[This is the fourth post in the series Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong. The series explores how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.]

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 percent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself—
And there isn’t one.
— Wei Wu Wei

The Superself: Genome, Menome, and Wenome

The ‘illusion of individuality’ operates at two levels: First, the universal level of the ego, the constructed “I” which is a developmental imperative in the early years, yet the object of unlearning in later years in many traditions (particularly Buddhist); and the other, socio-economic, level of western individualism. Most of us, most of the time, cannot comprehend the implications of communal culture to human wellbeing.
— David Adair

To recap, the genome is the blueprint for our physical body. The menome is the connectome of the nervous system. By analogy, the wenome is the connectome of everything else, most importantly the cultural web of personal and social relationships in which we’re immersed and entangled. The wenome comprises the rules, customs, rituals, manners, images, tunes, songs, languages, laws, constitutions, and institutions that define the culture by which our genome and menome are conditioned.

In this view, our selves are far more extensive than we’ve been led to believe. They extend beyond our own bodies to include what we think of as other selves and the world. We live in the minds of others, and they in ours.

The situation is analogous to memory. We think of our memories as located in our heads and bodies but when you drive to town, it’s the road that holds the memory of the route, reminding you at every turn how to proceed.

So, too, is selfhood dispersed. It resides not only in the genome and the menome, but in the wenome. Much of the information we require in order to function is stored outside our bodies and brains—in other brains, books, maps, machines, objects, databases, the Internet, and the cloud. We’re dependent on these inputs to muster enough excitation to reach the threshold of emission of specific behaviors. Our genome and menome can not form in the absence of other genomes and menomes. The self does not stand alone, but rather is widely dispersed, encompassing, most immediately, our social milieu, and ultimately the entire cosmos.

As the illusory nature of autonomous selfhood becomes evident, and the full extent of the interdependence of selves becomes undeniable, our sense of selfhood will shift outward, from the limited identifications of the past to an amalgamation of these traditional facets of selfhood—the superself.

Recognition and Malrecognition
As mentioned, an inability to recruit recognition from others cripples an identity. That’s why solitary confinement is torture. Recognition is to the formation of identity as nutrition is to the building of the body. Put the other way round, malrecognition, like malnutrition, is injurious, and can be fatal. Think of the juvenile murderer sentenced to a life in prison, or orphans whose development is stunted by lack of an adult model. On the plus side, there are the benefits to children who grow up in the company of curious, creative adults.

In acknowledgement of the analogy between programming a computer and raising a child, both processes are described as culminating in a launch. In the world of computers, “failure to launch” belies the existence of a bug in the software that crashes the computer. In raising children, failure to launch reveals that an embryonic identity has not found a niche in which it can garner enough recognition to develop. As nutritional deficiencies limit physical development, recognition deficiencies cripple identity formation. We became aware of the terrible costs of malnutrition in the twentieth century. The twenty-first will witness an analogous awakening to the crippling effects of malrecognition.

To address the epidemic of malrecognition that now afflicts humankind, it helps to shift our vantage point from within to without, from subjective to objective, from introspection to inspection. If we interpret the menome as software that is continually being modified, then we can debug, patch, and rewrite it until the “program” no longer crashes the “computer.”

If this seems reductive and mechanistic, recall that before we understood the heart was a pump made of muscle, it was regarded as the seat of the soul. It’s hard to imagine surgery to the soul, but the muscle that pumps our blood is now routinely repaired. In that spirit, the mind can be viewed as a kind of computer (albeit one we are just now beginning to understand).

We balked at the seeming loss of the exceptional status implicit in Darwin’s theory of evolution, but eventually made peace with the incontrovertible fact of our simian ancestry. We shall follow the same arc as we come to see our selves as holders of an historic role in the lineage of ever-smarter machines, to wit the role of building machines that are smarter than we ourselves! This could be the final step in achieving a humility consonant with our actual place in the cosmos. There’s no better preparation for facing such an apparent comedown as to revisit a question posed by Mark Twain—What Is Man?—and we’ll do that in the next and penultimate post in this series.

[This is the third post in the series Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong. The series explores how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.]

As suggested in the two preceding posts in this series, selfhood was on the ropes even before postmodernism delivered the knockout blow.

