Use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
I remember fairly clearly the day when, while trying to choose what to read in a bookstore, I realized that what I was choosing is who would control my consciousness — my mind — for a couple hours.
It wasn’t a thought I’d never had before; after all when we watch TV or a movie, or read a book, we want our consciousness to be changed for a while, but the “I’m letting the author’s mind control me” epiphany was direct, vivid, and somewhat alarming.
We think of ourselves as our bodies and thoughts, and as everything else as “outside” us, but that’s wrong. We never experience anything but ourselves, we experience nothing but our own consciousness. It is literally impossible to experience anything that isn’t yourself, including these words.
This is true regardless of your metaphysics. The material world may well exist, but what of it? At best, you experience it as a representation in your consciousness.
Because I’m slow, it took me about year to apply the “mind control” understanding to my environment. Every room I’m in, every vista I see, every road I walk, and every person I see or hear or talk to is in my mind. The environment — cars, people, walls, buildings — controls and forms my consciousness.
There isn’t any question that this effects me, what I think, what mood I’m in. There’s vast research literature on something as simple as the what mood different colors cause.
So my environment, my day to day environment, where I live, work, eat, sleep and walk, what I read or watch, and who I talk to or hug — that’s my consciousness.
Now I meditate, and I have more control over the emotional tone of my consciousness and the thoughts I think than a lot of people, but still, the environment is a huge influence. If I see people fighting, or I’m threatened, yeah, I can influence my emotional reaction, but I have to and sometimes I can’t. If, on the other hand, I interact with friendly, even loving people, it’s a lot easier.
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Likewise if I’m walking through some slum, full of despair, that changes my consciousness. If I’m in a beautiful room full of plants or pictures, I feel better than if I’m in a room of crumbling concrete, stained and stinking, because my consciousness changes to be like wherever I am. My consciousness IS my environment.
So the simplest way to control consciousness isn’t meditation (much as I have benefited from meditation) it’s to control your environment — the rooms you live in, sleep in, and work in. Your neighbourhood, if you can. The people you interact with, to the extent you can.
If something’s bad in your environment and you can change it to something better, you’re directly changing your consciousness for the better.
And even the most self-controlled, disciplined mind, is affected by environment. If you’re in an awful environment (and the most important part of an environment is the people), you have to constantly manage that; it’s a stress.
So beware of the environment you live in, please, and don’t assume you’re some Buddha who can just shrug it off (which, even he didn’t — and couldn’t — before he was the Buddha).
Previous: Groups and Coalitions
(Introduction and Table of Contents)
I struggled a bit with what word to use for this chapter; to most people today, “environment” means the natural world, but here I’m using it to include not just that, but the social and the built environment. The social environment is the people around us and how they act: a nomadic clan is very different from a peasant village, and both are different from an American city, which is different from a Chinese city or the rural areas in both countries.
The environment, things like geography, technology and upbringing, determines what politics are possible, but how which politics happen.
Time also matters. Growing up in the 1930s was very different from growing up in the 1950s, let alone in the 2000s. Although it’s controversial, generations do have shared characteristics, because they have shared experiences due to similarities in their lived experience.
Environment is not separate from ideology and identity, of course — what the people around you believe and try to make you believe is important. How they act based on their beliefs matters. What identity groups exist for you to join or reject also matters.
Environment forms people; it is a large part of what creates their characters and their abilities. Even if you reject something about your environment, even if you hate it and can’t wait to leave, by reacting against it, you are being formed by it. (Our relationships with the people who raise us is similar — there is no escaping their influence.)
Ideologies must explain the environment we live with in. Hunter-gatherer religions tend to be polytheistic and animistic and concerned with luck, cycles, and the bounty of nature, because hunting is an activity where luck matters a great deal. The deer can bolt at the last second, the seal can dive, and you’ll have nothing. Gatherers manage the environment more than most realize, but it’s still a gift from the spirits or the Gods.
Agrarian communities, on the other hand, tend to have all-powerful sky Gods. You must have rain at the right time and no early or late frosts, or the crops fail, and many starve. The earth is seen as more passive, and the farmer plants the seed, but the sky can be fickle.
