The separate self is the sense of oneself as an individual fundamentally divided from other people, from nature, and from the divine — the "discrete and separate self" that 📝Charles Eisenstein places at the root of every crisis in 📝The Ascent of Humanity.
Eisenstein's claim is that this self is an illusion — a story so deeply assumed it feels like simple fact. From it follow the defining structures of civilization: a science that studies a world it stands outside of, an economy built on competition between separate interests, technologies of control, and an 📝ego forever defending its borders. The book argues that the converging failures of these structures are evidence that the underlying story is false.
Against the separate self Eisenstein sets a larger identity — the connected Self, continuous with the world. "It's not that we shouldn't be selfish," he writes, "it's that we misperceive the self. When the other is not an other, then to be good to an other is to be good to yourself." The whole movement from an 📝Age of Separation toward an 📝Age of Reunion is, at bottom, a change in where the self is felt to end.