Suggesting that many of the philosophical and political underpinnings of the author's short stories stemmed from his views on domestic life, Palmer's focus turned to Dick's common use of sterility as a metaphor. In "The Gun", "Second Variety", "The Penultimate Truth", and "The Last of the Masters", people and sometimes the earth itself have been driven to sterility. As Palmer noted of "The Last of the Masters", Bors can be interpreted as a symbol of infertility: "It is not clear why he does not replicate himself, or educate his human servants: it is simply a given that he is sterile. The old, technologically advanced, highly organized civilization is a civilization of production, but now under Bors it can do no more than maintain itself." Following an inspection of other short stories with similar references to sterility, Palmer asserts that Dick's work presented a social and existential protest. Palmer interpreted Dick's social critique to be that if the act of creation validates existence, and genuinely expresses a form of individuality, then the process of reproduction is alienating, oppressive, and retards an individual's liberty. As Palmer explains, "...this process disempowers consumers, and even technocrats, by making them dependent on a process of which they have become entirely ignorant." Existentially, Palmer interpreted Dick to further mean that reproduction violated the author's concept of what made an object unique and valuable: "A thing can't be a real thing unless it is in some sense an individual thing."