When mass culture grows reflective it ruthlessly quantifies the self and hence obliquely admits that there is no self. Quantities are perfectly substitutable and perfect substitution can be read as compassion, not only because there is nothing to distinguish you from the other, but because there is a pervasive anxiety associated with the threat of a non-existent or purely formal identity, and compassion, or more correctly just the intention towards compassion, is a way to resolve this anxiety. The emphasis on ethics and identity, in its new purely declarative form, is a reaction formation against the absence of deep identity glimpsed in the mirror of truth. At an earlier period the locus of truth was in transcendental subjectivity and since truth is an overriding value this lead to a certain antinomianism, a sacrifice of life on the altar of a higher value - the figure of this was the artist-philosopher. When everyone is now an artist-philosopher antinomianism no longer works; the locus of truth moves back out to the other, now understood in purely horizontal terms as the mass itself, and the transcendental subject again collapses into the natural subject, morality returns with a vengeance. What used to be the rigour of self-transcendence now becomes the sublimity of the death-wish.