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.

Like other thinking men of their day, America's revolutionaries of 1776 were raised on a notion of self more-or-less as defined by the philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650).  The Cartesian self was conscious, contained, and separable from others. You  thought, and therefore existed. (Eagleman's title, "Incognito" is a reference to Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum") Although the soul, Descartes postulated, resided deep in the brain, body was separate from mind --- it was a gizmo, a machine. Your job---and responsibility---was to train your body to obey your mind as you would a kennel of hunting dogs.

To the best of our knowledge today, Eagleman explains, the self is more like a clowder of cats in a go-cart. It has no center, no "soul," no single steering wheel and no one steering. Certain patterns of neural interconnection make you feel---sometimes very strongly--- that you have a soul, or that you can sense souls in others, but so far experimental findings suggest that having a soul is an illusion, much like our impression that our eyes see the world "as it is."

Your mind, he reports, is made up of several separate systems (including bacteria in your gut) that compete among themselves for your attention and struggle to control your interpretations of data and your actions. No one part of your mind decides which systems will win. No one part defines you.

Predispositions---genetic and epigenetic--- combine with a data bank of environmental interactions to steer you towards behavior that may or may not prove adaptive. Like an addictive drug, your mind makes a lot of decisions for you (things as seemingly willful as "I will now raise my hand,") before it fools you into thinking that you came up with these decisions yourself.

Many scientists and philosophers insist that you do have some self-control, some free will or "executive function" that lets you point your mind in directions "you" choose. But that "you" is still pretty a fuzzy item.

Your 21st Century self is no longer as distinct from other people's as the founding fathers' were, because research shows that most of what you think, feel and know has come to you through culture and upbringing, a web of other selves and bodies of knowledge that reach back through time and without which you'd be a wolf boy or a paperweight. In addition, cognitive manipulators like advertisers and news organizations own a bigger piece of your mind than you know, and influence more of your thoughts than you can know.   

According to Dick Armey's Tea Party Manifesto, "Individual liberty is the unity of purpose that binds the Tea Party movement into a cohesive community." As he sees our situation, a liberal elite in the name of "social justice" redistributes the wealth of functional, financially competent people to dysfunctional moochers and golden goose slayers, gradually replacing a nation of  free citizens with a spineless, swarm of government-subsidized (and controlled) parasites. (3) In other words, liberal "social justice" is not a rational response to humanity's biological and economic interconnection but rather something invasive, addictive and destructive, like Burroughs's heroin.

Looking back reverently to our republic's founding fathers, Tea Party representatives express dismay at seeing individual sovereignty endangered by, for example, socialization of healthcare. Although a universally accessible health system may prevent epidemics that could kill Tea Party stalwarts along with the unemployed or undocumented, the party line is that it is a "reward" to socially unproductive paupers and illegal immigrants.

Individualism, the notion that each of us is king of her castle---a sovereign being, responsible for all her own choices and free to determine her own destiny---while it may describe what we believe, both in our solitary hearts and as a nation, is no longer fully supported by hard science or commmon sense. Hilariously, contemporary neuroscience's notion self is more like our House of Representatives---a fractious gang in debt to competing interests, often pulling in many directions at once while attempting to arrive at adaptive decisions.

What might be fueling the intensity so many of us feel about addiction, government over-reach, loss of privacy, reproductive freedom and many other fears we have about individualism, left, right and in between, is that, here in 2011, "you" simply isn't what "you" used to be, and many of us are having difficulty adjusting our worldviews to new theories of identity. As we each struggle to process the contradictions inherent in our notions of selfhood we resemble players of a popular "first-person shooter," immersed in a game of conflicts and challenges that millions of us play together while experiencing the thrilling sensation of fighting alone.

 NOTES

(1) Timothy Melley, author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Dec 1999) See "A Terminal Case" an essay included in High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, 2002.

 Of Burroughs, Melley writes:

"The characters of his fiction are usually addicted to junk, but as early as Naked Lunch (1959) they are also addicted to commodities, images, words, human contact, and even control itself."

"Rather than accepting the less strictly bordered, and less rationally centered, subject implied by his own representations, he worries in hysterical terms about external invasion and control of the self."

Also:  "This fantasy---the dream of a self hermetically sealed from the external world---is central to the contemporary American logic of addiction..." 

Melley's CV: http://www.units.muohio.edu/english/people/faculty/I_P/MelleyTim.html

It's worth noting that Burroughs wrote in an era whose right wing encouraged fears of communist brainwashing (invasion from within). It was the era in which Vance Packard in his influential book "The Hidden Persuaders," suggested that corporate advertising, while ideologically different, was structurally similar. The point is that agency panic---whether justified or not---is an oft-used trope in American narrative, from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Matrix. Melley lists among agency panic's sufferers David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and the Unabomber!