It is necessary to repeat again and again that in the background of all our lives there exists a fundamental and dominating lie. It is that material success counts more than anything else – indeed, that nothing else counts but material success.
People are not simply, or even principally, thinking machines. Most people absorb much more information from sense impressions and emotions than they do from abstract symbols. The world is not only, or even most importantly, material. Scientific reason can never be more than part of the story. Human beings are concerned most of their lives with values yet scientific reason cannot cope with questions of value at all, as Ludwig Wittgenstein, that most exacting of philosophers, kept ramming home to anyone who would listen.