The modern American equivalent is “job creators.” All good things come from money and you get money from jobs, so “job creators” are the modern Gods: Billionaires, in older times inventors, entrepreneurs, and so on. Because they are the the people who give others good things, they must be treated with reverence and not taxed too much, so they can keep showering their beneficience upon the people.
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From about 1930 to the 1970s, almost no one believed that “job creators” were a thing. The Great Depression had taught them that capitalists, bosses, and bankers were clueless idiots who if not kept in an arm-lock at all times would crater the economy and create untold hardship. So we regulated them tightly and taxed them, often at over 90 percent marginal rates and we saw government, which had gotten us out of the Great Depression as good, and believed in spreading wealth and income to increase demand, since a demand collapse caused the Great Depression.
But that distrust of business and the rich, and that belief in equality was a function of environment; it explained the Great Depression. In the 50s and 60s, business operated well, provided a lot of good jobs and didn’t overpay their executives. But then the government couldn’t handle the oil shocks and an ideology was presented, created by people like Milton Friedman and pushed hard by big money interests, that said that government regulation of business and taxation of rich people was the problem, and that private enterprise would create a new dawn in the US. Enough people believed this to swing the 1980 election to Reagan, and neoliberalism took power.
Now, in the early 2020s, private enterprise and government both look incompetent, and young people have huge debts and little chance of ever owning a home. The stage is set for another explanation to rise.
When written narratively like this, we could go back through ideologies and sub-ideologies for hundreds of years if we wanted to, it sounds inevitable. This is, in essence, the crude Marxist’s argument: Material circumstances control superstructure like ideology, so look at the material circumstances.
But this is only half-true; ideology is constrained by material circumstances, absolutely. It has to explain both the environment in which people live and the material support of ideologues often constrains them. The 17th century philosophes who created the Englightenment values which powered the American and French revolutions could not have happened without French Salon culture, a multiplicity of possible patrons and a robust book and pamphlet publishing industry. Before the printing press and during the time when essentially all intellectuals were under Church control, the rise of the bourgeousie and the Philosophes could never have happened.
So ideology is definitely related to material circumstances, but there are always multiple ways to explain the environment. Even within a major ideology, there are sub-ideological transitions — as with the one between New Deal/post-war capitalism and neoliberalism which we have discussed so much in this booklet.
None of this is predetermined. The 70s did not have to lead to neoliberalism. There were other threads to follow, including one which suggested the initiation of a green transition to reduce dependence on oil.
In the early- to mid-20th century, wars were fought to determine which political ideologies would be most important: Communism and Democratic Capitalism defeated Fascism (a capitalist ideology, but not a democratic one), then Communism collapsed later. There’s a very strong argument that capitalism won not because of any innate superiority (as its ideologues argue), but simply because it had a stronger geographic and economic position all through both wars and the Cold War, and that superior position was largely a historical accident.
Environment has other effects. Some of them are obvious and often commented on in geopolitics: location, climate, resources, whether there are defensible borders like rivers, mountains or coasts (Britain’s history is impossible for any non-Island state, the same is true of Japan). As they are often discussed, we’ll pass those by, and move onto how our lives create our character and abilities.
The Mongol conquests, nor any of the other great horse nomad invasions wouldn’t have been possible if horse nomads hadn’t learned to ride and shoot starting as very young children. The signature Mongol military maneuver of firing accurately behind them as they rode away from attackers, for example, is something most people simply could not do. Likewise, in the Middle Ages, knights trained from childhood, and it was said that anyone who didn’t start as a child would ever be any good.
Our lives give us our abilities, but they also form our character. In modern life, most people spend at least 12 years in school where they are taught to not speak unless given permission, to do what they’re told in exactly the way they are told, and are ranked by how well they do what they are ordered to do. Those who rebel or are otherwise bad at doing what they’re told when they’re told, sitting still and shutting up unless called on, are filtered so that most of them will never have good jobs. Those who succeed have shown exactly the abilities bosses want: Subservience to authority and willingness to do exactly what a boss orders in exactly the way the boss wants it done.
