This book does not give handy tips on how to be better or wealthier or healthier, nor does it lay out a ready-made framework for understanding the world and how to live in it. What this book does do is place in your hands some powerful tools for constructing your own way of understanding, and for using that understanding productively. “Self-help” books are part of our passive consumer culture: buy this book and it will make you better, along the same lines as buy this car and it will make you respected, buy this phone and it will make you hip, drink this brand of vodka and you will be sophisticated, vote for this candidate and your problems will be solved. This book empowers people to reject the mind-numbing passiveness of the consumer society and recognize their own powers as producers: producers who do not need someone else to tell them what to think or believe or do, but instead rely on their own powers to pursue projects of their own choice.