While the classical zero-sum game of scarcity and competition is essentially antisocial, it is not nearly as divisive as one might expect. What holds overdeveloped societies together is the common interest of all sectors to maintain their global position with respect to other societies they exploit. While capitalism propounds “freedom,” “democracy,” and “consent of the governed” to appease the masses both at home and overseas, in truth it is parasitic rule by the rich, with tongue-biting assent of the would-be rich. The peripheral awareness of this double social truth, which can never be directly confronted without appearing seditious, is no doubt in part responsible for the widespread cynicism in America with regard to politics. Which, of course, only aids those who hold actual power.

From the mechanist perspective, the causal system of nature appears as a World Machine we inhabit, of which our bodies are mere parts, subject to its mechanics. Nature controls us even internally through the body’s genetic conditioning. Though we attempt to get outside nature and re-create it literally as machines we can control, the more this project succeeds, ironically, the more the human world as a whole actually becomes an engulfing machine. While mechanism is the instrument and symbol of human empowerment, it is also the greatest threat to democratic distribution of power—and ultimately, perhaps, to human hegemony on the planet. In one sense, mechanism is the means to become as the gods, even to create artificial persons; in another sense, it is the nemesis of the ideals of freedom, personhood, and transcendence the gods personify. The reason behind the separation from nature may be to create heaven on earth, but life in an environment that has become a literal machine promises to be a new kind of hell.

While it may have begun the other way around, fashion is now the preoccupation of the fairer sex. The focus of men’s compulsion to idealize has shifted from their own bodies to those of women. Moreover, female fashion is about male status; while men may care less about the woman’s social standing than women care about the man’s, they are concerned about their own standing in other men’s eyes. The adorned woman is status symbol for her man. This might include her social standing, but by no means needs to. It is not how she is viewed in her own right that counts for him, but rather how she is viewed by other men as a sexual object—his possession—which reflects not her wealth or standing but his. This male objectification of woman serves to contain the feminine within the bounds of male culture and definition. That way, he knows just what she is, and her power over him is limited to her wiles and sex-appeal. It is the woman’s subjectivity, her empowerment as an agent, that is resisted, contained and minimized through objectifying her body and limiting her social power. The male’s more conservative approach to his own appearance reflects his insistence on subjective being and power, projecting bodily presence rather upon her. The near invisibility of the man in the gray flannel suit emphasizes his desire to be all subject and no object; and he wants the woman to be the opposite. The woman in patriarchal society can only claim her subjectivity through the man, or in traditional ways he approves, such as motherhood, which will not challenge the political structure of male supremacy. In modern, democratic, post-sexual-revolution society, women are free to become virtual men, though women’s economic power remains fixed well below that of men, at a magically persistent ceiling.

As a result of the policies of globalism, there is a universal widening poverty gap and a decay of civil society in both developing and developed nations around the world. Every country with a national debt is, after all, a “debtor nation.” Homelessness is the counterpart in developed countries of third-world poverty. Within developing countries, the beneficiaries of international aid have mostly been business elites instituting practices that further disenfranchise the poor. The same is true of the new “aid” provided by global capital in the form of loans by such agencies as the IMF and the World Bank. These are loans that already impoverished developing countries cannot hope to repay. What they do accomplish is an effective takeover of control of the economies of such countries, which are thereby conscripted into the transnational program of unrestrained movement of capital and goods across borders, with unrestricted access to cheap labor. Third World governments are effectively extorted into submission by the threat of calling the loans, with the result that these countries lose the very right of self-determination the West so loudly vaunts. Local public policy can no longer intervene on behalf of the poor in the form of labor laws, unions, minimum wages, fair trade regulations, or environmental legislation.

How I relate to my body is of key importance, reflected in how I relate to the world of “body” at large. If my body is my personal attendant, sports vehicle, entertainment center, and pleasure dome, why would I not relate to other objects in the same way? For, the basic dualism lies between self and world; this body is just the first tier of outerness and otherness in relation to “I.” Every form of egotism, subjectivism, self-indulgence, addiction, sexual and economic exploitation, manipulative attitude, substance abuse, and obsession with power likely stems from this root opposition of self and world. And what a different world it would be if this self were seen as a usurper, a fiction, a dream, or perhaps merely a detail of language! But the self, of course, is utterly convinced of its own existence. Descartes doubted the reality of the world, but never that of his self.

Whole nations can be dedicated to false values, to keeping a privileged position gained at the expense of others. Western society, and America in particular, attempts to build heaven on earth. The sad irony is that this paradise, with all its religious and humanistic ideals, remains profoundly self-serving. As the West retreats into private entertainments, from the unsavory realities it has created, its new feudal order condemns millions to virtual peasantry in the name of an ideal world for a new aristocracy, this time without the reciprocal obligations of nobility.

