That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right?

You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors. And it's not like the liberal arts have nothing useful to teach. Most graduates would, for example, consider the idea that "in reality power [..] is essential if one aims to enable true change" a tautology in need of an editor.

Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.

Some of the best technologists I've ever worked with were film majors, history majors, philosophy majors, sociology majors, &c.

By far, the most important skill for this kind of work is critical thinking.

He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.

Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.

Also, I don't mean any disrespect here, but the fact that he killed himself kind of taints these sort of speeches for me also. How much better is his proposed lifestyle/world-view really, if it didn't even work for the master-mind himself? (Assuming that the goal is to be happy of course.)

EDIT: Just to clarify, I know he was probably battling depression, but should a person fighting such a severe mental illness really be the one, one listens to for live-advice then?

In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.

Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.

In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.

> I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice

I'm sure we could conduct an easy experiment.. but maybe that's too empirical for you