Reviews

The Double is Dostoyevsky’s second published work and is a definite precursor to much of his later work. Following the life of a low-level bureaucrat named Golyadkin for a couple chaotic days. Golyadkin is a weak and flakey person with crippling anxiety and bordering on psychotic. After attending a party and committing some embarrassing party fouls he is thrown out into the snowy night in St. Petersburg. It is in this state that Golyadkin literally bumps into his double a person that looks just like him and even shares his name. The rest of the book follows the relationship of these two characters as the double is the inverse of the real Golyadkin and has everything the original lacks. This book was also adapted into a movie with Jesse Eisenburg who is a great match for this character. The style is very surreal and also satirical it is much different from anything else I’ve read from Dostoyevsky. It was also the worst book I’ve read from him, in fact I think he says it best ...

Summary Written in 1844, Max Stirner aimed to stir-ner the pot. While teaching at a school for girls by day, he was a revolutionary writer by night. His publication of “The Ego and Its Own” necessitated his resignation from teaching, but earned him a spot among influential German thinkers. As a young man, Stirner attended lectures by Hegel before joining the ‘Young Hegelians’, a group that included Marx and Engels but eventually imploded due to disagreements - a common issue among philosophers. In “The Ego and Its Own”, Stirner seeks to open the reader’s eyes to the world’s workings. He argues that we are born into a body limited by materialistic constraints - we can’t fly, we need to eat, we must stay warm, etc. However, as we mature, we discover a limitless internal mind. This internal world, unbeknownst to us, has been populated with “spooks” or “ghosts” by society, religion, parents, etc. Since we are unaware of the origins of these ideas, we feel they are inviolable and real. Stirner aims to demonstrate that these are not real (in the sense of natural laws) and that surrendering our autonomy to these ideas is a mistake. He argues that all our ideals are egoists, working only for their advancement. Stirner poses the question: why work for another egoist when you can act independently? Beyond this, he suggests that human behavior, when examined, is ultimately driven by egotism. For example, why did person A donate to an orphanage? If you probe deeply enough, it appears that actions are motivated by perceived personal benefit. Stirner posits that there are only two ways to live: either as a conscious egoist or as one who believes they aren’t. Recognizing one’s egoism, according to Stirner, allows a person to cast off any “spook” or ideal like humanity, nation-states, etc., as soon as it no longer serves the individual. He argues that we are more than concepts and should not submit to them when they cease to serve us. Unlike Ayn Rand, he does not elaborate on what this approach might entail in practice. ...

I’ve listened to Sammy boy’s podcast a fair bit so I figured I should check out some of his work. In the End of Faith, he comes out of the gate swinging. This book was written in 2005 while the Twin Towers were still fresh in everyone’s minds. So, while it pulls no punches for any religion there is a special place in Sam’s hell for Islam. He claims that much like we have retired Zeus and Apollo it is time to do the same to Jesus and Mohammed. A central claim of this book is that religion is that last place in society that has managed to remove itself from criticism. It attempts to justify itself from reason while dismissing reason as a valid way to understanding its truths. He then makes some interesting points about religious moderates not really helping things because to those living the letter of the law a religious moderate is a failed fundamentalist who will likely end up in hell. This is a very valid insight in my opinion, moderates have no leg to stand on. To me this has always been my biggest thing against “Jesus loved the gays” viewpoint. Another quip “sacred texts are sacred because they were thought so yesterday”. He then fires some shots at Bill Moyers trying to revivify these traditions. Right or wrong at points in the book Harris feels like an angry parent who wants to tell us: “you’ve been very naughty with your myths and so you’ve lost your privilege to use them! Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.” He also brought up this point (that I haven’t been able to verify) about the impossibility of removing contradictory beliefs from your own head. He said, if there was a computer as large as the universe made up circuits the size of protons running at the speed of light that verified each new belief against all its prior beliefs before continuing, and this computer had been running since the big bang it would still be working on cross referencing its 300th belief. Yikes! Another interesting insight is the concept that belief may be a passive response from the brain while in order to disbelieve something you have to expend mental effort. Good for Tigers in the jungle, bad for Bitcoin taking me to the moon. He then makes the common critique of sacred texts easily being used to justify violence (i.e. stoning an adulterer in the OT or killing infidels in the Koran), indeed he argues that it takes more work most times to sidestep such awkward verses than to accept them. Fair play! He does some minor stanning for the Israel/ Palestine situation, arguing that if Palestine was in power there wouldn’t be a conflict because there wouldn’t be any Israel left. This too seems like a fair point. He criticizes Chomsky for laying the responsibility at the foot of American foreign policy arguing that America’s foreign policy is not the driving factor behind terrorist attacks and that religion is. If you stop and think about it Chomsky’s opinion does seem a little weak, because one would expect many more Vietnamize suicide bombers than Middle Eastern suicide bombers, but to Sam’s point the Vietnamize aren’t Muslim. Chomsky has further made the classic liberal blunder of attributing unequal ethical blame to the actions of those in power. One only has to stop and question the motives of the two sides. The US seems to go out of its way to reduce civilian casualties while the Taliban seems to do the opposite. Cynically you could say that to the Taliban every civilian dead is one less infidel, while to the US every civilian dead is bad PR. He then ends the book making a case for spirituality without un-reason. In particular he singles out how the eastern traditions have largely been able to make a form of spirituality the is based on experience and not faith. Overall, I think that this book, similarly to “The case for Christ” will not convince anyone one way or the other about religion unless they were already halfway there. I found some compelling critiques and ideas to munch on and that is good enough for me. He received a lot of flak in the book for making the statement “There are some ideas that are worth killing someone over”. This is a great statement to vilify someone until further inspection and it becomes patently obvious that this is the only reason, we kill anyone and so the statement is almost pointless. Not a must read, especially if you’ve listened to any of his stuff for very long as you probably already understand most of the ideas put forth in the book. The book itself is well written and entertaining. People/Sam Harris

