perfidy

When I asked for good books to read, Aretae, Foseti and Isegoria all gave me links to “Books that Influenced Me” posts. I guess I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but here’s my list of books that played a part in making me the sicko that I am today.

• Heinlein; The Bible - My earliest reading started with Heinlein. My mom read an article in the local paper about good books for kids. It mentioned Heinlein, and specifically Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Set the course of my reading for most of the next 35 years. Heinlein’s Juveniles had a profound impact on my thinking - the value and danger of recklessness; the importance of thinking, the martial virtues and competence. It created a huge chunk of my worldview. I later went on to read nearly every thing Heinlein wrote. The other early influence is the Bible, King James Version. I’ve never been particularly religious, but the language of the KJV is second only to Shakespeare. I used to read Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” This prepared me well for High School.
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus / Schroedinger’s Cat - Shortly after High School, and after leaving college for a major in beer and other intoxicants, I was a bit at sea. Pirsig’s book blew my mind - the idea that some random dude on a motorcycle was challenging the entire edifice of western philosophy was just awesome. Later readings made me appreciate the care with which he drew his analogies. This book was the start of my heretical thinking, as opposed to my earlier reflexive contrarianism. Robert Anton Wilson’s books also blew my mind. Or maybe it was the drugs. Still and all, the big pull from these books was how important perception is to reality - that your worldview can control what you see, and that things that don’t fit really are invisible to most people.
• Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation - Amazing book. Convinced me, before I had heard the word Singularity that it was bound to happen. Also made me realize that most sf writers are frighteningly conservative in their extrapolations.  Nanotechnology, AI and biotech will change the world beyond imagining, and any sf that doesn't wrestle with this is not the true sf.
• Shakespeare - I was trapped in a crappy apartment with no money, not much of a job, and a copy of the complete work I picked up for $13 at an antique store. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I read most of it, and read it slowly. Christ, what a writer. No one compares. No one.
• John Brunner, Shockwave Rider; Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age / Snow Crash - John Brunner and Neal Stephenson are in some ways my favorite sf writers - they not only cram their books with great techojoy, they create vivid societies that result from the technological changes. These books changed the way I looked at technology and its implications.
• Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern / Intellectuals / Modern Times - Many academic historians give Johnson the cold shoulder. But at least one Academic Historian, my dad, loves him and introduced me. I’d been reading history by the truckload since I left high school, but most of my reading was centered on 1600 and before. Modern Times was the history I should have learned in high school - it is a wonderful tonic for the recieved notions of our recent past. These three books put me on a more conservative path to understanding the world, away from the unfocused quasi-liberalism I had absorbed from my surroundings. Unlike Foseti and Moldbug, I never went through a larval libertarian phase before embracing reaction.  Over time, I developed an appreciation of the flaws of Conservatism, and as soon as I found Moldbug ten years later, went straight to the darkness.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel - fascinating book. I now think that he went way overboard on the geographical determinism - race and IQ have a huge part to play that Diamond discounts utterly. Still, brilliant work.
• V.D. Hanson, The Soul of Battle - really got me going on classical history for starters, but this book, (and Carnage and Culture, too) is a direct opposite to Diamond. Hanson argues that culture is vastly more important than geography. I noticed also that the “West” while having a constant tradition of freedom and individualism was only occasionally democratic. This was the beginning of my questioning why we associate the former with the latter.
• The Writings of Mencius Moldbug - when I first happened upon Moldbug, it was like coming home. I’d built up, over the previous decade, an understanding of the world that had no explanation. Moldbug gave me a philosophical structure that explained things I had already noticed, and thought about. Still feeling the effects of this one. For one, I still resist giving up the faith of my youth, in the inherent goodness of American republicanism.
• The Catastrophists - I hit this one about the same time that I found Moldbug. I read a book by the sf author James Hogan, Kicking the Sacred Chao which details that author’s scientific heresies. Among them was another look at Velikovsky and Catastrophism. I’d read Velikovsky in high school - my local library had his stuff on the shelves - but I read it like science fiction. Hogan convinced me that at the very least, Velikovsky had been the victim of a colossal hit job by mainstream science and Carl Sagan in particular. Since I already knew Sagan was an asshole, that seemed plausible. I started looking into it more, and have concluded that at least some version of the Catastrophist outline is likely, and that the Plasma Cosmology view of astrophysics is almost certainly true. Complete revolution in my scientific and political worldviews in three years!  Electric Sky by Don Scott and Electric Universe by Talbot and Thornhill are the two most accessible.
• Neal Strauss, The Game - I’d read and enjoyed the evolutionary psychology books for years, but here it was put into practice. Strauss is a wonderful writer, and this is an inherently fascinating topic.