Roszak argues that our habits of abusing nature, as well as out patterns of overconsumption, betray a sickness of the soul rooted in our estrangement from the natural world. The roots of this sickness lie in modernism's account of a dead and purposeless universe. ...modern psychology made it irrational to care for the world. The result is we left ourselves with only a cultural or conventional basis for defining sanity, based upon the individual's adaptation to society.