His book is driven by a powerful moral sense of truth and justice, and sense of outrage at the exploitation of human frailty by charlatans and tricksters. He identifies people who avoid the truth and moral obligations in their work. Corporate ad men and executives artists hire entertainer-writers like Thomas Peters, Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra to facilitate corporate solidarity, sell products and raise capital. In fact these entertainers have become apologists for corporate values of consumption and self-gratification, and, like various sports and entertainment celebrities, minor deities in the pantheon of capitalism. Politicians, like corporations, dabble in the New Age and alternative practices to project an image of sensitivity and modernity - and some of them seem to let it influence policy (Nancy Reagan's astrologer, and assorted gurus tied to the Clintons and the Blairs). Advertising and entertainment are the art of illusion. Post-modernism and process philosophy have legitimized belief in improbable, artificial and illusory belief systems. People are gullible. People don't have time to learn the truth and need to defer to credible advice. People defer to authoritative stories and believe well-packaged stories that fit their feelings and preconceptions. People get caught up in mass movements. People are prone to believe myths and stories on slight evidence and to rationalize their irrational feelings.

He overreaches himself in one area. The book is about truth, bullshit, humbug, mumbo-jumbo and plain lies. He tries to discuss the problem in terms of rationality and his understanding of the central ideas of the European Enlightenment, which he describes as the revolution of reason against the repression of knowledge. He refers to a 1999 article by Roger Scruton published in City Journal for his central thesis that the Enlightenment and "our entire tradition of learning" are at risk in a counter-revolution by a coalition of post-modernists and primitivists, New Age and Old Testament. He claims reason, logic, empirical science, objective reality and a belief in moral truth as the property of the Enlightenment, and he dismisses all religious believers as irrationalists.

His thesis is pretentious and tendentious. To begin, he doesn't deal with the fact that most of the people he trashes are intelligent, rational people. The problem isn't that they are irrational. The problem is that they rationalize. In some areas they rationalize the unknowable, but in some areas they rationalize bullshit. Second, he dismisses all systems except (atheist) empiricism as a legitimate method of discerning truth and making rational moral choices. He ought to be more tolerant of other systems that value objective realism and truth over pure imagination. Third, his assessment of Romanticism as the mere emotional colour of the Enlightenment is way off. Romanticism is the moving force of the Enlightenment and the modern age. The myths of Romanticism - the noble savage, liberation from the restraints of culture and tradition, the truth of instinct and the heart, the will to power - are the central myths of modern popular culture.