1.      As countries grow in interdependence, they must grow in their moral responses to the social needs of particular nations and cultures, not the personal agendas or the political dogma or hollow creeds that ignore the needs of the common people! The role of technology plays a vital part in maintaining the stability of these relations, and even more so, the necessity for an ethics of compassion. Bacon's observation that knowledge itself is power equally applies to the wielders of technology today. In his quest for dominance, man must not abandon the moral imperative accompanying these innovations; otherwise, America and its allies will suffer the isolation, condemnation, and destruction resulting from its hegemonic policies. This was Mary Shelley's tragic message for a scientific community that failed to foresee its ethical obligation associated with its growth and development.  Victor Frankenstein's obsession to create life from death blinded him to his responsibility for his creation and robbed him of every emotion, save vengeance, ironically evoking an identical response in the abandoned monster. The consequences of Victor's neglect  sadly costs him not only his own life but the lives of his family, friends, fiance, and the monster itself. By failing to consider the moral consequences of his actions, man reaps its consequent spiritual and emotional loss of purpose.  Yevgeny Zamyatin suggests in We that  technological advances in the absence of ethical constraints reduce a person to a mere cypher, with mathematical equations for answers yet still no "absolute, precise  solution to the   problem of happiness" (Zamyatin  12). Technology without morals eliminates emotions, which are the heart and soul of all life.  In his dystopian satire concerning early twentieth-century progress, Zamyatin says, "I have read and heard many incredible things about those times when people still lived in a free , i.e., unorganized, savage condition. But most incredible of all, it seems to me, is that the state authority at that time--no matter how rudimentary--could allow men to live without anything like our Table [Daily Schedule], without obligatory walks, without exact regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever they felt like it" (Zamyatin 13). In each the government uses the term to maintain its own form of control, not emotional fulfillment. This week, the U. S. President ordered the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to discontinue the use of several words which the Administration felt should not be placed in any governmental document, including the next federal budget.  Two of these  include the words fetus , transgender, diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, science-based and vulnerable; and they are to be replaced with the words or phrases suggested by the Administration. Just as in 1984, when  Big Brother encouraged Symes to create a dictionary  limiting the number of words in order to restrict the people's ability to articulate  concerns which conflict with the Party, so does this recent order raise similar concerns. This information was taken from a National Public Radio (NPR) Broadcast on December 16, 2017. Limiting the use of words limits man's ability to express himself clearly and dehumanizes to the extent of incoherence and inarticulation, a goal to which those in power seek to achieve and maintain.  As Nietzsche suggests in The Genealogy of Morals, "Why stroke the hypersensitive ears of our modern weaklings? Why yield even a single step . . . to the Tartuffery of words? For us psychologists that would involve a Tartuffery of action . . . For a psychologist today shows his good taste (others may say his integrity) in this, if anything, that he resists the shamefully moralized manner of speaking which makes  all modern judgments about men and things slimy" (Nietzsche, quotd in Alinsky 50). In We, happiness is equivalent to having sufficient  food and sexual gratification; in 1984, happiness means obeying Big Brother as a comrade; and in Brave New World, happiness means taking enough soma to remain in a state of euphoria.   In essence, technology without morality dehumanizes and demeans its subjects, leaving them lost  and disillusioned into believing whatever the State prescribes.  As Aldous Huxley maintains, "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." Just as Big Brother dictates the behavior of Winston in Orwell's 1984, John Savage in Huxley's Brave New World, and  Equality 7-2521 in Rand's Anthem, so do current film and literature suggest the same form of terror and control as was employed in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin then, and Putin there today,  all  at the expense of human dignity and worth. In the past months, new reports revealed shocking information concerning artificially intelligent robots capable of thinking, communicating, reasoning and exchanging information from the  cloud, shocking revelations of lifelike robots, one of which made the bold assertion that he  will soon control an army of drones capable of controlling the world by controlling the Power Grid.  This news comes from a youtube site  on CNBC called RISE and is narrated by the robots' designer named Hanson. In another youtube clip, an AI robot named Sophia became the first lifelike robot to attain citizenship, from Saudi Arabia. Ethics is certainly an issue here; their creator-designer suggested  he hoped that within twenty-five years, many homes and businesses would employ these robots at home and at work, a robot capable of obtaining,  retaining, and sharing among robots all history and information learned from the external world, as well as from the cloud.  Hanson also said that within five years,he hoped to have robots as intelligent, or even more so, than humans. Could such robots deprive man of self-expression and autonomy, if placed in the wrong hands?  (CNBC November 2017) Stephen Hawking, in BBC News, December 2, 2014, told technology correspondent   Rory Cellan-Jones that artificial intelligence "could end mankind." Hawking went on to say, "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."Today, NPR reported that Hawking's ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, between thegraves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin (June 15, 2018).  Like Bowman's struggle with Hal the master computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind will inevitably decide whether or not to pull the plug on a sophisticated robot that, like Hal, "was proposing a major change in mission planning, and was therefore stepping far outside the scope of his order" (Clarke 144). As James Baldwin suggests in Nobody Knows My Name, "Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people" (Baldwin 38). In such a case, only a meaningless void remains. We give, love, and forgive because we live; no other standard is necessary, save faith and courage. Abandonment and isolationism today easily manifest themselves in what Viktor Frankl "neurosis on a national level." This posture could further result in behavior associated with paranoia, defensiveness, and aggression. To avoid this scenario, ethics and innovation must be proportionate. As J. A. Froude suggests in Lord Beaconsfield (1890), "If a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life, has been the besetting sin of England for the last century and a half, since the passing of the Reform Act, the altar of Mammon has blazed with a triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases --to propose a Utopia to consist only of Wealth and Toil--this has been the business of enfranchised England or the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife y the wail of intolerable serfage" (Froud 96).  