Are Objects Also People?

Can you imagine a world in which it is Politically Incorrect to say “Stop objectifying me”?

The retort will be, “Don’t be so anthropocentric. Objects are also people.”

Panpsychism—the idea that everything in the universe has a personality and experiences something like pleasure and pain—is an ancient idea, but one we get to taste anew through Pixar and Disney films which show us worlds of talking cars and singing candlesticks. In academia, pop fantasies are rebranded with highfalutin terms like object oriented ontology.

Whether you agree with panpsychism or not, it’s worth extending the metaphor that objects have personalities and seeing what happens. Perhaps the exercise will serve as a reductio ad absurdum in defense of human distinction. Perhaps not:

• Do things bear traces of “childhood traumas” that need to be “worked through”?

• Are things prejudiced by their use history? Can these prejudices be transmitted “epigenetically”?

• Can a thing experience dysphoria? (“I’m really a hammer, but I’m trapped in the form of a stone”)

• Do things experience “mimetic desire” (wanting something because other things want it).

• Can a thing be lonely?

• What is the good life for an object?