Lynn Phillips - Neuroscience threatens the concept of individuality America is founded on

Seems William Burroughs and the Tea Party crowd have something  in common - who woulda thunk it? This article is by Lynn Phillips in Dream On, one of the Psychology Today blogs.

Are You Not Who You Think?

Neuroscience threatens the concept of individuality America is founded on

Published on August 31, 2011 by Lynn Phillips in Dream On

 

Both Tea Party Patriots and Wm. Burroughs yearn for sovereign selves

Underground magus William Burroughs in his 1959 novel, Naked Lunch, defined heroin addicts the way most of us still do: as creatures in thrall to a foreign invader---junk--- that takes them over and replaces their autonomous selves with a slug-like succubus that lives only to get more junk. Once having identified that nightmarish pattern of enslavement, however, Burroughs began to see it everywhere. He depicted consumerism, government surveillance and free-floating paranoia as similarly invasive and sinister forces---eventually concluding that even language is a virus that subjugates and colonizes the human mind. Culture critic Timothy Melley in 2002 dubbed Burroughs' terror of being invaded and controlled from within an example of "agency panic," a fear that "possessive individualism" ----America's belief in the self-reliant, impermeable self---is being compromised.(1)

Contemporary neuroscientists don't substantially disagree with Burroughs; they simply feel a lot less horrified about abandoning our dearly held belief in the sovereign self. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in his well-wrought popularization of identity science, Incognito--The Secret Lives of the Brain,(2) draws a picture of selfhood that's extremely different than what most of us experience. The Eagleman self not only differs from our current addiction model (free-will-defeated-by-a-disease), but is also a bad fit with the sovereign individual our Founding Fathers imagined as the basic unit of our republic.

Read the whole article.