Bernard Lulfre, personally tasks Jared with investigating an itinerant American lecturer, Charles Atterley, who has gained notable attention in Europe and whose ideas the Laurentians consider a potential danger to humankind.
Ultimately pressed for a judgment on the possibility of B's being the Antichrist, Jared is driven to penetrate B's inner circle where he soon finds his religious foundations shaken to their core.
Among the tenets of B's philosophy are: an advocacy of neotribalism and the "Great Remembering"—which is his idea humanity has forgotten its hunter-gatherer history and should reclaim this forgotten knowledge that once steadily supported humanity's survival—as well as an opposition to "totalitarian agriculture", the style of agriculture whereby its practitioners destroy all competition and assume all resources are made only for their own use.
Shirin's further teachings include the idea of a Law of Life, the concept that storytelling may be a genetic characteristic of humans, the promotion of animism, and the notion that totalitarian agriculture results in ecological imbalance and over-population, which themselves are rapidly leading to humankind's self-destruction.
In the hospital, Jared attempts to piece together his memories, chronicling that one of B's lecture theatres was bombed, and Shirin and B's inner circle are presumably all dead.
Jared renounces his devotion to the order and returns hastily back to Europe, desperately searching for any information about possible survivors of the bombing and lamenting his lack of knowledge about the people he seeks out, for example, the fact that he never even learned Shirin's last name.
Visiting the mouth of the tunnel, which is barricaded by wooden planks, Jared finds contact information engraved in the wood.
Moments before Jared must leave to board a plane, he urges the spreading of B's philosophy and writes the final words of his diary: that Charles Atterley, Shirin, he, and the reader, too, are all B.
What was forgotten is that there was a time when people lived without civilization and were sustained primarily by hunting and gathering rather than by large-scale animal husbandry and agriculture.
By the time history began to be written down, thousands of years had passed since abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it had been assumed that people had come into existence farming.
B argues that our knowledge and worldview today would be greatly altered had the foundation thinkers of our culture known there was history beyond the beginning of civilization.
B's (i.e. Quinn's) thinking here should not be confused with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who made the prediction that population would outrun food supply.
"Prehistoric" hunters and gatherers operated according to a worldview that promoted coexistence and limited competition between predator and prey.
B notes that even tribal societies who battle with and claim victory over other ones do not normally force their defeated enemies to assimilate as do the members of our own world-dominating Taker culture.
He states that war, crime, famine, plague, an exploited labor force, drug abuse, slavery, rebellion, and genocide have resulted from Totalitarian Agriculturists' continual expansion.
People lose the will to live, become listless, become violent, become suicidal, and take to drink, drugs, and crime... laws, customs and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young, who see that even their elders can no longer make sense of them."
He comments that, because we have already experienced a collapse of culture, our society is ready to abandon our totalitarian agriculture and industrial trends.
B calls for followers to abandon the idea that humanity needs to be saved from itself and to tell accusers that "we're straying from the path of salvation...but not for love of vice and wickedness as you contemptuously imagined we might.