It's that time of the year where I go over the best books that I read or the most important books I read in the previous year. You're supposed to do these lists right before New Year's Eve, so you get all the clickbait. But I've always been bad at that. I always try to sneak in one more book, finish one more thing before the end of year, and I want to include it. So, the tradition has been for me to always do the Best of lists in January, right after.
00:08:21.640There's a reason that Jeremy has been able to take this book onto Tucker Carlson's show and Charlie Kirk's show and he's presented it to members of Congress and it's even been cited by judges and their rulings.
00:08:34.580This book is important not just because of its contents but because of its timing.
00:08:38.940It's the best measured level-headed look at a critical issue that is finally being addressed in the mainstream public.
00:08:47.380And you should definitely read it and you should definitely give a copy to people who you think might be interested in understanding more of this but were always worried about kind of the, again, edgier elements that had been attached to the discussion beforehand.
00:09:03.320Number four, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:09:07.680In this late winter of civilization, in this time of kind of the managerial bug man who has just been turned into gray goo
00:09:35.360and is intended to consume things and take no risks and do no great works, there's really no better critic of a moment like this than Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:09:46.960Obviously, once again here, I'm not pulling something out of obscurity.
00:10:38.440And I think ultimately, Nietzsche does have critical insights for what we are dealing with today, even if his overall understanding is incorrect.
00:10:48.540So yeah, in this moment where we live in a system that is all about flattening everyone down, making everyone the same, suppressing greatness, suppressing genius, suppressing vigor and vitality and risk.
00:11:04.200In a moment like ours and in a system like ours, Nietzsche really is a powerful critic and he is challenging us to do something very, very different, see the world in a very different way.
00:11:15.400And so yeah, you should definitely check out Thus Spake Zarathustra.
00:11:21.240Number five, who are we? Samuel Huntington.
00:11:26.300This is the book that follows Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which I've already recommended to you.
00:11:32.340And in Clash of Civilizations, he touches on for a chapter to the importance of this question, who are we?
00:11:41.080He says we are ending this bipolar moment in world foreign policy where we have the communists and the anti-communists, and that is defining everyone's worldview.
00:11:53.360And instead, we are going to shift back to a more organic understanding.
00:11:58.360He believed that it was going to be based mainly on religion, but also language and blood bonds and everything else that have classically shaped identity throughout history, not just this highly ideological bifurcation of the world.
00:12:13.040And so this book, this sequel, is basically trying to answer that question.
00:12:18.080And I give him a lot of credit because remember, Huntington is a guy of kind of the center left.
00:12:27.160He could have just left that observation or just never made it, but he certainly could have left that observation on the table where it was.
00:14:07.460But what he is saying is that anyone who comes, anybody that wants to be a part of the United States, must conform themselves to this baseline.
00:14:17.700That we have to maintain this Anglo-Protestant baseline as the culture of the United States.
00:14:23.340And anyone who wants to join, they can't come and say, oh, well, we are going to kind of like some of your freedom stuff.
00:14:30.000But we're going to add in this part of our culture, our language, our religion.
00:14:50.100You can say he's wrong about certain aspects of this.
00:14:53.180However, coming from a center left Harvard professor, this is a very measured take on a very important issue that a lot of conservatives are too scared to discuss in this moment.
00:15:04.100So I think it's a really good place for you to start.
00:15:07.020And maybe, again, a book that you can hand to your parents, to somebody who wants to explore this issue, but doesn't want to hear a lot of stuff from a bomb thrower.
00:15:14.420Number six, thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss.
00:15:22.140I had never read any Leo Strauss until this year.
00:15:25.100I had heard of him, but I just never dove into his work.
00:15:27.980And this year I read Natural Rite and History, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and his essay on Carl Schmitt.
00:15:35.160I went to Thoughts on Machiavelli because I needed to do more research on Machiavelli.
00:15:40.440I'd kind of gotten to the edges of my own scholarship.
00:15:43.500Apparently, this is his most complex and esoteric book.
00:15:47.760I didn't know that at the time, so I just went in and gave it the surface level reading.
00:15:52.520In that capacity, I think it's a good book.
00:15:57.320He's certainly a first-class scholar of these different philosophers and brings out different aspects that you probably haven't thought about, even if you've read the book several times.
00:16:07.560That said, you also have to be careful because Strauss specifically talks about the ability of the commentator to kind of slip in his own thoughts under the guise of commentating on another philosopher.
00:16:20.300And Strauss is, of course, doing that in this book.
00:16:23.220Everything that he says isn't exactly what Machiavelli meant or was saying in any given passage.
00:16:29.940So you need to have a pretty good knowledge of Machiavelli.
00:16:33.660You should have probably gone through The Prince and the Discourses on Livy multiple times if you really want to get the most out of this.
00:16:41.460And apparently it's a book that you can read over and over again and find all these weird hidden things.
00:16:46.840It's got enough footnotes that they are themselves, like their own little puzzle with insights in there.
00:16:53.280There's numerology and everything involved.
00:16:55.980They're almost the size of the basic book itself.
00:17:00.000So I'm sure Michael Anton is sitting there and discovering the center of the universe on this one.
00:17:07.140Like he's somebody who is just obsessed with that and deeply interested in it.
00:17:11.500I don't know about the Straussian project.
00:17:15.060I don't think I like it both of the ways that it's been described to me.
00:17:18.600One way is that it's this Nietzschean will to power thing.