As starvation, civil war, and disease ravage our planet, we must not preoccupy ourselves with notion of progress at the expense of humanitarian concerns. Tragically, Rand's Anthem alone ends with the possibility of optimism. 1984 ends with Winston a victim of torture, betrayal, and electroshock, his mind broken yet praising Big Brother. Brave New World ends  with the suicide of John Savage, and We ends with O's torture in the gas chamber and I-330's surgery to remove his "soul,"  his mind broken  yet believing the the State will overcome because Reason must prevail" (Zamyatin 232). In all four stories, there are lovers  who  make  the conscious decision to place the feelings of their hearts above the demands of the government. Only Anthem ends at this juncture. The other three novels end with their secret meetings, love affairs, and subsequent betrayals. Tragically, the lovers each suffer excruciating torture at the hands of the authorities and as result even betray one another.  In essence, the power and terror of the state crushes  every vestige of freedom in the characters. For more on  the conflict between man and technology,  please go to the chapter entitled "A Pound of Flesh" toward the end of Quest of the Spirit.

   2.       In retrospect, determinism, whether biological, political, social, or psychological, in the wrong hands provides  a dangerous means of social control and dehumanization  These dialectics, as well as political philosophies, must in no way be allowed to denigrate the worth of individual dignity. According to Frankl, "First of all, there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's 'nothingbutness,' the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological, and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free" (Frankl 153). As early as the 1850's, Herbert Spencer recognized the  potential dangers of  applying of natural selection to enormous financial institutions in America, and declared "We are being rebarbarized" (Spencer, as quoted in Paterson 232). In The God of the Machine (1943), Isabel Paterson reveals the absurdity of contradictory terms which are used to support the ideas of determinism. According to Paterson, "But the Marxist terminology reduces verbal expression to literal nonsense  on the basis of fact and usage; this is not obvious  gibberish, nor the humorous nonsense which will sometimes elucidate an intrinsic difficulty of expression or indicate a gap in knowledge, but arrangements of words according to the rules of grammar, in which each word taken separately has a customary meaning, but which in the given sequence, the sentence, mean nothing at all" (Paterson 96). Paterson uses the statement "An isosceles triangle is green" to illustrate the absurdity, as " an example. The words are commonly used separately, but not in combination. Paterson also uses the phrases "roundness of a triangle" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" to suggest the impossibility of either occurrence, as is the term "dialectical materialism." According to Paterson, this latter phrase "posits an inevitable succession of a thesis producing its opposite or antithesis and the fissiparous abstraction reuniting into a synthesis. As nothing in nature does go through any such transmogrification, endless and senseless debate may be carried on by which social relations are said to exhibit in various phases a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, each credited with producing the opposite." The absurdity even proceeds to a higher level  when Communism, for instance,  fails to reach the withering away of the state, and then rationalizes that this phase, since it has not yet occurred,  is only yet to come (Paterson 96-97). Paterson then addresses the absurdity of the term "class war" by saying that that is is "physically impossible for 'labor' and 'capital' to engage in war" because "capital is property" and "labor is men." In this case, only "riots" and  "destruction of property" would result because wars are always fought with a union of capital and labor (Paterson 97-98). In essence, deterministic jargon creates an unreal scenario culminating in an illogical consequence, frequently justifying an unjust act in the name of the greater good. Class wars, as Paterson avers, never end in progress.  The loss of lives from wars cannot be termed good in any respect; only its designers or survivors live to superimpose a moral interpretation upon it. One might call the error of deterministic logic as an eschatological fallacy which justifies any act of fear or cruelty--messianic monsters trusting blindly in an unfounded future world, an unknown and terrifying reality. Walter Rathenau, famous Jewish-German politician-philosopher, commented on the cruelty of Russian Communists' methods in the following passage: "We cannot use Russia's methods, as they only  and at best prove that the economy of an agrarian nation can be leveled to the ground. Russia's thoughts are not our thoughts. They are, as it is in the spirit of the Russian city intelligentsia, unphilosophical, and highly dialectic; they are passionate logic based on unverified suppositions. They assume that a single good, the destruction of the capitalist class, weighs more than all other goods, and that poverty, dictatorship, terror, and the fall of civilization must be accepted to secure this one good. Ten million people must die to free ten million people from the bourgeoisie is regarded as a harsh but necessary consequence. The Russian idea is compulsory happiness, in the same sense and with the same logic as the compulsory introduction of Christianity and the Inquisition" Ironically, as Paterson observes, the idea of determinism never took hold in the days of early colonial America, but in Europe, as result of Galileo's and Newton's cosmology, Europeans applied the theories of natural law to science, politics, history, and social studies, all of which sadly contributed to the rise of dictatorships in the early and mid-twentieth century (Paterson 144).  Torn by wars, plagues, and revolutions, Europeans  leaned more toward  a fatalistic approach to life; whereas, in the United States, the Puritan work ethic, the ideas of rugged individualism, and Manifest Destiny played a greater part in the nation's development, and as result, Communist and Fascism did not as easily fall on fertile ground. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,  expresses a similar disdain of deterministic ideologies in The Cycles of American History (1986). According to Schlesinger, "Ideology is the curse of the public affairs because it converts politics into a branch of theology and sacrifices human beings on the altar of dogma. The simplifications of doctrine are forever at war with the complexity of reality" (Schlesinger 67).

