But perhaps one of the most bizarre and stunning corollaries of the addiction to the nihil - cause or effect is unclear - is the denial of self. Possibly it is both cause and effect. That is, it may be that the denial of self is both a cause and a consequence of the addiction to the grand néant, the great nothingness, that is now the prepossessing idol of the marketplace in our culture. We cannot assign it as the sole cause. The failure of logic, masquerading as the failure of philosophy, has to share the honors for this bright ovum of voidness. And an aggressive materialism and an equally aggressive atheism are undoubtedly not only present at the conception, but also share in the adulterous generation, since they too point toward a perfect nothingness as the grounds and center of their 'belief' systems.
            But, then, it is perhaps just as likely that the denial of the self is a consequence of the ineluctable undeniability of the self. On the one hand, the self is everything. Nothing in our experience is other than our experience. Even our ignorance is our experience of our ignorance. 'Matter', as we have it, is empirical - that is to say experiential - and not necessarily objective. Only objectivity seems to certify its putative external validity, but objectivity is an experience and not a fact. The elitist savagery of the objectivist is the sure sign of this.
            Solipsism is the great hovering shadow over the whole of 'the modern', even if we define the modern in its largest purview, as 'post Renaissance'. And Hume did not resolve the issue. Undoubtedly, a brilliant logical technician like Bertrand Russell could not see beyond Hume's Machiavellian toils of rationalism. But that, of course, is because neither Hume nor Russell was a legitimate empiricist. Take away Hume's aggressive rationalism and his foundationalism of 'numbers and matters of fact', and his appeal to immediacy becomes an appeal to solipsism itself, where neither immediacy nor inference is self-validating. We have no basis, then, for distinguishing between 'fact' and 'dream' or 'delusion'.
            But Hume points to the logical inference of the experience of objectivity: only the external is 'real'. The logical inference, but not the actuality of the experience, since the savagery and elitism of the objectivist derive directly from the self-validating force of the experience of objectivity; that is to say, from the validating force of the experience of objectivity that falls on the self. But, of course, the experience is the experience of objectivity - the experience, ostensibly, of the validity of the external. The subjective validation is therefore - for the average conceptualist, the usual modern thinker - a validation of the self as objective: an essential abnegation of the self.
            Not only is this the ground for a great deal of contemporary abuse - on the part of people who have had a greater or lesser experience of objectivity - it is also undoubtedly the real root cause for the generic, cultural denial of self. But the cultural denial of self, of course, differs qualitatively from the actual subjective psychology. The subjective bifurcation of the self is the source of the addiction to the nihil, the overt expression of the unacknowledged psychological quandary. But, while the addiction enforces the external 'philosophies', the projective denial of self as a cultural phenomenon has its own peculiar aetiology, as well as ramifications.

            The first thing I would point to is that, while there is an almost universal intellectual 'agreement' on the denial of self, there is absolutely no grounding intellectual document for it. Hume may be cited. But he is never read in his entirety, except by specialists, who take the given interpretations for granted. And he is no longer a cultural commonplace. I doubt that many people cite the behaviorists, although the behaviorists, and B. F. Skinner in particular, had significant influence in producing this effect in the last intellectual generation or two. Students and some scholars may leap over the intervening turmoil and point to Nietzsche, but such a reading of Nietzsche emasculates him. He stands at the headwaters. The 'over man' is a supreme manifestation of the individual, even if the concept begins to bury the individual as common individual. Nowadays, whichever side the interpreter falls on, we always get less than half of Nietzsche.
            Paradoxically, as I have already suggested, some of the latest grounding sources - or source rationalizations - for the present denial of self are part of the wonderful antinomies emerging from neo-Marxism.

            Marx and Darwin are the two empowering centers for all the present philosophies disestablishing the self.

            Darwin, of course, is the darling of the materialists, and especially of the materialistic atheists. But what is it in Darwin that appeals to them? Is it his detailed justification of evolution itself? Of course, the materialists hold that the comprehensive exposition, first of the alteration of species and then of a specific 'tree' of evolution - to wit, human descent - justify everything in Darwinian theory, and explicitly 'natural selection'. Undoubtedly, the observational detail is a bravura scientific performance. But what it justifies is evolution, not natural selection. Both the 'creationists' and the materialists and atheists seem to make a point of deflecting us from this distinction.
            At the time of Darwin's theory, Lamarck proposed an alternative to natural selection, the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics', i.e., that modifications could be a response to the environment, rather than the predatory survival of random variations. But, of course, in the late Victorian intellectual community, with its not so covert reaction to a saccharine popular Christianity, 'reality' was 'nature red in tooth and claw', a direct debunking of the 'pathetic fallacy' of the Romantics, the assumption of any affinity between 'nature' and the human. Therefore, obviously, Lamarck had to be wrong. He was buried under an avalanche of opprobrium specifically conflating evolution and natural selection.
            Of course, the beginnings of modern genetics seemed to validate the idea. If the gene, eventually isolated in the DNA, is the sole bearer of heredity, only the random splitting of the gene - random variation and natural selection - could justify evolution. But the latest research begins to carry us back to Lamarck. It began with the decoding of the genome. Perhaps we have forgotten, because the point disappeared so rapidly from the popular media, but when the gene was decoded it became clear that there was not enough viable genetic material in human DNA to justify the full range of human characteristics. Now the research shows that DNA is only a piece of the hereditary puzzle. It was known that active proteins in the cells carried the 'message' of the DNA in the development and maintenance of cells and tissues. But now it has been discovered that active proteins can block or modify the DNA, not only attaching themselves permanently to the molecular strands, but also being replicated through heredity. The 'gene' it turns out - given that name as short for 'genetic material' - is not limited to the double helix.
            And Lamarck's thesis is once again back on the table.
            One hesitates to say that this also brings back the possibility of a teleological vector in evolution, since the adjective suggests things as speculative, at this point, as the 'randomness' of 'natural selection'. But it disallows the universality of the 'randomness' that the materialists and atheists assumed to be irrevocably 'proved' by Darwinian theory - the randomness they use, in turn, not only to disallow the self, but consciousness and value as well.

            The Marxist influence is more subtle, but, as a consequence, more pervasive and difficult to isolate. However, an appropriate characterization may bring it to focus directly. Basic Marxist social and economic theory (as opposed to revolutionary Marxism) has become, in the western intellectual world, a grounding 'scientific' or 'materialistic' rationale for selfless social concern. The aggressive collectivization of intellect as well as polity, in revolutionary Marxism, becomes a thesis tacitly validating not only the abnegation of the self as the highest social, political and intellectual act, but also the total rejection of the self as a precondition for apprehending 'reality'. Only the collective is 'real'. The self is an artifice, a Romantic hallucination, created by the delusional monism and foundationalism of the Idealists, who tried to found reality in the self. The fact that Idealism was the consequence of the full developmental process of western philosophy and the only meaningful answer and possible gateway out of solipsism is neither here nor there.

            And, of course, once we deny the self, we deny the global explorations of the self, our only meaningful center and the only ground of our experience of validity - and therefore the sole 'object' that might provide us an alternative to today's mentality. But, apparently, we would rather engage the world, analytically, through endless short threads of the most mundane and stultifying logic, justifying their collective meaninglessness and aimlessness by a core thesis of randomness.