That we then expect a population trained this way, who in both their childhood and adult lives make almost no decisions, to be “free” is one of the grand ironies of our age. We march to war, in the millions if necessary, do what authorities tell us to, and are generally compliant to the demands of power. That’s our character, and it’s what our daily lives train us to be, not just in school but at work.
This is why people like Jefferson thought democracy required a base of Yeoman farmers: People who made their own decisions about what to do each day, even if constrained by weather, soil, and other natural demands. The term wage-slave was coined in the 19th century precisely because employees lost so much relative freedom, and, in many places, universal state schooling had to be imposed with military force against parents who felt their children were being stolen from them.
The great period of unionization was built on huge factories; where everyone was treated almost identically by employers. They did basically the same thing all day, in the same few factories owned by any employer. They saw each other regularly and were used to working together already — plus, factories of the time were places of hard, brutal, and dangerous manual labor, so early workers were often willing to risk physical confrontations. The same thing could be seen in China during its recent industrialization, with riots where workers would tear up beds in dorms to get the steel rods to fight with.
The environment, then, inevitably forms our character and our abilities — how brave we are, how used to thinking for ourselves, but it also it helps create our social ties. In a highly anomic society, where even families often live far apart due to traveling to get jobs, such as in the late 20th century US, social ties become thin, and concerted action becomes difficult.
Then environment also includes technology, especially the technology of conflict. Armored knights as the pre-eminent military force could never create an egalitarian society. Firearms, where anyone can kill anyone and where mass armies make sense and are feasible, did. Republican Rome and Greek City states exactly made citizens of those who could afford to fight in the Phalanx or row galleys and Rome had a class above the commons, the Equites, made up of those who could afford a horse and thus fight as cavalry.
The Swiss cantons, with their Pikemen, who regularly defeated cavalry, were a late Medieval equivalent, and while one of the first nations with male suffrage, were one of the last to give women the vote. But they also could not have existed outside a mountainous area like the Swiss Alps, because cavalry could have easily swept past pikemen.
By World War I and II, industrial production became key to winning wars, and with so many men conscripted, women went to work in the factories en mass during wartime and women soon gained the vote.
This relationship of voting to production was also based on how the economy was organized during the late 19th through mid 20th century. It’s the economy, and its effects on politics (and vice versa), which we will discuss next.
A few months ago I read a couple of books by the Singaporean intellectual Kishore Mahbubani. In Has China Already Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Mahbubani discusses Taiwan.
The one exceptional trigger for a war involving China is Taiwan. Most of the time, the Chinese leaders have a lot of policy flexibility. There are no strong domestic lobbies to worry about. But the one issue where the Chinese leaders cannot bend and compromise is Taiwan. Any Chinese leader, including Xi Jinping (despite all his power), could be removed if he is perceived to be weak on Taiwan. Why is Taiwan so fundamental to China? There is a very simple explanation. Every Chinese knows the century of humiliation that China suffered from the Opium War to 1949. Nearly all the historical vestiges of this century of humiliation have been removed or resolved, including Hong Kong and Macau.
Only one remains: Taiwan. It was Chinese territory until China was forced to hand it to Japan after the humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.
Mahbubani also discusses what sort of person would be elected if China was a democracy.
Think Theodore Roosevelt, who, if you aren’t aware, was a raging warmonger. Xi, and the CCP in general, are a moderating influence on Chinese foreign affairs. China’s population has far more aggressive feelings than China’s current rulers. They are still furious about the “century of humiliation,” and they want China to be the number one nation in the world — or certainly to be dominant in its sphere of influence, exactly as Americans did in through the late 19th century to the 20th century.
We have some really weird ideas about our own history, or about what is normal for rising or re-establishing great powers.
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They always take control of their near abroad if they can. This is why Russia is willing to fight a war for the Ukraine, if it comes to it: The Ukraine was part of Russia for centuries. China is actually being remarkably flexible about Taiwan for a rising power. The US bent every country near it to its will and took chunks of land out of both Mexico and Canada, while replacing governments in Latin and South America regularly. Britain brought Scotland and Ireland into its “union.” Germany grabbed everything near it that it could, until defeated in World War II. Japan went on one of the biggest empire building sprees in history.
