Individuals are a lethal fiction. ‘Selves’ are local expressions of constellations of relation in time and ecology. In space and light. So, too, ‘minds’, ‘souls’ and persons. Where fictional overlays replace the orienting contexts of intelligence and relation, it is impossible to have ‘persons’ or ‘individuals’… especially ‘rights’. What we get instead are symptoms masquerading as their opposites in language, culture, law, commerce, education, medicine, language itself… and ‘persons’.

Most people are not really people until there is a context that ‘personates’ them. Prior to that, they are … usually… a lot of very confused thoughts about why such contexts do not exist or complex opinion–trees over relation, identity, value, meaning and intelligence. That’s the absence of an individual or a person. It’s a thought-ghost that doesn’t have any idea how to be anything other than a relatively passive spectating critic.

Contexts imply and invite the meanings of separation, unity, gender, intelligence, progress, wrongness, and so on… within them, individuals and pods respond, mimic and comply or restructure that.

Authentically intelligent contexts allow the possibility of personation and individuation. Fictional contexts replace that with depersonation and impersonation.