One longs for freedom from the struggle to merely survive and from the vulnerabilities of the flesh, but also from the sheer blunt ending of life and consciousness. The self-conscious mind cannot fathom ceasing to be; it thirsts after the immortality and freedom from the limits of embodiment it can conceive. The psychological way to have such freedoms predates technological effort: invoke them by telling a story of an alternative reality in which they simply are true. The corruptible body is actually incorruptible spirit; the temporal personality is immortal soul in its pilgrim journey through incarnation. Immortality is then not a goal to be sought in the future but one’s true state all along.

Personal wealth above a certain level can only serve symbolic needs. A prince’s real personal needs are no greater than a pauper’s. Beyond the satisfaction of those needs, his or her wealth will either be tied up in possessions that cannot be enjoyed by society at large, until or unless they are bequeathed back to the community, or will circulate as capital only within a restricted investment environment, moving essentially between the pockets of the rich. The classical argument that this flow will eventually reach the masses in some significant way is at best a myth, contradicted by common sense and statistical fact: wealth trickles relentlessly up.

Both technologic and economic optimists presuppose a one-way interaction, between subject and object, of unrestrained use of the world and of others. Feedback from technological manipulations is allowed to affect only the type of knowledge of the object that is useful to further control, while the knower remains untouched. Expertise grows, sinisterly, while the expert does not. This is why technological progress outstrips wisdom, which is the sadly lacking ability to distinguish the merely possible from the genuinely worthwhile. Feedback from the policies of economic globalism similarly does not reach its hermetically sealed steel-and-glass-tower protagonists—or their shareholders—except through highly filtered statistics coming over the wire or in glossy annual reports.

The obsession of Western media with sex is in direct proportion to the disappearance of gender as a profound cognitive division of labor. Just as consumer choice is the trivialized version of individual expression and real political choice, so is sex in consumer society the trivialized version of access to the perceptions of the other gender. But in patriarchal culture, this is a one-sided affair. Women have gained free access to masculine ways, while deeply feminine perceptions are discouraged in both men and women. The unisex mind is in essence the masculine mind. Grounded in the genderless, though masculine, soul and the genderless Creation by a masculine God, the Western mind found in the Renaissance cosmos a new plaything suitable to masculine interests: the universe no longer a garden but a machine to tinker with and harness to profit. Thus Illich points out that, just as neutral matter and energy moved through abstract space and time, so neutral capital flows through economic channels and neutral libido animates the genderless body. What is lost in this eager rush to so-called objectivity is the perspective of feminine intentionality or values. In a masculine world it is far more the feminine sensibility which embodies and conserves the sense of life’s mystery. The feminine bears the values considered humane and civic, in opposition to the rapacity of an economic warrior elite and its arms industry. The masculine world is frankly too much with us.

All power comes down to the power of mind to decree its independence of the body, to rule its own proper kingdom. This is what marks the passion for technology as idealism in both the normative and descriptive senses, and gives it a religious, even fanatical, flavor. Men are virtually driven to become “as the gods,” creating from scratch their own artificial world. And that is a timeless world in which they already rule, in thought long before its technological fruition. At its core, this dream bears the promise of eternity and omnipotence. This is far from hyperbole, though not so far from blasphemy. While dreams of ultimate power are the clichés of science fiction and horror, they are also the unconscious motor of male-dominated culture at large.

Though serving as a model of nature, mechanism is unnatural by definition. It is the very thing nature cannot produce. This is because the machine is an isolated system and a product of intention and top-down design, whereas in nature there are no isolated systems and no designer: the natural world is found, not made. Furthermore, intention is a byproduct of nature, not (as idealism holds) the other way around. There is therefore considerable irony in the fact that the machine has been adopted as the very plan of nature; that organisms are regarded as natural machines; that even the cosmos as a whole continues to be regarded as a vast machine or (lately) a computer. The obsession with mechanism chases its own tail: the machine concept, abstracted and idealized from experience with natural systems, is projected back upon nature as the organizing principle behind the very life and consciousness that creates the machine concept. But far from being a reasonable model for understanding nature, mechanism is, in fact, the very opposite of nature. Mechanism and nature are disjunct in the way that mind and matter are, dualities in both cases resulting from an imposed way of looking and acting. Mechanism is proposed as the means to control nature—including human nature—but nature does not consist of isolated systems controlled from the outside, and creatures are not machines that have been programmed from the top down.

The moral sense is an internalized guide to the expectations of the group. It concerns the compatibility of behavior with intuited, self-evident, and supposedly absolute truth. Ethics, in contrast, has more to do with self-consistency, based upon consciously accepted precepts. In that, it resembles law and the notion of formal proof in mathematics. Ethical principles, like democratically legislated laws, are norms or conventions of behavior to which people have agreed, for whatever reasons; whereas moral notions involve belief in the intrinsic validity of such principles. Good and evil, divine decree, or other moral sanctions are often called upon to justify ethical principles. Unfortunately, ethical and moral principles usually require a convincing metaphysic to underwrite them—the threat of hell or karma, for instance. We prefer that our relationships to one another be regulated by an absolute order of things above us, and independent of individual will or whim. But a conscious ethic must reverse this chain of command, so that collectively we agree to principles that serve the universal good.

While science is ideally a dialogue with nature, technology is far more a monologue. If technology inquires of nature, it is to better control it. The attitude of inquiry is kept subordinate to the intention to harness physical reality toward fixed goals. The feedback of nature in response does not penetrate to the core of the inquirer, but is deflected and redirected to further advance purposes that remain unquestioned. Communication is one-way, homeostatic.

It confounds one to ponder just what the felt qualities of experience—the greenness of trees, sweetness of sugar, pleasure of orgasm, or burning of pain—have to do with the blob of gray stuff inside one’s head. It is too enormous a leap from the circuitry of brain cells to the personal spectacle of experience, which one is ill prepared to make even in the age of neuroscience. The brilliant Leibniz could not conceive how the brain as a mechanism could give rise to subjective experience. Many philosophers and scientists even today cannot, and the Mind-Body Problem is a wilderness in which we are still wandering. I believe this is partly because we continue benighted with romantic notions of our own idealized being as subjects, on the one hand, and with simplistic idealizations of matter, on the other. In other words, we are victims of the subject-object split we study, being ourselves tied in the Gordian knot we attempt to unravel. In part, also, the concept of mechanism is at fault (or else arose from the same defective thinking). The systems with which Leibniz and Descartes were familiar were hopelessly simple. A modern computer is unfathomably more complex than a clock; yet even it is nowhere nearly as complex as the lowliest organism—a single cell. Nor is the organism an isolated system, an artifact. It is no more like a computer than like a clock.

Mechanized economics, like mechanized farming, is an incursion of masculine thought into traditional bottom-up ways of subsistence, with their traditional gender balances. This incursion recapitulates the attacks upon civilization by warrior-dominated nomadic tribes, which wreaked havoc upon early agrarian societies. The notion in capitalist economics, that maximal profit should be extracted from one resource and reinvested in another exploitative enterprise, parallels the nomadic principle of overgrazing one area and then moving on to the next. This is our genetic heritage, the prevailing mindset of conquerors who once pillaged agricultural settlements from horseback and now rove the world in business class to pillage consumer and labor classes and what is left of nature.