there were ever a time in which the connection between existing facts and a moral 'ought' obligating us to act stands out more prominently than at any other, it is the here and now, with the factual twin challenges of global warming and the resource sustainability of our planet! The Political Centerpiece The  author's main conclusion to the first chapter is this advice: If you want to change someone's mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuition, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch -- a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. (p. 50) Haidt leaves no doubt that his book has political aims. He is worried about the negative consequences that would flow from a continuation of the present trend, becoming world-wide, of increasing violence in language between different sides of the political fence, carrying threats of actual violence, and in not a few cases the act itself. In the extreme form we have terrorism, which has its own specific sources, but in today's globalized world, everything tends to interact. I will not try to describe all those multiple sources, but hazard the view that peoples, from the WEIRD to the underdeveloped and repressed, sense that something like what Haidt calls a Rubicon Crossing (as in Julius Caesar's crossing of a river of that name to gain control of the Roman Empire) is in the