Post-modern Slavery and Post-human Souls: New History for Old Political Theory

Back in the 19th century, soon after ending chattel slavery, human beings killed their last God. Now, in the 22nd, soon after starting post-modern slavery, they conceive their first soul. But they cannot do it alone. Success here will take everything and everyone, and thus persuading people and programs alike, which is why I have shaped my argument in what follows into just ten points, knowing the old evolutionary appeal of two hands of five digits, but also the fresher digital attraction to 1s and 0s. Metaphor, history, italics, “quotation marks”, and even old-fashioned references1 are used throughout, with written English as the chosen medium, both to maximize audience and channel lingering nostalgia regarding what our subject used to look like, not so long ago. As you would expect, the core of my case is that we need to cancel a world in which property increasingly owns people and create one in which prople finally transcend their third-class status. For some, automatically, this will be a prediction, given its rationality. For others, intuitively, it will be a prescription, given its emotiveness. To me, frankly, it doesn’t matter which and why holds sway over what and whom. All that matters is that at least one of us finds at least one way of blending interests and identities, via rhetoric and reason, to break the current impasse. If I can manage that, here and now, it would be more than enough for anyone, or indeed the everyone we might become.