Objectified and disavowed

“The distinctive discourse of modernity is one of prediction and control. In the teeth of severe cultural and moral crises, we continue to use it as if it were the sole alternative to sullen silence…We predict the weather and try to control inflation because we are not the weather and not inflation. They are objects other than ourselves, objects we want to subject to ourselves…Yet the dominant discourse about the future of our society is composed of the vocables of prognoses, projections, extrapolations, scenarios, models, programs, stimulations, and incentives. It is as though we had taken ourselves out of reality and had left only objectified and disavowed versions of ourselves in the universe we are trying to understand and shape.” - Borgmann, A., 1993. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, University Of Chicago Press., p. 2