Abstract

In this chapter, I fill in the sociological theory of the self that grounds the concept of the “I” as a grammatical illusion. I introduce the idea of humans as always, everywhere, and already social. We are the most radically social of what biologists refer to as the eusocial species, the highest level of animal social organization. The chapter deals with how society constructs individuals as social matrices, the recurrence theorem (which explains our ability to sustain our self-concepts as we move across different social settings), the problems of programming, free will, and consciousness, the evolutionary context of the social self, and the limits of the Golden Rule. I also introduce the concept of dissocism, the inability to “see” the social as a nexus of causal forces (thus making “the social” invisible to large portions of populations across time, space, and culture).