Please share books that affected your worldview or changed your thoughts.
For me, it’s A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman. I studied business and work in finance, and before reading it, I never questioned the idea that capitalism was just the natural way of things. This book made me realize that capitalism is man made. It had a beginning and it can have an end. Wealth and poverty are not just inevitable, they are created by human decisions. That perspective really shook me.
Do you have a book that had a similar impact on you?
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I used to be a semi-devout christian, but at 15 I started reading the bible while on a basically mandatory bible camp of sorts. So the bible changed that.
Hope I don’t get flak for this one, but:
Jurassic Park. Of everything in this book only one thing really stuck with me. The park was overrun with dinos because the computer counted the ones it meeded to, then just stopped counting. It found its target of, say, 2 raptors. I didnt need to keep count of the others because it located its expected two. Good enough.
I’m on mobile so its a little hard to write out my thoughts and find accurate quotes and notes, but I think you’ll get what I’m saying.
That’s the earliest idea of a confirmational bias I can remeber when I was much younger, and I think helped me with critical thinking moving on.
most books I read impact and change me, lol
With regards to politics, reading Marx (especially the 1844 Manuscripts) and Chomsky initiated a major change in my ideological thinking, and from there it was mostly history books helping fill in the details.
Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, for example, was a history book that really impacted my way of thinking.
Grapes of Wrath. Until I read that I never thought of the human side and impact of the industrial revolution. Eye opening.
1984
I know it’s a typical answer. But there’s a reason for that.
That book will put the fear of fascism in you in a way that even actual history doesn’t. That book caused me to take historic examples of fascism more seriously and personally.
Apparently not enough of my fellow Americans have read it.
Blackshirts and Reds made the biggest difference on me regarding how I view Socialist states, also called AES, in that it helped me see them in a more sympathetic light and debunked a lot of Red Scare mythology.
As far as personal thought process is concerned, the big 3 works that made a big impact on me are Socialism: Utopian and Scientific for outlining the why of Marxism, Elementary Principles of Philosophy for clearly and simply explaining what Dialectical and Historical Materialism are and how they came to be, and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, for explaining the primary obstacle in the way of Socialism worldwide.
Honorary mention to Capital, I am not finished with it yet but at the midpoint, it has helped flesh out parts of Marx’s Law of Value that are only briefly touched on in works like Wage Labor and Capital and Wages, Price and Profit.
I read Lenin’s The State and Revolution and followed it with a chaser of Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds a couple years ago. A fine pairing.
