One illustration that Sloterdijk employs to make this point is the activity of agents and double-agents, which to him incorporates contemporary cynicism as an incarnation of tactical thinking, pragmatic maneuvering, silencing, and misspeaking.
Sloterdijk's analysis of Dadaism as artists practiced it in Berlin accompanies his disclosing of the variations of irony and sarcasm that all the political camps of the time between the two World Wars employed (especially Dadaists, Social Democrats, National Socialists, Communists in their derisive attempts to incite their supporters against those of all other points of view).
Sloterdijk concludes that, unlike the ancient Greek version, Cynicism no longer stands for values of the natural and ethical kind that bind people beyond their religious and economically useful convictions.
Rather, it has become a mode of thought that defines its actions in terms of a "final end" of a purely materialistic sort and reduces the "ought" to an economic strategy aimed at maximizing profit.
In the final chapter, Sloterdijk points out that he regards a "good life" not simply as an external fact, but as a "being embedded" in a "Whole" that constantly reorganizes itself and renews itself, and that humankind creates out of its own understanding and motivations.