ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggest a number of quite closely related ways in which, cultural aims contribute to the destructive objectification of individual people and weaken the possibility of their being able to take an effective subjective grasp on the conduct of their own lives and the shaping of their own world. The cultural phenomenon which the author particularly wants to consider in the chapter, because of its special centrality to the theme of objectification, is that of the cult of the machine. The machine culture does us great damage because it constitutes the mythology which prevents us from getting to grips with what ails us collectively in exactly the same way that the individual's personal mythology prevents him or her from even seeing what features of the world need subjective attention and intervention. The machine is a ubiquitous feature of our environment, and is accepted as an inevitable (unquestionable) development.
