with a Mahler, this was manifestly not what Alma was trying in any case to do. Freud told Mahler to instead aid his estranged wife’s quest, and ‘who better to do it’, for Pete’s sakes. More deeply and consistently, to take his mate’s needs as seriously as he took his own. Note to self, and dear reader.

Alma was neither echoist nor narcissist. But then again, neither was her husband. So, what comes out of this historical vignette is both an illustration of the problem of identifying just exactly where our selfhood lies, especially in relation to others, and also, by extension, where might we find the place or the space wherein our best self resides? For many today, these questions are too challenging to confront in any authentic manner. Hence the mass objectification of echoism as a parallax to the much more individuated construction of a persona. Statements such as ‘I am a person of color, a trans-person, a proud boy, a Christian “first”, a liberal, a conservative, a survivor of the residential schools, a Holocaust survivor, an abuse victim, a revolutionary, a woman, a man’ and a myriad of others, if held to be front and center in even casual conversation and in one’s political opinions, if taken to be the defining characteristic of one’s selfhood, are all decoys, meant to help one avoid the anguish of being a self, and short-circuiting the essential relation between anxiety and personhood. With all the patent irony of modernism, it is psychotherapy itself which plays upon these projections. And even if we place our faith in the analytic process – which involves a gradual unmasking of persona in order to confront the authentic self in all of its patently fragile mortality – we must, in the end, also abandon the wider conception of faith as well.

But what of the second term in our title? Speaking of faith, the fetish item, ethnographically, contained the Mana of some otherwise amorphous and animistic force. It might be the famed Churinga stones of the Australians, it might be the disembodied artifacts pinned into the shaman’s mesa in Mexico, or yet the ‘figurines of the Virgin Mary’, to borrow from King Crimson. Marx lights upon this conception and realizes that in capital, it is the commodity which now is seen as ‘Mannic’, excuse the obvious pun. Part of the object’s ‘surplus’, indirectly linked to the broader economic conception of surplus value, lies in its ability to transfer the consumer’s desire by objectifying it. The ‘finest’ marques, such as Ferrari, have mastered not the marketing of self-indulgence, but rather the ability to place the person in intimate association with the thing, as if the driver of a legendary auto is direct kindred with the shaman and their traditional fetish. Certainly, when I drove an expensive Jaguar just for fun, I felt a kind of augmented power, as if the prosthetic was mimicking an extramundane quality, something that the shaman’s tried and true trickery also mimicked. I also felt that the big cat was a mere extension of myself, and not just of my body, but rather of my very being.

And this is what the idolaters of identity also seek. In their absence of selfhood, they desire to deny their very existence as human beings first, as historical beings, as beings endowed, by evolution or otherwise, with both reason and imagination, and as cleaving to a very much mutable ‘human nature’ which is not, and has never been, one thing, let alone the one thing they have, like a long line of crucified simulacra, hung themselves upon.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Wider War on Personhood

The Wider War on Personhood (is a form of auto-genocide)

“You will not forget that the stress laid on the writer’s memories of his childhood, which perhaps seems so strange, is ultimately derived from the hypothesis that imaginative creation, like day-dreaming, is a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood.” (Freud, 1957:182 [1908]).

The last poet and the last human are one and the same. This, Freud notes at the beginning of his essay ‘The relation of the poet to daydreaming’, is what the writers try to assure the rest of us. In the writer, however, the heart of the child remains active. A child’s beloved is his playing selfhood, what an adult would call a persona. But a child is not yet a person in any holistic sense. Under a just law, she must be treated as if she were a fully cognizant person with all of the attendant rights such a legal entity possesses. But in day-to-day life, the fuller responsibilities of being and adult must be treated rather as a becoming; as something that is gradually developed and introduced, just as we adults become inured to the sense that death will at some point complete our own being. This ‘ownmost death’ is the culmination of the self as a thrown project, as a being-in-the-world, but it also represents the end of personhood and indeed, the return of a kind of persona. Each of us traverses the space between childhood, wherein the self is not easily distinguished from other selves and personae rule the child’s fantasy worlds, and dying, wherein the self experiences a diminution; in short, a regression.

Kindred with the oft logistical dependence and loss of autonomy aging and dying promote, various aspects of our being retreat into what by then are the murkiest memories of authentic existence as dependent. This is one of the crucial differences between actuality and authenticity that a human being can know, and this kind of knowing is quite intimate, and ironically perhaps quite personal, even if it is that very person who is failing. The aged are not children, but they generally must be cared for as if they are, and are so once again. So, there is in fact a double regression at work: that occurring to the person in question as she ages, and that happening to those around her, the caregivers, family members, friends and lovers alike. This community is regressed into the much more-narrow role of parenthood, whether as a paid professional health-care worker or as an intimate. The latter ‘sign up’ for such a role more or less tacitly, taking the vow of ‘sickness and health’ either formally or informally. The former expect that their vocation, at once noble and degrading, will include such caregiving and perhaps see themselves as heroic, even though their quest is routine, even otiose. What these others share, those both intimate and professional, is the experience of the objectification of being – the self brought low by failing mechanism – and thus also the foreknowledge that they too will one day be similarly regressed. All the care for others matters not, counts for nought, in this knowing.

