A Reading List

 I'm not given to epiphanies or "learn and grow" moments. I suppose I was during my youth -- but then again, I was full of shit in those days. Though I'm less prone to pseudo-satori than in the past, I find that I'm more receptive to interesting ideas. The slavish devotion to intellectual orthodoxy that handicapped me during my teens and twenties has yielded to a certain "ideological agnosticism," if you will. I no longer believe that any given philosophy or ideology has "all the answers"; and bluntly put, I consider most top-to-bottom bullshit.

Having long since given up bandying lines from Atlas Outsourced like a fry cook slinging hash at a greasy spoon ("Your hunger is not a claim on my Happy Meal! I will never supersize an order for the sake of another man, or ask another man to supersize an order for mine! Are you listening, Hamburglar?"), I'm inclined to consider ideas critically rather than dismissively.

This has done little for my sense of certainty -- but as one needn't be certain to be right, it hasn't cost me much sleep. I agree with Rand's assertion that man needs a philosophy (an integrated view of existence), but I draw the line at "sieving" reality and discarding the bits that threaten to disintegrate one's view(s).

I'll further agree that contradictions can't exist. Paradoxes and related mindfucks, on the other hand, usually indicate that we're mistaking the map for the terrain. When they occur, we're left with few choices: 1.) correct the map; 2.) ignore the discrepancy; 3.) try to force the terrain to conform to the map; 4.) deem topography a futile endeavor; 5.) dismiss the very notion of terrain as illusory; or 6.) go completely batshit, run screaming into the night, and either join a cult or spend the next few years living in a bottle/bag of weed/packet of organic bean sprouts. Having tried all six approaches (and I'm sure there are others), I've taken a shine to option 1.

Doing so hasn't made me any friends. (As a matter of fact, it's probably cost me a few). It's destroyed any inclination -- however slight -- I may once have had to be a "joiner" (in Faulkner's words: "I don't want to belong to anything but the human race"), and it's played hell with my voting record. It's also taken a big ol' mothafucka of a pimp stick to my ego on occasion.

On the bright side, I'm neither in jail nor in the "skull orchard." I'm more or less happily married (she snores like a chainsaw and drinks too much coffee-- the foulest beverage on earth; I prefer tea), and I'm no longer terrified of saying "I was mistaken" or "I don't know."

And I've gone on too long. None of the books on this list contains (drumroll...) ALL THE ANSWERS. But they've all helped me correct the "map," negotiate the "terrain" and put things in perspective. The best require days to read, and months or years to hunt down and peruse the bibliographical material. The worst (and I hesitate to use the term -- they're all good) provide "crash courses" in high weirdness.

The Underground History of American Education -- John Taylor Gatto
Propaganda -- Jacques Ellul
Blink -- Malcolm Gladwell
Tremendous Trifles-- G.K. Chesterton
The Ideological Imagination: The Rise of Mass Bigotry in Our Time, and its Roots in the Thought of Hobbes, Rousseau and Marx -- Louis J. Halle
Confessions -- St. Augustine
The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China -- Ralph D. Sawyer (Ed.)
A Book of Five Rings -- Musashi Miyamoto
The Sword and the Mind -- Yagyu Munenori
Conversations With Socrates -- Xenophon
The Sixteen Satires -- Juvenal
Touched With Fire -- Kay Redfield Jamison
Achilles in Vietnam -- Jonathan Shay
The Redneck Manifesto -- Jim Goad
Introducing NLP -- Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in North America -- David Hackett Fischer
The Naked Ape -- Desmond Morris
Manwatching -- Desmond Morris
The Ominous Parallels -- Leonard Peikoff
Emotional Vampires -- Albert Bernstein
Inside the Criminal Mind -- Stanton Samenow

And though I'm loath to recommend him, read Machiavelli. Except for Adolf Hitler and Leo Strauss (neither of whom, one imagines, enjoyed acknowledging an intellectual debt to a centuries-dead, "racially inferior" Katzenfreßer), Ol' Nick is still the most pungent, lingering, influential fart in the elevator of modern American political "thought."

Comments

[Jordans 4]

Take a moment to stop and appre- ciate the memories you have made, the memory making opportunies around you and make someone feel special today.

[Hal]

I've been perusing The Redneck Manifesto on GoogleBooks... being the cheap gobshite I am.

What struck me strongly is how easily I could mistake Jim Goad's prose for yours. (That's not an insult, btw)

I know you're busy, but write more dammit!!

Hal

ps. call me you ignerint hillbilly