Rorty's "Achieving Our Country" uses "Snow Crash" as an example of modern culture that "express the loss of what he calls "national hope"...the problem with "Snow Crash" is not that it isn't true—after all, it's a story—but that it isn't inspirational." This lack of inspiration is offset by something else "Snow Crash" and other works like it offer: "These books produce in their readers the 'state of soul' that Rorty calls 'knowingness,' which he glosses as a 'preference for knowledge over hope' (37)"; this preference for knowledge "contribute[s to a more fundamental failure to appreciate the value of inspiration—and hence of literature—itself."