It struck me the other day while I was walking that my greatest gift might be that I don’t actually believe in any singular set of answers to the eternal human questions. A singularity in quantum and cosmic physics is merely a place where the mathematics we have available to us crashes, usually by defaulting to infinity as a solution. I prefer to see in each -ism I explore the insights it is good at proffering, the foundational values or principles that inspire it, all the way up to the point where the math defaults to infinity. I do this with every system I study, exploring it until the math fails, which it always does. Then I superimpose what’s left of them, one over another and another, creating a sort of palimpsest. The Venn diagram of their overlaps, tiny as it might be, becomes what, at the moment, I feel I can relatively reliably trust as “true.” At least until a new math becomes available. This book pursues that initiative in two contrary directions: The first essay proposes quantum mechanics as a new paradigm for an ethical life in the 21st century. The second critiques the most serious impediment to that enterprise: capitalism.