If we have in the human arc a kind of faux circle, moving from the authentic pre-personhood of the child to the very much non-personhood of the dead, it is more understandable that vestiges, charades, trysts, and echoes of this existential frame resonate throughout the rest of our life, that in which we are more or less fully functioning adults with the usual suite of obligations and perhaps even some status here and there. The juvenile role-play of sexual burlesques, the desperate bullying of the authoritarian parent, the desire to repeat experiences first had in youth, which can easily become a compulsion, and the fantasy of projection even adults may indulge in – though with different avatars and icons than has the child; the thirteen-year old whose heroine is Swift may well become the thirty-year-old whose hero is Trump, for instance – all attest to the powerful force the imagination has over the worldly selfhood. Yes, the self is in, and thus is in possession of, the world as it is. But the imagination transcends this ‘isness’, and places before the willing senses another world, the world as it might be, even the world as it could be. This is the world of fantasy and projection, and that it often occurs to us as partaking of the visionary, rather than merely in the imaginary, constitutes its tantalizing hook.

Thus regression, even if the hallmark of aging and dying, is always available to us as a kind of auto-homicide, for it involves, at least for the moment, the death of the self. But what if entire cultures engage in this kind of regression? And further, what if such a culture, as expressed in a society or in a politics, willingly compels itself to undergo mass regression? This is, we will suggest here, what is occurring, and in a global fashion, in our own day. Freud recognized the incipience of such a crisis when he comments that it is the nation-state that takes the lead in regressing adults into children; nations and their leaders treat citizens as menial, mediocre, and misbehaved. This is so, we can add, because not only does the state represent the religion of modernity, it does so by way of ancient mythological themes. The state possesses the pantheon of godhead, in its various ‘ministries’ – and why else would such departments carry this hold-over nomenclature hailing from the premodern period of pastoral care and missions? – and performs the same function, and as often as not, with the same unction, as did the religious institution. And if it is the case that only in a theocracy are women and children enslaved by violence, in our pseudo-theocratic politics, we nonetheless enslave ourselves.

But the state is hardly the only regressive force present in modern culture. The vast popularity of fantasy fiction based upon both narrative and media targeted at children is also a case in point. We behold a regression in literacy of all forms; cultural, historical, textual, psychological. The comic-book legends, the cartoon heroes, the cardboard cut-out live action characters, mimic and mirror the manner in which we ourselves play out our oft-conflicted social roles. Can the mother and the professional co-exist in one person? Can the father and the recently marginalized male do the same? What of the dutiful daughter and Electraic lover? And speaking of such, what is our duty? To one another, to society, to the state, to culture? It does appear that any kind of authentic and autonomous selfhood could not bear any such burden. But instead of asserting all the more prodigiously, and with a truer heroic courage, that very selfhood, what we observe is a personalist retreat from personhood in imaginatively constructing new forms of gender and even divisions of the person in what the psychoanalyst would surely have called mild psychosis. It is somewhat reasonable to argue in return that the sovereign self of the Enlightenment is itself a fantasy, and thus all attempts at shoring it up, including those psychoanalytic, are in their own way, creations of the imagination alone. I would suggest in response that the purpose of such a self-conception rests in its service to that very imagination; its freedom, its creativity, its curiosity, even its nobility. Most of all, the authenticity of selfhood, in the face of forces of regression arranged against it, speaks to both myth and reality in a unique manner. It does so by bringing legend into life, fantasy into reality.

Instead of constructing persona, foisting upon the mature self a premature regression or, for some purposeless souls, never exiting childhood at all; instead of acceding to the state or to the low-culture industry alike what is most precious about human existence by becoming only what these institutions demand of their overlapping but so seldom competing markets; instead of puerile attempts to avoid the existential narrative of happenstance birth and unknowing death, both of which occur to mine ownmost self and for my experience, to no other, rather we must resist the wider war against personhood by reasserting, if not the sovereignty – a term deliberately used in the 18^th century as an antidote to the regent who, in the Ancien Regime was the only ‘person’ who existed in such a social form – then both the autonomy and the authenticity of singular selfhood, undivided by either social role performances externally or made schism by self-inflicted role-playing internally. It is a feature of successful propaganda that its audience take on the work of ideology as part of their own life-vocations. This ‘internalization’ is made possible by the simple and basic processes of child socialization. All of us are ripe, as it were, for indoctrinations anew. But the very fact that such efforts are made, and at such cost, in desire of compelling each of us to regress ourselves in the face of our ownmost humanity tells us that the default setting, if you will, of that selfsame human being is not regression but rather progression; we evolve ourselves through phases of life, we are beings who are forward-looking and future-seeking.

Adults made children once again are easier to control politically, easier to vend to as consumers, easier to manipulate psychologically, easier to ignore. Children made adults present grave challenges to both market and state, for they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, between myth and world, between self and other. If we like to say to ourselves, ‘well, no adult wants to be treated like a mere child’, then it is high time to make that aspiration into a wider ethic, instead of paying it personal lip-service in the effort to assuage our conscience – which cannot be regressed if and once formed at all – that our personhood is not truly at risk, and it is all fun and games after all. That conscience will, over time, find it unacceptable to be masked over by a mélange of role, phantasmagorical and social at once, and the murder of selfhood will attain its own wider form in the auto-genocide of culture itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was a professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.