In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology.

Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.

To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that’s not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you...Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It’s revolution, invention, war. It’s big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not.

Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things, and to do business himself, if called upon, who hath both civil and military knowledge; one, moreover, who has been in camps, and has seen armies in the field and out of it; knows the use of arms, and machines, and warlike engines of every kind; can tell what the front, and what the horn is, how the ranks are to be disposed, how the horse is to be directed, and from whence to advance or to retreat; one, in short, who does not stay at home and trust to the reports of others: but, above all, let him be of a noble and liberal mind; let him neither fear nor hope for anything; otherwise he will only resemble those unjust judges who determine from partiality or prejudice, and give sentence for hire: but, whatever the man is, as such let him be described.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Man is encased, as though in a shell, in the particular ranking of the simplest values and value-qualities which represent the objective side of his *ordo amoris*, values which have not yet been shaped into things and goods. He carries this shell along with him wherever he goes and cannot escape from it no matter how quickly he runs. He perceives the world and himself through the windows of this shell, and perceives no more of the world, of himself, or of anything else besides what these windows show him, in accordance with their position, size, and color. The structure and total content of each man's environment, which is ultimately organized according to its value structure, does not wander or change, even though he himself wanders further and further in space. It is simply filled out anew with certain individual things. However, even this fulfillment must obey the law of formation prescribed by the value structure of the milieu. The goods along the route of a man's life, the practical things, the resistances to willing and acting against which he sets his will, are from the very first always inspected and "sighted," as it were, by the particular selective mechanism of his *ordo amoris*. Wherever he arrives, it is not the same men and the same things, but the same types of men and things (and this are in every case *types* of values), that attract or repulse him in accordance with certain constant rules of preference and rejection. What he actually notices, what he observes or leaves unnoticed and unobserved, is determined by this attraction and this repulsion; these already determine the material of *possible* noticing and observing. Moreover, the attraction and repulsion are felt to come from things, not from the self, in contrast to the case of so-called active attention, and are themselves governed and circumscribed by potentially effective attitudes of interest and love, experienced as readiness for being affected." —from_Ordo Amoris_

A similar experiment may be tried in metaphysics as regards the *intuition* of objects. If the intuition had to conform to the constitution of objects, I would not understand how we could know anything of them *a priori*; but if the object (as object of the senses) conformed to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I could very well conceive such a possibility. As, however, I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become knowledge, but have to refer them as representations, to something as their object, and must determine this object through them, I can assume either that the *concepts* through which I arrive at this determination also conform to the object, and I would again be as perplexed about how I can know anything about it *a priori*; or else that the objects, or what is the same thing, the *experience* in which alone they are known (as objects that are given to us), conform to those concepts. In the latter case, I recognize an easier solution because experience itself is a kind of knowledge that requires understanding; and this understanding has its rules which I must presuppose as existing within me even before objects are given to me, and hence *a priori*. These rules are expressed in *a priori* concepts to which all objects of experience must necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. With regard to objects, insofar as they are thought merely through reason and thought indeed as necessary, and which can never, at least not in the way in which reason thinks them, be given in experience, the attempts at thinking them (for they must admit of being thought) will subsequently furnish an excellent touchstone of what we are adopting as our new method of thought, namely, that we know of things *a priori* only that which we ourselves put into them."―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 18-19

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer."Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

Power is the ability to bring to past a desired result. The exercise of power requires action. The key to power is in understanding how to use that which is already available to us in order to accomplish a sought after goal. The power comes from understanding and acting according to that understanding. When we live according to Truth, we thereby bring power to light. Yet we are never powerful because of ourselves, it is Truth alone that is powerful. We are, therefore, powerful only in proportion to our understanding in light of our situation. Understanding who, what, when, where, how, or why in light of our current situation is what determines the balance of power. Power is the effect of understanding. Therefore, the one who seeks to be powerful must first seek out knowledge and experience by the means of questioning and curiosity. Only through knowledge and experience may we obtain understanding. Only through understanding may we obtain power, and understanding is the power of the wise.

This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experienceof life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that whathappens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, thesmall-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because whatmatters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion ormove to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradictthis understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we payattention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy anddark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become morepleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallaghersummarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum ofwhat you focus on.