The idea of downloading one’s mind into a simulation is motivated by the desire for freedom from real embodiment, for which is substituted controlled experience in an artificially benign, if unreal, environment. This substitution presumes, of course, that one remains in a position to specify the virtual reality. But this involves a paradoxical dilemma. Once I become nothing but a subprogram in a computer, how will I control the simulation it runs? How else but with my body will I prevent someone, who has remained “behind” in physical space, from controlling my simulated environment in a way I do not like? What if I change my mind and want back into real-time where I can reprogram the simulation or exit it? On the other hand, if somehow I retain that control, will I not always be dogged with the knowledge that the simulation is an illusion I control? One cannot have it both ways. Reality is real precisely because it is beyond “direct” manipulation; real experience passes through a feedback loop, which includes a real environment that is external and independent. To know that one lives in an illusion, however cheery, would itself be a form of suffering. One can ignore such knowledge (as many addicts do) but one cannot escape its real consequences.

How the universe really is, apart from anyone’s looking, is presumably how it looked before any observers had evolved to observe it. We may rightly assume that the world was in a different state three or four billion years ago. But the question here is not change over time, but the meaning of “appearance” in a universe without observers. In trying to picture the unpicturable face of the world-in-itself, we have little recourse but to mistake it for its appearance to us. One is forced either to take the map as the territory or to remain silent—a dilemma that frequently results in the circular reasoning of what I call the “problem of cognitive domains.” The external world appears to subjective consciousness as an image constructed by the mind to reflect the external world, which means the latter then appears recursively to be an image constructed by the mind. The endpoint of the causal chain is recycled as the beginning, so that something in the human cognitive domain is unavoidably taken for the world-in-itself. There may well be a definite way the world is when no one is looking. Quantum physics has cast some doubt on this most basic premise of realism; but the question is too deep to be decided by a generation or two of physicists. We can be certain, however, that there is something wrong with the notion that objective reality is simply how it happens to appear in our cognition—or in that of any particular creature or generation. In any case, science has created a modern myth of origins, a history of life and consciousness arising within matter and culminating in Western civilization’s scientific worldview. This mythological creature chases its own tail. The scientific description of reality presumes to disrobe nature and raw experience to reveal the objective structure underlying appearances. But from the point of view of common sense and everyday life, it appears rather that science dresses the flesh of the world in its own abstractions. According to the story, we are the product of the history it tells; but the story—which reaches back long before our existence—is the product of our modern imagination and telling. Humans were not there to witness the origins of the world, and their latest, most cherished accounts are but a few decades old, out of the billions of years in which the drama itself may have unfolded. Storytelling is an ancient, entertaining, and essential human interest. It is central to the search for meaning and truth. But no cosmological account should ever be confused with reality itself, or with the ideal of truth.

Whether factory employee, office worker, consumer, or corporate shareholder, the significance of the unisex individual is that the society of mass production and consumption requires standard components and procedures. Consumerism and the unisex society follow together from industrialization. Moreover, all individuals must be essentially alike as governable social atoms. They must be functioning parts of the political-economic machine—reachable segments of the market whose vote, with the ballot and the dollar, must be cultivated by a universal media mill in which commercial and political propaganda merge. The tastes of men and women must alike be turned toward consumption and investment. Since love cannot easily be commodified, it must be trivialized as sex. Since family and local governance resist this structure of control, they must be eroded. Society must be atomized to yield the maximum number of consumers, and centralized to maximize control over them. In many North American cities, the same magnificent old houses that were once supported by a single white-collar income are now subdivided into several apartments or suites, each of which can scarcely be supported by two incomes. The ideal of consumer society would have everyone living in isolation, devoting all of their leisure time to spending or in activities that lead to spending, such as television watching and internet shopping. At the same time, consumers are encouraged to invest their savings as well as to spend them, in both cases putting more money in the hands of corporations. Isolated, we may labor not to express individuality or pursue creative purposes, but to have access to standard consumer ideals: car, house, entertainment center, new computer, second car and second house, boat, vacation package, etc. These are the off-the-shelf, clichéd goals and life plan of modernity. The vernacular values of homemade entertainment—whether making love or music or conversation together—are subversive in the consumer-investor society because they are not commercial products, do not enter into the economy, and generate no profit or taxes. He or she who is original is marginal, an economic dropout, a traitor to the system.

We are here because each and every one of our ancestors, back to the beginning of life, made at each turn exactly the choices that led to a life that included having offspring who in turn had offspring. The complexity of the human organism is in direct proportion to the convolutions of this evolutionary path; to the millions of invisible roads taken or not taken toward this simple goal of continuance; to the amount of trial and error that went into refining us as sophisticated replicators.