The Meaning of Life was now a lucrative industry

"The sham swamis and phoney sages of our time stand in for various more conventional gods who have failed. Philosophers, for example, seem to have been reduced to no more than white-coated technicians of language. It is true that the idea of the philosopher as a guide to the meaning of life is a popular misconception. Even so, one might expect them to do rather more than attempt to dissuade people from leaping out of windows by pointing out that the grammar of ‘nothing matters’ differs from that of ‘nothing chatters’. At the same time, theology had been discredited by creeping secularization, as well as by the crimes and follies of the churches. A positivist sociology and behaviourist psychology, along with a visionless political science, completed the betrayal of the intelligentsia. The more the humanities were harnessed to the needs of the economy, the more they abandoned the business of investigating fundamental questions; so the more the Tarot touts, pyramid pushers, avatars of Atlantis, and detoxicators of the soul rushed to fill their place. The Meaning of Life was now a lucrative industry. Books with titles like Metaphysics for Merchant Bankers were eagerly devoured. Men and women who were disenchanted with a world obsessed with making money turned to the purveyors of spiritual truth, who made a lot of money out of purveying it."