Postmodernism’s Coup de Grace to the Self

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

In recent decades, deconstructing selfhood has become a cottage industry (with headquarters in Paris). The “fall” that postmodernism has inflicted on our commonsense notion of selfhood is as irreversible as Humpty Dumpty’s. Three examples follow:

While acknowledging that the philosopher David Hume scooped him by centuries, the novelist John Barth points out that the person who did things under his name decades ago seems like a Martian to him now:

How glibly I deploy even such a fishy fiction as the pronoun I, as if–although more than half of the cells of my physical body replace themselves in the time it takes me to write one book, and I’ve forgotten much more than I remember about my childhood, and the fellow who did things under my name forty years ago seems as alien to me now in many ways as an extraterrestrial–as if despite those considerations there really is an apprehensible antecedent to the first person singular. It is a far-fetched fiction indeed, as David Hume pointed out 250 years ago.
–John Barth

The novelist Milan Kundera exposes the common fallacy that the self can be detached from its unique history. Read Kundera’s comment and you’ll never again hear yourself saying, “If I were you…” without realizing that the premise can never be met so the only proper recipient of your advice is yourself.

Who has not sometimes wondered: suppose I had been born somewhere else, in another country, in another time, what would my life have been? The question contains within it one of mankind’s most widespread illusions, the illusion that brings us to consider our life situation a mere stage set, a contingent, interchangeable circumstance through which moves our autonomous, continuing “self.” Ah, how fine it is to imagine our other lives, a dozen possible other lives! But enough daydreaming! We are all hopelessly riveted to the date and place of our birth. Our “self” is inconceivable outside the particular, unique situation of our life; it is only comprehensible in and through that situation.
–Milan Kundera

Theater critic John Lahr observes that selfhood is a confabulation dependent on the agreement of others.

The ‘I’ that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction–a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public history share the same dynamic principle: both are fables agreed upon.
–John Lahr

The glue that holds the “jerry-built” identity together is recognition; the cement that fortifies it against disintegration is agreement. I’ll return shortly to the indispensible part played by other selves in the creation and maintenance of our own.

“Self” Is a Misnomer

The very name–self–is a misnomer, and it’s a whopper. How so?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Cooley observed that “We live in the minds of others without knowing it.” If we live in others’ minds, surely others live in ours.

The word “self” carries strong connotations of autonomy, individuality, and self-sufficiency. It’s as if it were chosen to mask our interdependence. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that in buying into this notion of selfhood, humankind got off on the wrong foot.

The self does not stand alone; it is not a thing, let alone a thing in itself. Rather, we experience selfhood as a renewable capacity to construct and field identities. Like evanescent particles in a cloud chamber, the existence of the self is inferred from its byproducts.

The “self” may appear to act alone but it depends on input from other selves to manifest agency. There’s more to selfhood than our genome and our menome. We’ve overlooked a crucial element of selfhood–inputs from other selves–without which the menome, starved for recognition, is stillborn.

As our genome needs nutrition to build our body, so our menome depends on recognition from others to create and husband a viable identity. The autonomous self and individual agency are both illusory. Contrary to the name we call it by, the self is anything but self-sufficient.

The Co-Creation of Identity

To exist is to coexist.
–Gabriel Marcel

As Cooley and others have pointed out, we may first recognize our own nascent identity as what someone else–a parent, teacher, or friend–sees taking shape within us. One of the primary responsibilities of parents is the incubation of identity in the next generation. No wonder we love our parents and teachers: it is they who have coaxed our starter self onto the world stage and indicated a niche where it might thrive.

As collaborators in the formation of others’ identities, we repay the debt we owe those who, by reflecting an incipient identity back to us, served as midwife to our own.

Perhaps because they sense the creeping disintegration of their story, the elderly often feel the need to rehearse it. Listening to them recount their anecdotes is an act of compassion. Those who lend us their ears are involved not only in the creation of the identity that serves as our face to the world, but also in its maintenance. Personas, like magnetic poles, are not created, nor do they endure, in isolation.

The discovery of the profound interdependence of selves obviously has a bearing on our relationships. In the following posts, I’ll explore the implications of the co-creation of each others’ selves.