Other countries, of course, will resist as best they can, and I personally think that Taiwan should stay free. But the price of its freedom is allowing Chinese leaders to save face with their own population: They are saying “Taiwan and China are part of one country.”
This isn’t the 90s, when the US had an easy veto over a Chinese conquest of Taiwan. American aircraft carriers, if they try to intervene, will be sunk by China’s massive arsenal of missiles. China has nuclear weapons and is de-facto allied with Russia, so escalation is extremely dangerous.
Taiwan and the Ukraine are not, fundamentally, the West’s business — except, of course, that the West’s semiconductor fabrication is concentrated in Taiwan due to idiotic Western trade and industrial policies.
Both China and the West are building semiconductor fab as fast as they can in their heartlands. Soon even this vulnerability will be gone, on both sides.
In the meantime, if China wants to say “Taiwan is part of China,” which is something the US agreed to as far back as Nixon, it’s a cheap way to keep a small democratic state going and avoid a potential world war.
We don’t know a great deal about this with any certainty yet.
It appears:
- To have milder symptoms in the young. We don’t know if it does in the old.
- To be more transmissable.
- Less cough, no loss of taste.
Many are suggesting this is a good variant: mild, everyone gets it, gets immune — or it turns into a new flu.
Maybe. (“Appears” is the word I used for a reason.)
What I want to know is how deadly it is for the old, how long any acquired immunity lasts, and whether it spawns long Covid.
If it does spawn long Covid, how does that work? If you don’t get Long Covid the first time, can you get it another time? If you can, and Omicron is chronic and widespread, the odds of eventually getting Long Covid go way up.
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And, of course, if Covid, in general, continues to mutate fast, will a high virulence variant lead to other variants? If so, the next one might be high virulence with worse symptoms.
In the meantime, I’d suggest being careful, still. N95 masks, and let’s see how this plays out.
Mary Stewart was a best-selling author for much of the 20th century. I first stumbled across her as a child, reading the “The Hollow Hills” and the “Crystal Cave,” two of her books about Merlin, but most of what she wrote were adventurous romances, often described as “Nancy Drew for adults.” Recently I read her book “Airs Above The Ground,” written in 1965. She was a master at landscape description, and I felt this scene of a meadow in the Alps was worth sharing:
The grass was thick with familiar meadow flowers – harebells, thyme, eyebright, and, where the scythe had not yet passed, the foaming white and yellow of parley and buttercups. What was not so familiar was the fluttering, rustling life of the meadow: the whole surface of the field seemed moving with butterflies – meadow browns, blues, sulphurs, fritillaries, and a few of my own Vanessas, the red admirals and tortoiseshells. Their colours flickered among the flowers, each vanishing momentarily as it clung and folded, then opening to its own bright colour as it fluttered on. Even the green roots of the grass were alive, as countless grasshoppers hopped and fiddled there. The air droned with bees, all zooming past me, I noticed, on the same purposeful track, as if on some apian Autobahn of their own. They were all making for a little hut, the size of a small summer-house, chalet-style and beautifully built of pine, and as full of tiny windows as a dovecot. It was, in fact, a bee-house, a sort of collective hive for several swarms, each one with its own tiny bee-door, behind which it made its honey in candle-shaped combs. Amused and interested, I watched the laden bees aiming like bullets, each for its own door, remembering how, even a few years ago, in my own childhood, the English meadows, too, had been alive with wings, and how quiet now was the poisioned countryside. .
I think it would be hard for most moderns to write such a passage, even if they had Stewart’s eye and skill; we’re almost all from the city, and we just don’t know birds and the flowers and the insects the way her generation did.
But, of course, it’s that last line that caught my eye -— such a beautiful paragraph, ends with “the poisoned countryside.”
And it has become worse. Many have noted that “bug splat,” where driving through the countryside would leave windshields absolutely plastered with dead insects, is a thing of the past.
It’s harder and harder to remember just how alive the world once was, with plants, insects, birds and animals. We can only wonder at, say, stories of the old Grand Banks off the east coast of Canada, where you had only to dip a bucket into the water and it would come up with fish. In my childhood, almost any beach in British Columbia had enough clams for a meal, but now they’re gone. Vietnamese immigrants took too many to sell commercially, and destroyed the beds.