This is the oldest work of fiction in the history of the world. Read it! The oldest copies date around 2100BC. For reference the oldest copies of the Bible we have on hand are from the dead sea scrolls which date to 200-300 BC. That’s not to say that the dead sea scrolls are the first copies of the bible but they are the oldest we have while the rest are probably lost due to the writing material of choice, so we’ll never really know when the first copy of the Bible was written. The reason this survived for so long was that it was inscribed on a clay tablet. Going into this story I expected it to be dull. I was wrong, probably in part thanks to the particular translation I used, but on the whole this book is a must read. I think the most striking and controversial thing is that in the book there is an account of the flood. Now I know what you picture in your head when I say that, but literally when a character in the book started recounting the flood, it was totally shocking. The similarities and details couched in such exotic settings made for an incredible mind-bending experience. I won’t go over the similarities to save them for those who read. The story was then followed by an essay by the translator who explained where the text came from and how it was translated. This too was helpful to get more of an understanding of its place in history. At any rate I’d definitely put this one on your reading list.

I enjoyed this reread a lot more than the first time through. There were some points where he takes tangents and side roads which left me at times bored at other times frustrated. Yet the author is well aware of this tendency and warns the reader that it will happen from time to time, so I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself. There were so many parts of this book where it would feel as if I was reading my own journal, had I been a better writer. Several overlapping points of personality made a lot of his views relatable. I very much liked his humble approach to knowledge and latitude when it came to accepting other’s customs. His love for life as it is, not in concept but in embodied reality was refreshing. Everything in moderation, this goes for thought as well as action. I am sure the older I get, the more I will appreciate and understand from this humorous and likeable man. ...

I had never read any Emerson and was excited to stick my toe in the water. This book was a collection of some of his most famous essays. Written in the mid nineteenth century he is one of those early American intellectuals which seemed to have burned brightly and all but disappeared. Emerson was one of the leaders of the transcendentalist movement which started in the 1820s-1830s. These essays do a lot to outline in vague terms the ideas Emerson had about life. Which are essentially romantic, you as the individual are the orthodox of your life. Heaven is not a place out there somewhere, but something that can be experienced in everyday life given the right mindset. Humans are at their best when they are reliant on themselves for their ideas and beliefs. Man is one thing, that an individual rises out of, this is what gives literature its meaning in the sense that it speaks to that common denominator in all of us. “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” These essays covered a wide range of topics my personal favorites were on friendship and self-reliance. This will definitely be a book I am looking forward to getting a hard copy of, because his writing is so poetic as it is probably best enjoyed a sentence or a paragraph at a time. Very beautifully written. Emerson himself was a Unitarian minister when he was younger but ended up resigning largely because his worldview no longer aligned with what the church’s dogma. I respect that, and that American individualism is everywhere in his texts. As a sad side note in his old age about a decade before his death he started suffering from aphasia. Aphasia is the inability to comprehend or formulate speech. A cruel irony.

This was an experience, a probably literal fever dream. This book was never meant to be published as most of it is notes that he had written to himself. As such it isn’t the best most fun read, but it would probably be the most interesting journal you ever read. To me this book has its highs and lows. There are parts of this book that are fascinating, frustrating, redundant, contradictory, brilliant, and insightful. Being a preeminent science fiction writer, his strength is in his original ideas. There is no end to them. This book’s inspiration is based on a series of events that led him to the experience of singular mystical experience that was so life changing to him that he spends the next 8 years theorizing about its source and significance. He only stops theorizing about it because he died. As a reader it makes you want to experience something that significant just once in your life, but then again maybe not. Due to the type of mystical experience that was had, religious terms are best suited to try and describe it, but rest assured this religion of PKD is unlike any you’ve ever heard. I wrote down some of the ideas that stuck out to me, that I will continue to think about for a while. ...

