The Primacy of the Inanimate

Could it be that, in societies where human and planetary life are not priorities, our analogies are bound to measure the living with reference to the dead?

In one of my classes this semester a student brought up how we usually speak of bodies as machines, that is, how the allegorical symbols we use to speak of bodies are almost always rooted in machine-like terms. Phrases describing the human body as a ‘well-oiled machine’ are all-pervasive in our societies.