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The long, lost passenger pigeons used to fly in flocks so large they genuinely did blot out the sun, and it was unimaginable to early settlers that one day they would be no more; and many are the accounts of how the Bison flocked in their millions, filling the prairies to the horizon. The prairies themselves were entirely different from what we now know; they had a covering which protected the soil which Europeans removed so they could farm, and thus the soil blew away and lost its fertility.
As a child in the 30s, my (honorary) Uncle Jack would take a hook and line, walk ten minutes out of town on the British Columbia coast, and have a fresh salmon in ten minutes.
All of this we have denuded, poisoned, destroyed. In exchange, we have food that has less nutrients every generation, that you can eat and still feel hungry, and we have a lot of sugar, corn-syrup, salt, and foods made to purposely addict us, so various folks could be rich.
I remember a fantasy book where the hero had traveled to another world at the end of WWII, then returned around 1970, and his description of eating some beef, “it tasted like something had been removed, and something had been added.”
In so many ways, we live in a marvelous cornucopia. I can go to the supermarket and buy a wild variety of food, unavailable to prior generations, but it is a hollow bounty, built on destruction, a heating of the house, by burning it down.
We might as well enjoy it, but the price is being paid already and will be paid even more in the future. We have traded a world that was alive and bounteous, for an artificial cornucopia, and for many of us, that cornucopia will come to an end before we die.
(Introduction and Table of Contents)
Politically active groups form because of ideology and identity: they have beliefs about how the world should be; those beliefs are emotional and create both identification with other people who have the beliefs and shared desire to change the world or keep the world in line with the ideology’s prescriptions.
Identification is necessary, but without ideology there would be no direction: a group wouldn’t know who should rule or what they should do. Should we convert everyone to our religion and dis-empower or even kill those who espouse the wrong way to know and worship God? Or alternatively, is religion something which should be kept separate from politics? Should we elect our leaders, or should they be the sons of those who had power before? Who should be allowed to be a leader? Men only? Property holders only? Members of the aristocracy? Religious officials? Once in power should they try to make everyone equal and help those in need, or should they work to keep power and wealth only in the hands of those worthy of it, like the nobility?
Should you be able to buy land on the market? For much of history almost all land could not be bought. Should people buy their goods in the market, or make it themselves as part of group activities and distribute it based on something other than money? Again, for most of history, most good goods, including food and housing, have not been sold for money.
And so on. Ideology is the content of what any group wants. You can see it today in the differences between conservatives, liberals, socialists, identity politics, social democracy, fascism, and so on.
The power of groups is multiplied by their organization and their self-identification. An isolated union has only a small amount of power, but if there are many unions and they won’t cross strike lines and will support strikes, all of them become much more powerful. When unions make up almost half of all workers, as was the case in most Western countries in the 50s thru 70s, they are obviously more powerful than when they make up under 20% as is the case in many countries today.
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The more cohesive a group is ideologically, the more power they have. This means agreement on goals and methods. If some union members are willing to cross strike lines, unions are weak. If almost all unions or almost everyone in a major political party agree that women should or shouldn’t be able to work, feminism is far more powerful or far weaker than if a group is split on the issue.
If a group is split ideologically on important issues, in fact, it really isn’t a group; it’s a coalition: groups work together when they agree or don’t agree; coalitions and alliances work together only on specific goals they hold in common.
Just because there is disagreement, however, doesn’t make a group a coalition: if group members disagree but once a decision is made will pull together for a goal anyway, they’re still a group, at least politically. If, on the other hand, they will work against each other, they’re a coalition. You saw this in the 1972 American election, where powerful liberals inside the Democratic party actually worked against the party nominee, George McGovern^, because they disagreed with what they considered his radical agenda. To him them, McGovern wasn’t a legitimate candidate, he didn’t believe the right things, therefore he wasn’t a “real Democrat” and opposing him was fine. As a result, McGovern lost to Nixon and that split can be seen to presage the loss of the Democratic party’s status as the ruling party of American politics in 1980, which lead to the Republicans taking power, and the new ideology of neoliberalism becoming the hegemonic ideology of not just America, but of the West in general.