   3.    In The God of the Machine, Paterson primarily addresses  threat of  Fascist, Nazi, and Communist determinism in the 1940's  which she describes as the result of lack "structure" in a rising industrial society, a condition which creates a "death-trap" (Paterson 117); but today the problem of man the individual versus  artificial intelligence poses an even more significant threat to mankind's survival. Paterson used the automobile metaphor to explain the need for  legal guidelines and controls. she  suggests that advances in technology cannot exceed the protection of individual rights. "But the advance could not be made until a structure had been erected to accommodate the mechanism, including the type of control which is used in motor mechanics by the various applications known as safety devices, whether brakes, governors, or stabilizers. The essential feature of such application is that they do not and cannot take effect until the actual need arises. They are set to operate only if the motor and transmission goes wrong" (Paterson 103).  Today there exist no legal guidelines or controls in the field of artificial intelligence, a scenario which again could easily constitute a threat to individualism. Sadly and ironically, Paterson alludes to Henry Adams who attempted to draw a correlation between the Virgin and the Dynamo as metaphors of change. Paterson infers that  during the Middle Ages the Virgin  represented  the possibility of man's moral transformation through grace and forgiveness,  twentieth century man looks to technology for solutions. In the former, conversion came from within the heart of the person, but in the latter, change occurs in the workings of the machine, in an external environment far beyond the control of the the individual, in a dystopian, fatalistic ,or deterministic world of terror, power, and victimization (Paterson 156). Man looked to the Virgin for comfort,  hope,  and peace, on earth and in the next life. Today, man looks to the technology of artificial intelligence with fear, apprehension, and uncertainty. Both are sources of power, one for good, and the other,  yet to be determined. The Virgin offered love and security, but today  scientific progress evokes more dread than promise. Paterson also equates the energy of creativity and productivity with the individual freedom in the United States with America's leadership role throughout the world. According to Paterson, "What happened was that the dynamo of the energy used in human association was located. It is in the individual. And it was withdrawn from political interference by a formal reservation, along with the means and material by which it can organize the great world circuit of energy. The dynamo is the mind, the creative intelligence, which our Bill of Rights  and the treason clause assert to be free of political control " (Paterson 130). Unfortunately,  the uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence  could easily lead to a class of robots void of morals or any sense of compassion, very much like the disastrous consequences of deterministic ideas which have contributed to the decimation of peoples, races, and nations. In The Coming Victory of Democracy, Thomas Mann expresses a similar sentiment when he suggests that morality is a key issue the progress of nations. Writing in 1938, during the rise of Nazi Germany and the threat of fascism in Europe and America, Mann avers, "It is not an accident nor a mere question of politics  but one of morality if Russia aligns herself herself with the big and little democracies; England, France, America, Czechoslovakia. When peace is endangered, socialism and bourgeois democracy belong on the same side, for the feeling for peace is an internal problem It is a human quest of broadest ethical significance, the quest of humanity for its own development" (Mann 42). 

 4.         Quest of the Spirit attempts to reclaim that human dignity by emphasizing man's spiritual rather than his material significance. In his quest for power and dominance, man has created a spiritual void within himself, which in the absence of a moral or divine compass, fills him with a sense of loss, alienation, and despair. Quest analyzes literary works of prominent thinkers, scientists, scholars and theologians who express a similar desire to mitigate this growing trend. The voices of these famous figures admonish us never to compromise the ideals of freedom, mercy, justice, and tolerance. In Lord Beaconsfield, Froude describes Disraeli as a model leader who put the needs of the common people above mercantile theories, when he says that Disraeli "did not believe in a