Top Nine Reads of 2023 ｜ 1⧸2⧸24
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Summary
I get asked about suggested reading on a fairly regular basis, and so I go ahead and cap every year with a suggested reading list, just 9 books that I read during the year that I thought were very interesting and had an impact on the way I had been thinking about issues. Obviously this is a couple days late, but I had a very busy holiday season, so hopefully you'll forgive me.
Transcript
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I get asked about suggested reading on a fairly regular basis.
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A lot of people want to know where I encounter different ideas,
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and so I go ahead and cap every year with a suggested reading list
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just nine books that I read during the year that I thought were very interesting
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and had an impact on the way I had been thinking about issues.
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Obviously, this is a couple days late, but I had a very busy holiday season,
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Number one, Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
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Skin in the Game is a book about a lot of things,
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but primarily it's a book about what happens when you separate the cost of the decision
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from the people who actually make that decision.
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What does that do to the incentive structure of your society?
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This is really important because it speaks to what happens when you scale a society.
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When your society gets too large and you start entrusting certain institutions and bureaucracies
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with key aspects of your decision-making process,
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and they're specialized and they're professional,
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but they're also really far removed from the different communities they're supposed to be serving.
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They're no longer incentivized to actually do what is best for that community,
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but instead are incentivized to better themselves because it's not really going to impact the area they live in.
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It's not going to really have a significant cost to their way of life.
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What's interesting about this book is that Taleb is an options trader.
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That's his profession, and that's kind of the direction he comes from
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when he's talking about the psychology behind decisions,
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whether or not you have skin in the game and how that impacts the way that you look at these different options.
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I don't know if he understood that, if he's familiar with these.
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He certainly doesn't reference them in the book,
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but the phenomenon that he's talking about, this bureaucratic separation of interests from original mission,
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is something that is squarely in the wheelhouse of conquest laws,
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and so it's interesting to see him approach the same concept, but from a different direction.
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He also explains why the intolerant minority will always beat the more accepting majority,
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which, of course, is counterintuitive for a lot of people.
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It's very different from the way that people think that democracy or politics or the culture wars work,
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but he explains why an organized minority that has very specific intolerant demands
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is far more likely to win than a larger and accepting big tent,
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putting away the populist delusion, the big tent delusion that we talk a lot about
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in neoreactionary thought or Italian elite theory.
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So it's a book that dovetails very well with this space and the different ideas and theories of politics
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I always enjoy reading a book that approaches a similar subject and comes to similar conclusions,
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but does so from a different discipline, from a different angle,
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because that allows you to understand every facet of something, get the full picture.
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I always think that's a very valuable thing to do.
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Number two, Return of the Strong Gods, R.R. Reno.
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Return of the Strong Gods is a book that is very valuable for explaining to people
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why certain forces are taking hold in our world today,
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why it seems like nationalism and populism are resurgent in a time where
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many of the people in charge are very scared of those different movements.
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The author tends to point out the shortcomings of enlightenment and liberalism,
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pointing out why trying to put away many of the key aspects of human identity ended up failing
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and causing significant problems when it comes to social cohesion and meaning.
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Reno discusses the emergence of this post-war consensus after World War II about the need to
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stop any form of totalitarianism and that so many people thought that the core of totalitarianism
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was a connection to larger forces of identity, connection to meaning and purpose, to the transcendent.
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And so it was really important for these kind of new modern states to limit access to that.
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And this never-again mentality has some very serious side effects or ruling elites end up leaning very heavily
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into this radical individual atomization and free market fundamentalism.
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There are many aspects of modern life that we enjoy and have a hard time understanding how people went along without
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And I think Reno is pretty honest about his own worries here about how he would personally have difficulty
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But at the same time, he recognizes that these old gods are coming back, that these strong gods are coming back,
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that these realities about identity, nationalism, populism, they are going to reemerge.
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And you can be as concerned as you want, but that's not going to stop what's happening
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because we're transitioning away from the time of liberal ideology
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and we're returning back to the things that have been true about human identity for a very long time.
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And so for Reno, it's not necessarily trying to prevent the return of the strong gods,
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but about channeling them the correct direction.
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Because again, to Reno's credit, he understands the failure of our current elites.
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They're trying to contain this aspect of human nature.
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I mean, they've been trying to contain it for a long time, but it's very obviously failing.
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It's very clear that this stuff is going to break through.
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And so while they're running around and screaming about fascism or whatever,
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he recognizes, okay, this is a reality that's going to occur.
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And so what we need to do is channel this into something healthy,
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make sure that this is something that benefits society
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and not something that creates an ugly backlash when it emerges.
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I think that religion is kind of the core component of identity that he focuses on.
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But he also recognizes that other parts of this are going to emerge.
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They are going to be real and they are going to need to find a healthy home inside society
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because continued attempts at suppression are going to end very, very poorly.
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It's not revelatory if you're familiar with these arguments,
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but they are laid out in, I think, a very honest way
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by someone who isn't necessarily comfortable with all of them,
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Number three, Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington.
