Your view that there is no self is only that – a view. It’s quite common in religions like Hinduism to aspire to a higher self, your real nature. Brushing aside something that millions of people believe in this manner is no different from a corporate mindset. Eastern religions actively encourage seeking the self or one’s own real nature. It would be interesting to know how historically, viewing work that benefits society explicitly is the only kind of work that’s praiseworthy came about.

It would be great to find any society that believed in benefiting something other than the self, first. Then studies could be undertaken. I think you’d have to find an indigenous people untouched by corporate capitalism.

Self is not the endpoint of the spiritual systems you’re alluding to, though. It’s really the beginning. In the West, these spiritual systems have been distorted so that self-actualization becomes the end of the trip. People spend lots and lots of money to self-improve.

I’ve only spent a few years with Hinduism, and only read ten or so of the major texts. But I’ve never interpreted it to hold the aggrandizement of self, the acquisition of material goods, or the quest for personal power as its paramount values.

No doubt we have colonised the self and even gone so far as to sell billions in self-actualisation media.

Self is the union of the construct with the unexamined urges. Self is the process of growing beyond that. Self is being an other unto one.

“Dodi li v’ani lo”

Corporatism is the opposite direction. What we really ought to do is attack Douglas for denigrating the body!

-mason

ps Doug, this is your best book. Easy does it in these vids.

I agree with mason. This is your best book yet. Very timely.
- D.

I recorded your presentation at Bluestocking last week, but for some reason the audio is missing from the tape … so pissed.
I would like to contact you to ask if you have more presentations like that coming up, or if I can get an interview from you.
Thanks

Nicola

I think the way to see it is that “self” is a necessary construction within any sociocultural reality — people have to have have some understanding who they are as individuals and their relation to society at large. It seems obvious that the kinds of selves we have now are products of the consumer-corporate-capitalist society in which they (we) are formed. I agree with what I think Douglas is suggesting — that a better society is likely to have less ’selfish’ forms of self-identity than are produced in our consumer-capitalist way of life.