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Homo universalis?
Aug. 9th, 2024 06:09 pmAs I was reading a post about Czechia v Romania stats about books read per year, at first I thought to suggest that only a few books need to be read to innoculate self against two big falsehoods:
* The Goat Herder's Guide to the Galaxy, aka The Bible or the Quran (to eliminate the shackles of a masochistic long con kultbund with a psychotic manipulative eschatology)
* Cioran/Ionesco (to eliminate the shackles of a marginal culture steeped in self-pity and religiosity). Note: If not Romanian, these authors can be substituted with appropriate alternatives for your own birth lottery artificial polity (e.g. Zinn/Chomsky/Schlesinger/Toqueville for Muricans).
I then thought that the whole discussion is a red herring centered around quantity over quality. The discussion should be first about what is a good foundation for a well-rounded individual. Before we even start talking about how much one needs to read, we need to talk about what one should read first before anything else.
A few books/essays/authors/concepts come to mind aside from the above in no particular order (as they were foundational for me and possibly anyone raised in a Abrahamic religious family):
* Plato's Republic
* Familiarity with common Fallacies (t2)
* Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm
* Huxley's Brave New World
* Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (t2)
* Homer's Odyssey
* Tao Te Ching
* Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
* Russell's Why I am Not a Christian
* Norse/Greek mythology
* Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (t2)
Optional reading (especially for Americans):
* Zinn's A People's History of the United States
* Chomsky's critique of US gunboat diplomacy/foreign policy and US media's complicity
* Schlesinger's Imperial Presidency
* Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
* Atwood's Handmaid's Tale
* Toqueville's Democracy in America
* Federalist Papers, US Declaration of Independence (including first draft), US Constitution and especially its amendments, landmark SCOTUS cases
Extra credit:
* Asimov's Foundation
* Swift's Gulliver's Travels
* Machiavelli's Prince
* Tsu's Art of War
Other lists: quora/Jeff Clarke/Curtis Lindsay.
* The Goat Herder's Guide to the Galaxy, aka The Bible or the Quran (to eliminate the shackles of a masochistic long con kultbund with a psychotic manipulative eschatology)
* Cioran/Ionesco (to eliminate the shackles of a marginal culture steeped in self-pity and religiosity). Note: If not Romanian, these authors can be substituted with appropriate alternatives for your own birth lottery artificial polity (e.g. Zinn/Chomsky/Schlesinger/Toqueville for Muricans).
I then thought that the whole discussion is a red herring centered around quantity over quality. The discussion should be first about what is a good foundation for a well-rounded individual. Before we even start talking about how much one needs to read, we need to talk about what one should read first before anything else.
A few books/essays/authors/concepts come to mind aside from the above in no particular order (as they were foundational for me and possibly anyone raised in a Abrahamic religious family):
* Plato's Republic
* Familiarity with common Fallacies (t2)
* Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm
* Huxley's Brave New World
* Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (t2)
* Homer's Odyssey
* Tao Te Ching
* Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
* Russell's Why I am Not a Christian
* Norse/Greek mythology
* Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (t2)
Optional reading (especially for Americans):
* Zinn's A People's History of the United States
* Chomsky's critique of US gunboat diplomacy/foreign policy and US media's complicity
* Schlesinger's Imperial Presidency
* Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
* Atwood's Handmaid's Tale
* Toqueville's Democracy in America
* Federalist Papers, US Declaration of Independence (including first draft), US Constitution and especially its amendments, landmark SCOTUS cases
Extra credit:
* Asimov's Foundation
* Swift's Gulliver's Travels
* Machiavelli's Prince
* Tsu's Art of War
Other lists: quora/Jeff Clarke/Curtis Lindsay.