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Samuel Huntington was an international relations guru and a professor.
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Famously, Francis Fukuyama was one of his students.
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And of course, Fukuyama had an alternative idea of the way things would go.
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It's the Clash of Civilizations model versus the End of History model.
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I think we can probably say pretty confidently at this point
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that Samuel Huntington won that particular debate.
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But it's very interesting to go back and read this book
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And he's writing about what the post-Cold War world is going to look like.
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The shift away from the bipolar world is really important
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because many countries and alliances had been held together
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simply by the fact that there were these two major forces
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that dictated everything to do with international relations.
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And while Fukuyama looked pretty good initially
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by predicting that we'd have this kind of monopolar Western hegemony
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that would control everything and force everybody into one homogenous monoculture.
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We're starting to see how Huntington won in the end
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because he spends a lot of time talking about the ways
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that different civilizations are going to attempt to modernize
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How these things used to once be linked and to modernize
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because again, of course, this book was written in 1995
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the resurgence of classical cultural identities,
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but I mean, it's a pillar of international relations
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This was my favorite book that I read this year,
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and that's because Fustel doesn't just take a look
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at the events of ancient Greece and ancient Rome
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because you're probably very familiar with those,
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he takes you to the very beginning of those cultures
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You are unfamiliar with the way that these people lived
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And Fustel really focuses on religion in this book
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because this is the core of the ancient identity.
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This is the way that they try to understand everything around them
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and the way that they construct their family relations,
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And when he's talking about the ancient Greek and Roman religions,
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he's not really talking about what we think about
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He's talking about the truly ancient ancestor worship
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that existed where the sacred hearth is the center of the home
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and everything is connected to the continuation of that worship.
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but they only exist because your ancestors are buried on that land
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and you need to continue the worship by going to their grave
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and feeding them and caring for them in the afterlife.
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This isn't something that you could just sell easily with a contract.
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In fact, the introduction of that at some point becomes rather scandalous,
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but it's very interesting the way that every aspect of this is again,
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tied back to this ancient form of ancestor worship.
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because it's a great case study for the metaphysics of power
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as laid out by another French thinker, Bertrand de Juvenal.
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De Juvenal talks a lot about how the central government
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needs to break down all competing social spheres,
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all these other organizations that might hold power,
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whether it be families or churches or other things.
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If it wants to wield the power of the entire state,
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then it needs to go ahead and get rid of these.
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And in Fustel's book, he explains how the different djins,
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used to have incredible control over the people in their families
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and how they could basically restrict the ability
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Each family's religion was very particular to that family.
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They were not interconnected in some kind of larger structure.
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And so it made it very difficult for the city to make wide-scale demands
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or laws that would organize a larger political entity
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because the families had this amazing amount of influence
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that was connected to the practice of the religion,
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And so Fustel shows how this transition from individual tribes
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each one of these transitions also required an alteration of the religion
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or you're a fan of understanding how power works
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or you're a fan of both, and I know many of you are,
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Number five, Heroes in Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle.
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This book began as a series of lectures given by Carlyle at universities
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Carlyle believed that hero worship was the foundation of society
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and that's why it's the most consistent thing you can find
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In each lecture, he gives a different heroic archetype,
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the hero as the divine, the hero as the prophet, poet, priest,
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Many people will try to use this book to introduce you to Carlyle,
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but I don't think it's the best place to start.
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I mean, this is the book that is often credited
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with creating the great man of history archetype.
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but it's always rewarding and I fully endorse this one.
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Number six, Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions.
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I haven't recommended Thomas Sowell in any of these videos yet,
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and it's great to finally get to correct his absence.
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If you've never read him before, this is a really good place to start.
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It's a small book and it's not super abstract with a bunch of theory.
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It's just very down-to-earth and provides an excellent framework
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Sowell looks at what he sees as the two basic understandings,
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You have the constrained tragic vision and the unconstrained or utopian vision.
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Those with the unconstrained vision see humans as blank slates.
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Those in power can change core aspects of human identity and human action
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to create the utopian perfect society that they envision.
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In contrast, the constrained or tragic vision is one which understands that humans
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do have a specific nature and that that nature is imperfect.
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And these aspects of our character cannot be purged.
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We can never socially engineer some kind of utopia.
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So instead, the constrained vision understands that tradition is there for us to learn from
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our mistakes over time and hopefully get a better framework in which we can live.
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But we can never actually create a perfect society.
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We can never remove all of the flaws that make us human.
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Instead, we must live within those limitations.
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And of course, starting from two entirely different moral visions has a serious impact on
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The left takes the unconstrained vision, obviously.
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You can completely re-engineer society however you like.
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If only you had enough power given to the government to do so.
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As where the right has the constrained, tragic vision, they understand there are certain parts
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of who you are that are always going to be there and you can't get rid of them.
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And when you approach politics from these two different directions, you're going to have
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a serious conflict in the way you try to resolve political questions.
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So once again, you might not get hit right between the eyes with some kind of revelation
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It's an older book and many thinkers and pundits and writers have taken the ideas and filtered
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But Thomas Sowell is one of the best guys on the right.
