Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t dress this up as optimism; he sells it like a cold lab report with a smirk. Calling “Man” an “artifact” strips the species of its favorite alibi - that we’re natural, stable, entitled to remain as-is. Artifact implies manufacture, modification, even obsolescence. In one move he yanks human identity out of theology and humanism and drops it into engineering: we’re not a finished creature, we’re a prototype.

The tadpole analogy is doing more than making evolution sound friendly. It’s a rhetorical trap. No one argues a tadpole has a moral right to stay a tadpole; metamorphosis is framed as the organism’s proper destiny. Burroughs piggybacks on that inevitability to make human transformation feel non-negotiable. If you resist, you’re not conservative, you’re developmentally stuck.

Context matters: Burroughs is a mid-century writer steeped in Cold War acceleration, the Space Race, and a deep suspicion of control systems - governments, media, pharmaceuticals, language itself. “Designed for space travel” reads less like NASA cheerleading than a provocation: if the future is off-planet, the human body (and the human mind under addiction, surveillance, and routine) is inadequate hardware. The subtext is both exhilarating and sinister. Upgrading the species can mean liberation from biology’s limits, or it can mean being redesigned by whoever holds the tools. Burroughs keeps that tension intact: evolution as escape hatch, and as takeover.