I recently completed reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion
He also accuses himself of essentially positing an alternative belief system (religion) when he's advocating to remove religion. This is somewhat true, depending on when "philosophy" becomes "religion."
What I did take away from this book, however, is something I learned from Stumbling on Happiness -- which is that the brain's ability to look into the future is not very reliable. We really need to become presentists as much as possible. This does not mean we shouldn't plan for future events (catastrophes, retirement, etc.) - this distinguishes us from the monkeys. But, rather, we need to value current information as being more accurate than projected, predicted information, because ultimately that information may be misleading.
I also learned from this book that the Founding Fathers were correct in writing 'separation of church and state' into the Constitution. Our laws, which buttress civilization, should be focused on the betterment of society. There should not be overt religious interplay in the legislative process. At the same time, the legislative process should not interfere with peoples' abilities to subscribe to and practice a given religion.
I had hoped to learn something here that would apply to infosec. No such luck, per se, other than reinforcing that we need to find a way to speak to the instinctual side of people when describing threats. Though we'd like to believe that the average man can evolve to be the intellectual man, that day has not yet arrived. Thus, we need to describe things in the primitive language. fwiw.
