Efforts to solve the problem of human suffering through spiritual, technological, and political ideals have usually been subverted by greed of one sort or another. We have learned to distract ourselves from fundamental issues of equity and justice through the mythologies of the market place and the delights of consumption. Globalism is wrecking the planet, killing off species by the hundreds of thousands, creating exaggerated disparities of wealth and well-being, motivating terrorism and reducing democratic institutions to a farce, and threatening to replace life itself by artifice. This is in addition to the ongoing menaces of nuclear or biological holocaust, climate change, or other human-induced disasters to which we become inured as the price of “progress.” Smooth-talking advocates of development wheel and deal to get a piece of the action while it lasts, despite the costs to future generations. None of this will change significantly under the present system. A central obstacle to change in a system whose measure of all value is money, and whose solution to all problems is economic growth, is that it has always been possible to buy off potential malcontents by corrupting them further into the system. Deep change can only take place if the system itself is rejected, along with the values underlying it.

The Tin Woodsman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow could well serve as cautionary figures in a posthuman allegory. Elaborating on Baum, we might imagine the Tin Woodsman as a bionic conversion—a man who has been modified into a robot through transhumanist technology. (Perhaps some homeless brain was informationally transferred into a mechanical body.) In the Oz story, he seeks to recover a “heart”—that is, a relationship to other beings based on biological kinship and the emotions deriving originally from embodiment. His mind was downloaded but not his heart, nor presumably his sex, which were somehow lost in translation.

The Cowardly Lion has been genetically engineered, but something is missing in him too: courage. He is designed to be physically superior, but it is the moral loftiness associated with the real effort required to overcome one’s limitations from within that is lost. He lacks conviction and self-confidence because he knows his body is an artifact, a mere tool of someone else’s purpose. Since he did not self-create, nor evolve naturally, he lacks his own intentionality, purpose, and reason for being.

The Scarecrow is made of generic stuffing, the abstract universal material that is the ultimate engineering dream and the ideal of nanotechnology. He could represent the quest to rearrange matter according to whim, and to create life and intelligence from scratch. He is made to look like a man, but the resemblance is superficial; he doesn’t even fool real crows. This symbolizes the folly of the top-down approach, and the fallacy of simulation. What the Scarecrow lacks is a brain: a real, fleshly one, indefinitely complex, which can only evolve from the bottom up. The Scarecrow was created to simulate a human being, to provide the illusion of reality. But, as with Pinocchio, it is authenticity itself that is lacking.

Two centuries ago it was still feasible to believe that the cosmos was created by a personal God. From a Creationist perspective, the laws and constants of the universe, the difference between something and nothing, and why there is anything at all are matters of divine intention, rather than the inherent nature of the creation itself. Today, however, science favors naturalistic explanations of why the cosmos exists, with its particular laws, and why it exists rather than nothing. The emerging picture may include an infinity of possible or actual universes very different from this one, most of which might be too simple, too small, or too short-lived for life to develop. One thing is clear: only a universe of a certain size, complexity, and longevity could harbor intelligent observers who marvel at the improbability of their own existence. What is unique about this world is that we are able to live here; and what is unique about us is that we can conceive other worlds in which we couldn’t live. In imagination, naked consciousness may go where it wills. But in the real universe consciousness is clothed in brains and bodies, and can only occupy worlds that foster these.

Part of the failure of the drug industry to provide a genuine contribution to health care is due to the fact that modern drugs and treatments, like the proverbial snake oil, are designed and packaged primarily to make money and only incidentally to cure disease or promote health. They may do what is claimed, which is most often symptomatic relief rather than cure; but they may also do what is disclaimed in the contraindications and label warnings in fine print. The same tradeoffs and mercenary interest apply in many sophisticated and costly medical procedures, which gain glory and wealth for specialists and surgeons in the name of medical science. An aging and relatively wealthy population is held hostage to the fear of dying and disability, by an obliging medical establishment which promises delay of the inevitable unraveling of life that has been compounded by the debilitating effects of the lifestyle it implicitly condones. Fear of unhealth and death are good business. But the gain in average life expectancy modern Western populations have enjoyed is far more a result of improved sanitation, diet, working conditions, and hygiene than it is of medicine. The spin doctors who vaunt globalism would have us believe that the health and prosperity of the world depend on the operation of large corporations being unhampered by public control. In truth, economic health depends far more on physical health, which is steadily eroded by corporate practices—including the industrial production of food. The medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical puppeteers behind it, would have the public believe our wellness and very life are at the mercy of the ransoms they demand. In truth, responsibility for our health and quality of life remains in our hands, where it has always been, expressed through local political will. If we seem to have lost control over our lives, it can only be because we have allowed power over the common good to pass into private and often distant hands to which we defer.