Also available as a long essay. The Fall- An Account of Modernity by John the Baptist There is always a space between the thoughts in a writer’s head and those that the reader is receptive to, yet when it came to The Fall, I found that space to be incredibly small. Camus boils down modernity to one thing: “judgement”. This unique framework for viewing our image of self and relation to others illuminates what otherwise would appear to be simple self-aggrandizement with a desperate attempt to avoid the Last Judgement. ...

Summary The Federalist Papers are a collection of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in support of the Constitution drafted in 1787, over a decade after the Declaration of Independence. With the benefit of hindsight, historical events and structures can often seem predetermined, obscuring the many decisions that had to be made along the way. The journey of the United States from independence to forming a federal government was not a straight path. The land won by the Revolutionary War consisted of 13 colonies, newly rebranded as “states.” Each state had adopted its own constitution shortly after rebelling against the British crown. These individual states were loosely united during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, which defined a weak central government and functioned more like a treaty than a true organizing principle. This absence of centralized energy resulted in many inefficiencies during both war and peace. It may seem obvious now, but for the governors of these separate states, the idea of surrendering autonomy and assuming shared responsibility with neighboring states was far from intuitive. Thus, the framers faced an uphill battle in convincing all 13 states that it was in their best interest to form a federal government. This debate can be seen as an early manifestation of the enduring tension between “big government” and “small government.” Even though the federal government of that time was far more limited than it is today, it still represented a form of “big government” that had to contend with many of the same critiques leveled by libertarians today. The framers’ greatest inspiration was their nearly obsessive desire to construct a government that would, by its very design, prevent the rise of a dictator. “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” – Alexander Hamilton One of the key principles was that it should be the structure of the government itself that prevents abuse of power, not merely the laws it creates. This is why so much of The Federalist Papers is devoted to discussing which responsibilities should fall to the legislative, judicial, or executive branches. It was also part of the rationale behind making the Constitution difficult to amend, as the framers hoped to limit the extent to which any bad actor could consolidate power. ...

Summary John Maynard Keynes would go on to become a household name in economics, ultimately achieving the highest honor of becoming an adjectival eponym for his ‘Keynesian’ style of economic thinking. Keynes published this monumental work in 1936 during the height of the Great Depression, a period that baffled many classical economists. The primary issue at the time was cripplingly high unemployment rates paired with low demand, triggering a deflationary spiral. Theoretically, this situation should not have occurred because higher unemployment would typically lead to lower wages due to increased competition for jobs. Lower wages should, in turn, result in higher profits for investors, leading to increased investment and, subsequently, higher employment. This is what economists call equilibrium, where demand and supply are perfectly balanced. So why wasn’t this happening during the Great Depression? Classical economists believed that some form of market distortion, such as fiscal or monetary policy, must have been at play. Keynes, however, argued that the distortion they sought was not the result of policy but an inherent feature of economies themselves. While it might be simplistically argued that free markets will eventually find the prized equilibrium, Keynes believed that economies could get stuck along the way, like a climber snagged on a ledge. He summarized this idea in his best-known quote: “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” The central idea of Keynes’ The General Theory is that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labor but by the aggregate demand in the economy. This marked a departure from classical schools of thought, which assumed that supply would naturally generate demand. Keynes observed several circumstances that could disrupt this process. For example, wages tend to be “sticky,” meaning they are more easily adjusted upwards than downwards. As long as demand grows, wages can be sustained, but when demand contracts, employers are more likely to lay off workers than reduce wages. Moreover, Keynes emphasized the role of behavioral economics, noting that while thrift may be a virtue for individuals, widespread saving instead of investing can contract overall demand. One solution Keynes proposed for governments to stimulate a stagnating economy was through active spending. In hindsight, this is precisely what helped pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression. Between FDR’s New Deal and the massive government investment spurred by World War II, these actions acted like defibrillators, restarting the economic engine. Why is government spending sometimes necessary to combat deflation and high unemployment? It starts with a Keynesian concept known as the multiplier. This principle connects to another economic concept—the marginal utility of income. If someone with no money is given $1, that first dollar has a huge impact. Each additional dollar continues to have an effect, but eventually, the impact diminishes. This principle is known as the Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC). Classical economists assumed that each new dollar would be equally likely to be saved or invested, but Keynes’ MPC demonstrates why this is not always true. In a deflationary spiral, the problem becomes how to encourage consumption when prices continue to fall. The multiplier effect shows that if you target individuals with a high MPC, you can increase overall demand. Government programs that direct funds to those most likely to spend can create a virtuous cycle, where every dollar spent by the government increases the gross domestic product (GDP) by a multiplier. For example, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocated over $780 billion to boost economic demand, had an estimated multiplier effect ranging from 1.5 to 2.5—meaning every dollar spent could add up to $2.50 to the GDP. ...