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Yeah, he might be wrong on some things, but he's still an excellent thinker and his books
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And he provides a very good framework for understanding conflicts that holds up even
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It really just opens things up for me, especially if it's a book that is complex or has deeper
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You simply don't get everything the first time through.
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Even though he writes in a very approachable style, it's something that the layman can
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He's always layering in deeper lessons, and that's why I enjoy revisiting his works from
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This year, I reread The Problem of Pain, and something different jumped out at me.
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There was a different emphasis that was brought to the forefront.
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Obviously, the book does what you'd expect from the title.
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If there's an all-powerful God, why is there pain?
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And this is important because, for some reason, every internet atheist, every 13-year-old
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who logs into Reddit still thinks that nobody has ever thought about this problem.
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You still have grown men like Sam Harris or people show up on the internet and be like,
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Has any Christian ever considered the problem that things are hard sometimes?
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So books like this are still very valuable because apparently this is still a stumbling
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block for a lot of people who think that theologians just have never addressed this problem at all.
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Lewis's books are always more of a primer than any kind of thorough discussion of theology.
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He's your first introduction to the issue and the higher thinking ordered around it.
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It's not some kind of exhaustive defense or examination of the issue.
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However, this time, what struck me while going through the book was C.S.
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Lewis's discussion about what it means to be truly loved by a personal God.
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Many atheists tend to dismiss the idea of a personal God as ridiculous, and they do this
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because they're like, oh, well, how could a God care about me?
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He's got to do all these other things as if God had the attention span of a four-year-old
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Lewis explains that people are uncomfortable with the idea of being loved by a personal
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God, not because they have some kind of a logical misunderstanding about how God allocates
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his attention, but instead they are uncomfortable because the implication of that idea is that
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God will care enough about you to care about how you turn out.
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An impersonal or distant God might just create you and then move on to more important things,
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allowing you to move along the track of life in the way that you see fit.
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But a personal God who actually loves you and actually cares about you might require you
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to do difficult things, might even put you through hard times.
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If you're a parent, you understand that giving your children everything they want is a disaster.
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And in fact, adversity is one of the critical things to growing as a person.
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So if God is real and God loves us in a personal way, then pain may not be some kind of random
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accident or it may not be some kind of penalty for our mistakes, but instead it might be an
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intentional tool of refinement and there might be certain requirements incumbent on us as those
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And that is a notion that soft, secular, modern people who just want to live their lives and
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All C.S. Lewis is basically an automatic recommendation.
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Number eight, state of emergency, Patrick J. Buchanan.
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I mean, is there any one single human being who deserves a bigger apology than Pat Buchanan
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Buchanan is the guy who was the prophet unwelcome in his own town.
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He was excised from the Republican Party for being right about everything.
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His platform was basically the playbook that was photocopied for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
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And in state of emergency, he's warning about the invasion coming across the southern border.
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The book is written in 2006 in response to George W. Bush's policies, which of course Buchanan
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And it prophesies pretty much everything accurately.
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The nice thing about Buchanan is, of course, he's not afraid to go after the difficult
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He's willing to address not just the economic problems or the crime issue associated with
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immigration, but he's also willing to talk about the cultural impact, the way that it's
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going to change American identity and the way it's going to alter the ability of Americans
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to participate in their government going forward.
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Buchanan also doesn't just go after illegal immigration.
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He addresses the problems of illegal immigration and, most importantly, explains why the Republican
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Party is willing to be complicit in this transformation that negatively impacts their voting base.
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Chris Ruffo is, frankly, the most effective conservative activist alive right now.
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So when he releases a book, you should probably pay attention.
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America's Cultural Revolution is a book about the ideological roots of wokeness, and it traces
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the movement all the way from the 1960s to today.
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Ruffo stops to look at key pieces of ideology advanced by thinkers like Herbert Marcuse or
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And he does a good job of explaining how this whole thing hangs together, how one piece led
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to the next, but I think the most powerful and useful part of this book is the way it
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shows you how everything was really there at the beginning in the 1960s.
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Ruffo doesn't hold back when he's explaining the vile and violent and vicious ideology advanced
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by these people, the way that they were willing to use bombing and terrorism, rape, torture,
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all kinds of things to advance their political cause, and that every piece of anti-white hate,
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every piece of radical feminism, every piece of anti-family, anti-Christian hatred,
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they were all baked into this movement at the beginning.
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In this book in particular, I disagree with the way that he characterizes the need to return
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to the Civil Rights Act, the true spirit of the Civil Rights Act.
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I would argue that the Civil Rights Act did pretty much exactly what was intended, and
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so returning to its origins is kind of the opposite of what you're trying to do if you're
00:24:14.920
trying to purge this DEI woke philosophy from our institutions, but it's still a very valuable
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All right, guys, so that's my top nine reads of 2023.
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If you want to look at issues and understand where I found some of the insights that I've been
00:24:33.680
sharing, these are the books that you should be turning to.
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