After being indoctrinated to hate everything about the west and Christianity for most of my life — through school, university, news media, entertainment, and the administrative state
— and after coming to hate the west and Christianity as a consequence of this indoctrination, I really found the following books to be the ultimate mindfucks:
- Heretics by GK Chesterton
- Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
- Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America by Mary Grabar
- A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
- Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
A Conflict of Visions is a good one. Thomas Sowell is a true intellectual. Sure, he has strong biases, but I believe those developed out of his intense study of the facts, rather than being implanted in him before he started thinking for himself, which is sadly the case for many so-called intellectuals nowadays.
If you could recommend only one of the others, which would it be?
Understanding our past and knowing we did some pretty fucked up shit isn't hating the west, its dealing with it and learning from it. I think you would agree that how Germany has dealt with their past is good compared to sweeping it under the rug and saying that while Hitler did some bad stuff he had some good points.
First problem - it is gigantic. Statistically there is no chance that so many books are so revolutionary genius that they are on some other level etc.
Second problem - it is a generic top100/top500 style list, populated by exact same old "classic" fiction books like every other list on the internet.
There are some "above average" books intersperced in this list, but a casual reader will not know how to find them among the books being there simply on the virtue of being good and 50-100 years old. Being old book is not a virtue, unless we are in a history class.
Before looking at the list, two of the books that came to my mind as possible candidates were Permutation City by Greg Egan, and Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Permutation City made the list, and I definitely endorse it.
Glasshouse is not on the list, but I definitely think it's worth a read.
Neuromancer is on the list and it may be my personal favorite novel (if not #1 on my list, it's very close).
A couple of Murakami novels were on the list here. I've read several of his novels and would basically make a blanket statement "read anything by Murakami".
Tor Nørretranders' The User Illusion was a great read, hereby warmly recommended. One of the principal ideas was that our senses take in many orders of magnitude more of data than we are able to be conscious of. I believe he estimated something like 10 Mbps taken in and 80? baud being aware of — something like that, I should read it again sometime.
"Revolutionary Road", by Richard Yates. Because it uncovers the greatest conspiracy of our time.
Also "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy, for the same reason.
The real so called "mindfuck" comes when what you read unravels the reality around you, not when it sends you in some utopia with the promise of a metaphor built to solve a great mistery you actually don't give a f... about.
P.S.This is just one of the HN threads which is more valuable than the article it refers to.
Thank you for all the good books mentioned here, HN!
I think I've read about a quarter of the list, and only a couple of the ones I've read fit that title to me. I wish the list contained a line explaining why...
- Heretics by GK Chesterton
- Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton
- Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America by Mary Grabar
- A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
- Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
reply