Let us now hear the words of the prophets that are written on the subway walls:

"It’s your body and your life." Put them into a metaphysical container and let whatever there is of you that somehow isn’t your body or your life carry them around. Hoard them, cherish them, at a distance—they are your property. For if they weren’t property, they would be worthless.

"Be professional"—that sacred petty-bourgeois status symbol. Remember, in the game of life, everyone is an enterpreneur. "You’ve got to assert yourself"—in other words, bully the weak and sneak past the strong. Social Darwinism sounds so much nicer when presented as individual psychology.

"Take charge of your life and be who you want to be"—i.e., what everyone else thinks is impressive with a few of your own quirks mixed in. "Don’t let anyone limit you"—i.e., don’t let them play down your ability to conform to the social ideal. "You can look great and have a successful career"—thus increasing the value of your body and your labor-power at once. "But you can’t do it for anyone else, you have to do it for you!" Who is this you that you are supposed to do it for, and how does it differ from the acting-you who is commanded to be so eager to please you? For if they are the same, "you do it for you" is tantamount to saying nothing.

But no explanations are forthcoming; for at this point everyone applauds the quoted lines, moved, apparently, to hear the "wisdom" of our times in such concentrated form. Why?

It is not merely a question of ordindary petty-bourgeois humanist individualism—under which social reality is still acknowledged as primary—but a degeneration of much more recent and extreme vintage. I refer to the post-sixties Cult of the Self.

It is post-sixties in the truest sense—that is, it resulted from the fact that the 1960’s had not produced what was expected from them, that people were upset and disillusioned by this, but that they did not want to know what was really the cause of the gap between their expectations and actual events. Therefore, a scapegoat had to be designated, ridiculed, and cast out. That scapegoat was the ideal personhood towards which modernists had been striving throughout the twentieth century, a mixture of hero, prophet, hedonist, messiah, and child king, graced by the added transformations of the times: that special blend for which sixties counterculture was known but that had remarkably influenced even "square" society, incorporating social criticism, utopian anarchism, wild imagination, and above all else, profoundly honest witness to the mad state of social reality. All these came together to reinvent the ideal personhood of modernity, now seemingly on the verge of being actualized at last, although nowhere visible in any concrete form. This New Man (people tended to be rather sexist then) had plenty of living exemplars, dotting a whole generation, but none of them was remotely adequate to his quasi-divine specifications. That did not kill the New Man, for he made himself powerfully felt without being manifest; and on his shoulders rested hopes for a revolution which could be found nowhere else. But just at the moment when he was presumed to be undergoing a painful and psychedelic birthing he was aborted, and an ugly little monster was put in his place. That monster was the Cult of the Self.

It was then whispered to the nurses that the original baby would have inevitably burned the hospital down, considering his overtly anarchic disposition and the heat waves emanating from Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, and that a bullet had been narrowly dodged by all. Thereafter fragments of New Man duked it out with the Cult for more than fifteen years of rebellion, vigorous but increasingly devoid of a cause, until finally cynical acceptance became the trendy youth attitude towards authority, everyone started talking about how overrated the sixties were, and the Cult of the Self won out. This was the beginning of what I call the Interregnum, a society-wide holiday from the oppressive burden of critical thinking; this era, from which we are barely emerging, began in the latter eighties, shortly before the end of the Cold War, to which the sea-change was later glibly attributed. From then on, anyone who exemplified the New Man was treated with the utmost contempt—"We don’t want you any more, haven’t you heard?"—while those who conveyed the impression that they fitness-trained and manicured their own toes, then sucked on them, but all in the interest of commerce, became society’s new lions.

"People tried that ‘love each other’ business back in the sixties, but we all know it didn’t work out. You’ve got to love your own body, or no one will give you the love you need for a healthy and fulfilling life. You work hard at your job—you’ve got to work hard on yourself, too. You deserve it!"

And the applause is defeaning within the isolation of the crowd.