“At the close of the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy lamented the fact that the Russian middle class and aristocracy were so divorced from the material realities of everyday life that they were no longer capable of experiencing authentic grief, authentic love, or authentic courage. They spent their lives in relative luxury that only heightened their appetites, inflated their ambitions, distorted their affections and turned the most spirited among them to reckless adventures or duplicitous success seekers totally out of touch with themselves or the realities of their time.

“The same could be said of us and our progeny. Increasingly incapable of discerning love from lust, anger from indignation, fear from grief, or hope from ambition, we seek some sort of map to orient our interior lives. But to the extent that the programs, processes, therapies and philosophies that are supposed to supply these maps reinforce the centrality of individual accomplishment, we find ourselves plunging ever more deeply into the very dilemmas we hope to cure.

“… Depression and anxiety are at near epidemic levels. And there is a growing clinical consensus that both of these maladies arise from a misguided attempt to control life. This desire for mastery fosters a fascination with all manner of positive thinking strategies, miracle cures, tactics, techniques, dirty tricks and sympathetic magic. Americans are apt to try anything once if it promises them some material benefit – everything from transcendental meditation and the Thigh Master, to the pray of Jabez, right on up to and including pulling the sheets over their heads or taking a gun to school. All of these are attempts to halt change, either by forcing the moment to its crisis or refuting its dynamics entirely by sheer force of will.

“When such superficial and desperate measures reach a critical mass, cultural narcissism passes into outright paranoia, and then personal security, preoccupations with one’s health, addictive routines, material accumulation, sexual experimentation, and military might become the preoccupations of the land and intellectual timidity and vice insinuate themselves throughout the body politic. This reactionary cocooning is then further aggravated by apocalyptic radio hosts, misanthropic rock stars, fear-mongering politicians, and all manner of false prophets who exploit our phobias and insecurities. This in turn inflates the national ego and drives the quest for a life lived in accord with conscience ever further to the margins of our society."