Small groups and homogenous groups; groups whose members have many similar characteristics are easier to keep coherent and to organize. As a result, elite factions are always powerful, not just because they have more money or power in the current system, but just because they are small and members have so much in common, they coordinate with one another easily.
You can see this fairly clearly in both Britain and the United States, where elites tend to go to the same private schools and then the same universities: the Ivy League and a few small private liberal colleges in the US, and Oxford and Cambridge in Britain. Elites in both country were raised and educated together in very similar fashion and they know each other personally. It is no wonder they can act together to create a world in line with their ideology and perceived interests. (Remember that perceived interests are based on ideology.)
Even small groups that aren’t elite, but are homogeneous and organized can punch well above their weight. In America think of New York’s orthodox Jews, or Miami’s Cuban exiles: they are solid voting blocs and are pandered to, because they can deliver votes and resources, including money.
At some points such groups included medieval guilds, unions, Masons and other fraternal societies, and Indian Zoroastrians (the Parsi) and so on.
Marxists emphasize class, but classes often aren’t political groups. Marxists who talk about class consciousness recognize this: a class (industrial workers) is only a political group when they identify with each other and have a common ideology, and they are only an effective political group when they have some form of organization, as was the case with unions from the mid 19th century. American farmers up until World War II organized not just thru political parties, but through fraternal (and in some cases sororal) lodges which had vast power and could mobilize money, political workers and voters.
The most effective groups are all what are known as mobilized groups: they are conscious of themselves as groups, have shared identity and ideology and have some form of organization, whether formal or informal.
Often enough people’s political groupings are not horizontal: not class based class-based, but based on vertical alignment. Married women are more conservative than unmarried because they vote with their husband, who they identify with and who is often the primary provider: what is good for him is good for them. People may want what is good for their industry, and so oil workers may vote the same as their bosses: the vertical ties to their superiors is are more important than the horizontal tie to workers in other fields.
In everyday life, a workers who wants to be promoted finds their closest competition isn’t the boss, it’s their co-workers, who they must “beat” to impress the boss. Workers cohere together, in part, when they see that most of them won’t be getting promoted and that their best chance for a raise isn’t to beat other workers, but to beat the bosses.
Such perceived interest is two-way: it is informed by ideology and identity, but it also informs identity and ideology. Movement of individuals between self-perceived groups and changes of ideology and identity happens. In a society with multiple ideologies, identities and political groups, it can only take a relatively small shift to shift the ruling ideology. In 1980 so-called “Reagan Democrats” gave Reagan his margin of victory, just as in 72 anti-McGovern democrats gave the election to Nixon. In neither case did most Democrats shift, just a minority.
Since the Reagan Democrats had changed their ideology, however, they became a permanent vote for neoliberalism, and to get some back Bill Clinton himself became a neoliberal. Such shifts are part of the causal chain of ideological shifts.
But, without the oil shocks, inflation and high unemployment of the 70s: without it being seen for over a decade that post-war liberalism was failing to deliver on core promises, there wouldn’t have been enough Reagan Democrats to flip the sub-ideology.
Coalitions of groups are most effective when they have the policy of war allies: no separate peace. In such situations, groups in a coalition won’t cut ^side-deals that go against their allies core interests of their allies.
In the US, as of this writing, the Republican party could be seen ^as an alliance between traditional fiscal/corporate conservatives, libertarians and conservative “populists”. They vote together and can rarely be broken apart: they rarely make a separate peace with Democrats. The Democratic party, however, has some neoliberals who will make separate peace, and since the Senate is 50-50, that means Biden can’t pass his agenda since he can’t hold all 50 votes, while Republican leader Mitch McConnell can hold all 50 of his votes.
This is to a large extent based on legitimacy: to neoliberals doing left wing things like give poor people money and fighting climate change isn’t legitimate: it’s not how government should act. Left-wingers shouldn’t be in power, they aren’t the right type of people, and the policies they want are just wrong. It’s OK to stop them.
The Democratic party itself is at best lukewarm to progressives: Bernie Sanders, who ran for the nomination was an independent, and while independents preferred him, registered Democrats did not. The split in the party is real, and to neoliberals left-wingers don’t have legitimacy.