What distinguishes human relationships from those of other creatures is not the capacity for affection, concern, or even altruism, but the ability to idealize these. This includes idealizing one’s own and the other’s being as personhood, and extending personal affection to a broader group of recipients of moral concern. Personhood is a fundamental category—both descriptive and normative. Like citizenship, the state of being a person has in principle no degrees or kinds or gender, though history is replete with incidents in which whole groups of people are denied this status. Since the human world is composed of people, personhood is its obvious first principle. The concept of personhood, or humanity, is a category that idealizes certain animate objects by imputing to them the interior life that is so utterly different from the objectness of inert things. Human relations understandably manifest the ambivalence and confusion troubling subjective consciousness around the dualism of subject and object. The fact that people are both subject and object is the bane of history as well as of philosophy. Mind-body dualism is an ongoing political catastrophe as well as a mental recreation for mild-mannered scholars.

I would argue that only artifacts—intentional constructs—are truly deterministic systems. This is because they alone are closed, idealizations with a content fixed by definition, whereas nature and natural systems are not. It is therefore somewhat ironic that causality has been associated with determinism, while intentionality has been associated with free will. Free will is only free because consciousness can transcend the determinate content of its own creations. The creations themselves, however, are necessarily finite, closed, and hence determinate. It is not nature that is deterministic, but Man’s thought systems and idealizations projected upon it. It might turn out that nature is deterministic, but only if nature proves to be an artifact, a thought, a simulation. Only, in other words, if nature is unnatural!

I would argue that only artifacts—intentional constructs—are truly deterministic systems. This is because they alone are closed, idealizations with a content fixed by definition, whereas nature and natural systems are not. It is therefore somewhat ironic that causality has been associated with determinism, while intentionality has been associated with free will. Free will is only free because consciousness can transcend the determinate content of its own creations. The creations themselves, however, are necessarily finite, closed, and hence determinate. It is not nature that is deterministic, but Man’s thought systems and idealizations projected upon it. It might turn out that nature is deterministic, but only if nature proves to be an artifact, a thought, a simulation. Only, in other words, if nature is unnatural!

Experience represents the world, not as photography does, but in the way that language does: by symbolic convention. (Significantly, the person of a viewpoint takes its name from language.) And the subjective experience of qualities such as color, smell, taste, touch, and auditory tone emerge from sensory input in a way analogous to how meaning emerges from the inchoate babble of syllables.

If many “labor-saving” devices do not in the end save labor but multiply it, or simply change its form or shift its burden to others, this may be because saving labor or time is not their true purpose, only their rationale in an economy where every claim must be understood in the context of marketing and sales. Truth in the consumer society is what sells, and the practical usefulness of a product or service is secondary to its sales capacity. This is the context in which technology as a whole evolves in our society. Any approach to the wise and selective use of technology cannot ignore this general commitment to the values, lifestyle, and economy of consumerism and the distribution of power which technology serves. Neither technics nor the notion of progress can be understood apart from the growth of the global economic machine, in which society becomes ever more a ghost of its former self.

Industrialization not only standardizes products and production methods, but in so doing changes the nature of the products and of the labor that produces them, while rendering us insensitive to such distinctions. Both trade laws and consumer attitudes look upon commercial products independently of their history, means of production, or genetic composition. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose. A tuna is a tuna, regardless of how it was caught, and a tomato is a tomato whether organic or genetically-modified. A pair of running shoes is just a pair of running shoes, no matter it was made with slave labor. (By such black-market logic, a stolen Rolex is simply a bargain!) In addition to the coercions of language, this kind of thought is a measure of how much the modern mind has brainwashed itself through greed, where the only consideration is the bottom line. Saving a buck by buying the cheapest goods from the cheapest source is the passive consumer counterpart of the profit motive, complementing the corporate drive to demand the highest price and pay the lowest wages, regardless of context or human or ecological cost.