George Saunders' Theory of the Self:

While mucking around, looking for something else entirely, I found something I like in this article from ole' GS (one of my favorites) over at Amazon.com:

I think the history of human development goes something like this: in learning to survive, it was somehow beneficial for us to posit and believe in this thing call the self. And even though we now know that the self is just a sort of elaborate physio-chemical feedback loop, and doesn't refer to any stable, reliable, "permanent" entity, and that privileging that self over other beings is nutty and harmful and illogical, and that even treating that self as something fundamentally separate from the rest of creation is crazy and indefensible, we are still doing it, because we are still physically predisposed to doing it--we're wired that way. So what I think will happen (what I think had better happen) over the next 1,000 years, is that we will gradually wean ourselves away from the self.

[More GS goodness over in georgesaundersland]