But many of the ideas that progressives push are just what would have been mainstream during the New Deal and post-War liberal periods: the ruling ideology has changed, and along with it legitimacy and with those shifts so also has changed which party is dominant, and how strong the internal alliances within the parties are. (These shifts happened over time, there used to be more members of both parties willing to vote for the other side’s agenda.)
What caused the change in ideology and identity and legitimacy, cascading to groups and then to government control was in large part a change in the environment. Not just oil shocks, but much more.
All ideologies are influenced by their environment, and it is thus environment to which we turn next.
A few years ago someone asked me for a reading list. I recently came across it again when someone else asked, and I thought I’d share it with everyone.
I wouldn’t necessarily read this exactly in order, and what you need to read will will depend on your background, the person asking had very little in the social sciences and humanities.
Writers who had an outsize affect on me compared to how others view them are Randall Collins, Jane Jacobs and Damasio.
“Conflict Sociology” is dense and long and many would be served by skipping it, but it’s also the book I read that no one else has that has done me the greatest service. “Debt” is also long.
“Cities in Civilization” is long, but each chapter is on one city and it can be read in gulps, and it’s excellent.
The List
To start in Philosophy I would read A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel, it’s a bit dated so you won’t get a lot of 20th century, but excellent for the rest, just remember he has a point of view.
I would read the two Collins books I reviewed: Max Weber, A Skeleton Key” & An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology.
If you like those find a 1970s copy of Conflict Sociology, and read Interaction Ritual Chains by Collins as well.
I would read Jane Jacobs Economy of Cities & Cities and the Wealth of Nations“. If you like those the next two would be Death and Life of the Great American Cities and Systems of Survival.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of scientific revolutions – short, to the point
Justice by Michael Sandel – reviewed on my site
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Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (be careful to see how this applies to more than the USSR.)
Confucius and the Chinese Way by Creel (older book)
I would read some Freud, because you can’t understand the 20th century, especially mid 20th century, without him. Three or four of his early books. They’re short and well written.
Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips
Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells — an understanding of the effects of the agricultural revolution is necessary
The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (be sure to google the critiques of it, particularly with respect to women’s religion.) Dense, very dense, but fascinating.
Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang.
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, in the commons, you can probably find a *.pdf, but it’s long.
Debt, the first 5,000 years by Graeber.
Medieval Cities, their Origins and Revival of Trade — nice short book, .pdfs available
Sun Tzu, The Art of War. (Get one with commentary)
If you have time on your hand Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization will reward you, it’s about much more than cities.
Machiavelli, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Do not skip Livy, the Prince is all most people read and it gives a skewed vision of Machiavelli’s thought. Discourses is longer and more important. Remember that Machiavelli gets a lot of history wrong, but it doesn’t really matter.
If you don’t have much background in them, Karen Armstrong’s books on Buddha and Muhammed are decent introductions, bearing in mind that Armstrong clearly doesn’t understand meditative accomplishments, so it’s an outsider look at Buddha.
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, largest land empire in history, probably good to learn about it, and Genghis Khan was an amazing leader.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner (despite behaviouralism’s issues, it really does describe a lot of human behaviour very well, and you can easily apply it to mental events even if behaviouralists frowned on that.)
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I got a lot out of this back in the day. It’s light in some ways, but still worthwhile)
Descartes Error by Anthony Damasio (I found his other books weak, this one is very important.)
There really should be more on India, and China but the topics I consider most worthwhile there are hard to find good introductions that aren’t misleading to people who don’t have a background. In particular Buddhist/Hindu metaphysics and epistemology is very strong, but also very hard to read and understand. Pagan religion is missing, Roman history and culture, etc, etc. Obviously if you haven’t read the New and Old testament’s you should, ideally with a very annotated version to guide you in the meaning where it’s less than obvious. There’s a fair bit to be said for reading some Plato (especially the early stuff) and Aristotle, as well as Cicero, but I’d read Russel first, to get some background. Philosophy tends to be a pain to read until you learn the lingo of the specific type/period of philosophy; it seems harder than it is.
What are some books that had a huge influence on you?