Is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight Harvard’s new “Opiate of the Masses”? On her web page http://drjilltaylor.com/book.html, she says, “I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet.”

But since when is the “here and now” fair? I imagine that many sociopaths live in the “present moment” and feel inner peace after a “kill.” And if everyone on Earth drank themselves into a very prolonged stupor, fewer endangered species would go extinct in the near future.

Surely, rather than getting too wrapped up in imaginary “inner peace circuitry,” we must first focus on reality and root causes: we must do more to help the poor, the crippled, the abused; we must do more to curb the excesses of our hackneyed justice system; we must do more to stop white-collar crime.