The most profound change going on at the end of the 20th century may not be the post-Cold War reshuffling of political and economic power but the psychological transformation taking place among people everywhere. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist and author of numerous books exploring future trends.

As we proceed into a global civilization, the most profound change going on may not be political or economic but psychological -- the rise of a new notion of self. Gone is the single identity based on deep and permanent connections to a single location, class, nation, job. In its place is a more mobile, multi-centric and changeable sense of self.

Social scientists are now busily studying and describing this change. Some demographers, for example, describe the worldwide increase of what they call "multi-locality" people as migration, not stasis, becomes the norm and information technologies enable migrants to keep their ties to families and countries of origin. "Individuals, families and communities are no longer rooted in one place," notes one report, "but neither are they placeless. Rather, people have multiple linkages to multiple places."

Even people who don't move are likely to form different sets of identities. "Multiphrenia" is the term coined by psychologist Kenneth Gergen to describe the consciousness of contemporary people who are, as he puts it, "saturated" by the experience of life in a media-rich civilization. Gergen says that the bewildering variety of messages we all get through television, print and contact with other cultures furnish us with a variety of messages about who and what we are. "For everything that we 'know to be true' about ourselves, other voices within respond with doubt and even derision. This fragmentation of self-conceptions ... invites us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an 'authentic self' with knowable characteristics recedes from view."

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has identified a new type of personality he calls "the protean self." The protean person is unafraid to change and goes willingly through many metamorphoses in the course of life. These may be stressful to the person who is going through them and bewildering to others, but they are not simply signs of pathology or weakness. Furthermore, this pattern of life extends to all areas of human experience -- people may change their national identities and political ideologies, their sexual orientations and even genders.

Then there's the impact of life in cyberspace. Some heavy computer users live rich on-line lives, become members of "virtual communities," communicate with others using identities that they invent for the purpose. Another kind of interpersonal experience has been created, with new roles and options. Some computer hookups are taking a critical look at their policy of allowing any customer to have up to five "screen names," which users can change at any time. This allows any user to throw away an identity that begins to have a bad reputation. "When people find out that Uncle Jim is on-line cruising for teenagers, or that HotGirl4U is actually a boy," notes one report, "those identities vanish, and the people behind them reemerge under different names."

Psychologists are deeply divided over what all this means. Some regard multiphrenic, protean people as somewhat disturbed and prescribe work toward a more integrated, stable sense of self. Other theorists and therapists celebrate the new internal pluralism, see in it a new model of mental health. Gergen quotes approvingly a poet's statement that "Identities are highly complex, tension filled, contradictory, and inconsistent entities. Only the one who claims to have a simple, definite, and clear-cut identity has an identity problem."

While this debate rages through the psychological world, students of politics are doing some parallel rethinking. In recent decades, domestic politics in countries such as the United States has been dominated by "identity politics." Now another intellectual movement has emerged, calling itself "post-identity scholarship." In a recent book entitled "After Identity," proponents argue that the discourses of identity politics tended to "obscure the differences among women, among gays, among blacks, and others, and to ignore the significance of multiple allegiances, communities and experiences."

As borders melt at all levels, people are figuring out different ways to live and different ways to think about who and what they are. The end of the 20th century may well see the death of the individual and the birth of the multiple person.