• You are making a pretty risky decision, aren't you, in accepting the end of a Robert Altman movie as a depiction of reality? There's no basis for doing that.

• Though this is evidently still a draft in transition, it seems to me that I ought to say something about its travel thus far. The essence of this essay and the first one has been a call for the recognition of the contingent and the irrational, rendered in a sufficiently loose and associative rather than logical style to create some discomfort in readers. Methods of construction less rigorous and classical, in which the style shares the contingency, irrationality or incoherence of experience can be made to function effectively in larger works, but—as you have commented yourself—they don't work easily or well at 1,000 words.

* On the substance of your draft as it stands, I have two comments. The theory of the contradiction of self requires a unitary self to be contradicted. I think it's therefore at best unestablished and almost certainly wrong as stated. Crowd psychology has been a subject of great interest since Gustave Le Bon. I've mentioned before the impossibility of being a cultivated lawyer today without a good knowledge of Freud. In this case, the work is _Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego_ (1922). What puzzles me about the theory advanced here, aside from its choice to proceed as though no one else had ever thought about these issues before, is that the theories it resembles in emphasizing the irrationality of the crowd (from Le Bon to Edward Bernays) conduce to a belief in the inevitable necessity of propaganda: they lead directly to modern PR and they are, to put it softly, not very democratic in their political implications. So far, you haven't dealt with that except by ignoring the issue and those who have raised it.