Instead of logically criticizing our feel-good society that will not reason (which is what the book claims to be doing), LeGault uses anecdote and assertion to explain that we should feel good about ourselves and sort of pretends to reason. Well, I was skipping faster and faster as I got more and more exasperated, there may be evidence in here somewhere, but it's thin on the ground for the first few chapters. Definitions of what's being discussed are thin or missing; for instance, 'our' society is apparently the US, but that's not cited so much as implied by, say:
Europeans are in effect barred from a truly rational, free-thinking inquiry by the entrenched political special interests of their societies.
And that's a very funny sentence, coming after the claim that
...this country's environmental regulations, as embodied in the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and numerous other pieces of legislation, are the most stringent of any industrialized nation.
because our Clean Air Act is terrifically hamstrung by the special interest we have in cheap coal. So is Europe's legislation, I should think, indeed that of all the industrialized nations; but figuring out who is more stringent is actually hard--I've just spent an entertaining but inconclusive thirty minutes trying to define a total 'environmental stringency' and then measure US and EU standards on it, and I have last terms' climate-modeling seminar as a good base to start with. I would say the US is more stringent about particulates -- 'the US' wins because of California -- and the EU about CO2; but the two places don't really measure quite the same thing, and exactly how some of the 'voluntary agreements' with automakers are supposed to be counted is even weirder.
But it seems to me that Singapore knocks all the other industrialized nations out of the running. Of course there are rationalizations, e.g. we were only supposed to 'count' big countries, or countries with governance 'like' that of the US; but rationalizations that invert the sense of a true-false statement annoy the heck out of me, and are unforgivable in a book preening itself on clear thinking about uncomfortable topics.
Other bits of poor thinking: on p. 45, he is accusing the 'wired set' of wanting us to 'mothball the written word'; a peculiar accusation for a medium that produces this much prose; and, even worse, the evidence he does adduce against visual (or audible?) media is that we don't have 'time to stop and reflect upon the issues, to question and explore'. But digital representations of plays, etc. are exquisitely available for pausing, rewatching, reworking, and making extended hypotheses and counter-arguments to. The evidence and the claim don't line up. The next argument, that popular movies appeal to faculties other than reason, seems true but is circular.
On page 56, he quotes a "Gestapo-like, motherly dictum", which is a surprising comparison, except that he's trying to be against yob movies and the nanny state at once; still, claiming that mothers are Gestapo-like is a very emotional claim for which he offers no evidence. Chapter 3 disdains our collective or egalitarian intelligence, and uses GM's troubles as a sign, but doesn't explain why it's Japanese companies, in a culture more explicitly consensus-friendly, that are picking up GM's market-share. And on page 71 he describes GM as 'the ultimate government project', that is, unaccountable and without incentive; I suspect that 'government' is as loaded a word for his audience as 'Gestapo', and again, there's no reasoning given for using a statement that's literally false. Still, the interesting question if you're thinking about the role of government and accountability is why the Japanese companies were a counterexample, when they are so deeply intertwined in their government.
It seems to me that this is a polemic encouraging white US men to assume the virtues of their predecessors (not in the sense Hamlet used 'assume') and take back everything they used to have; it's disguised as a paean to reason. Of course I might be wrong, but since no terms are actually defined, my assertion is not disprovable.
Find in a Library: Think!
So wrote clew in History (21st c.).