00:17:23.040You got to tell a noble lie, but that's only to keep the masses quiet so you can exert all this power and create your own world.
00:17:30.660And then you have this kind of pseudo universalism thing that it's trying to do is kind of the other interpretation of it.
00:17:37.420And I don't think I like either of those, but purely as a work to help you understand Machiavelli, I think Strauss is good at pulling insights, not just on Machiavelli, but many of these other thinkers that he discusses in places like natural right and history.
00:17:54.860And so I would say you can read Strauss, but I would remain skeptical of kind of his larger project, his overall conclusions.
00:18:03.920Again, at least the way that they've been described to me, I haven't read all of his works yet.
00:18:09.700I don't have a heavily informed understanding of his wider system that he's trying to put together.
00:18:16.100So I can only speak on what I've heard and what I've seen so far.
00:18:19.620But I would still say if you want to get a deeper dive into any given philosopher Strauss, even if you don't agree with his worldview or his overarching project, he is a great scholar.
00:18:31.880And I think he is going to bring something valuable to the discussion for you to chew on, again, even if you're not embracing an overall worldview that he would endorse.
00:18:41.660When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:18:51.660Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
00:19:30.900So if you're worried that you might be infected by the postmodernism, then steer clear of this one.
00:19:36.380This is the book that inspired The Matrix.
00:19:39.500Every college philosophy student falls in love with it at some point, and it's easy to see why.
00:19:44.640It really does address issues that are rather glaring in modernity.
00:19:48.900Baudrillard focuses on the separation between the signified and the signifier,
00:19:53.940the way in which our language and art and other aspects of life have really been cut off from our organic experiences that normally would have informed these things.
00:20:05.700Basically, we've lost the ability to just have kind of these normal, grounded, real experiences to define our life in the way that we communicate with each other.
00:20:17.160Instead, everything is an iteration on an iteration on an iteration, and that gives us this feeling of being in a simulation where nothing we're actually discussing or interacting with is real.
00:20:30.660It's all just us working from these distorted concepts so that we never actually make contact with something that isn't a copy of a copy.
00:20:40.380And that's what gives us this hyper-reality that Baudrillard talks about.
00:20:45.260He talks in detail about the media and the way that it dehumanizes and distorts reality really helps to create this postmodern condition.
00:20:55.240Of course, you can't take everything out of this, but ultimately it's short work, and I think it's one that's worth reading.
00:21:02.620Number eight, the collapse of complex societies.
00:21:18.140He's just reducing everything down to material and specifically economic explanations, and this leads him to make some embarrassing statements.
00:21:27.540He completely dismisses guys like Spangler and Toynbee and just calls all of their work ridiculous nonsense because it acknowledges the existence of factors that aren't on a spreadsheet somewhere, and that's a huge problem for him.
00:21:45.080Also, because he is trying to reduce everything to this one material cause, it makes him contradict himself in some areas.
00:21:53.160For instance, he says that the inefficiency of bureaucracies is not enough to go ahead and explain certain scenarios, and then he goes on to talk about why they do exactly that.
00:22:04.600Why these bureaucracies become so inefficient.
00:22:07.760It just seems like he's rearranging language to make it fit his one particular phrase so that, oh, then it's a grand unifying theory.
00:22:16.420But ultimately, I do think that the book is worth reading because Tainter's core thesis is sound, that a reduction in marginal utility when it comes to complex societies is a huge problem.
00:23:15.640Of course, we can just create a global system of trade that is entirely interconnected with no downsides.
00:23:22.740Again, I think the book is flawed due to the author's ideological limitations.
00:23:27.820But that said, it's still a very important piece of the puzzle and one worth understanding.
00:23:32.440Number nine, the conservative mind, Russell Kirk.
00:23:38.600The conservative mind is always referenced as one of the definitive texts when it comes to American conservatism.
00:23:46.840But you don't hear people actually talk about the contents of Russell Kirk's thought very much anymore.
00:23:52.640It's important to understand that this isn't just some kind of Fox News, Sean Hannity, pop conservatism that Russell Kirk is talking about.
00:24:01.060He is specifically discussing the importance of conservatism not being ideological, being grounded in the conservation of a particular people, a particular way of being, a particular place.
00:24:12.820It may still not go far enough for a lot of right-wingers, but it's still a very important overview.
00:24:19.680Russell Kirk is giving us a survey of conservative thought all the way from Burke up to the modern day.
00:24:26.540Kirk has a lot of different entries in this.
00:24:28.760It's a very long work, but you can kind of read it piecemeal if you want, because he's zooming in and focusing on different thinkers, different parts of the tradition.
00:24:37.820It's something that's easy to kind of pick up and put down and you don't completely lose the thread of the argument over seven or 800 pages or whatever it is.
00:24:47.380So Kirk was eventually placed in kind of the paleo-conservative corner of the GOP, along with Pat Buchanan and guys like Paul Gottfried.
00:24:56.100And one of the reasons we don't hear about Kirk that much anymore is he was kind of canceled later on in his career for regularly making the joke that American politicians kept confusing Tel Aviv with Washington, D.C. for the capital of the United States.
00:25:09.940So I would definitely recommend The Conservative Mind.
00:25:12.880It's something that's going to, again, give you that survey, that broader view, and the context in which conservatism has evolved.
00:25:20.940Even if you don't think of yourself as a conservative, you are certainly tied to that intellectual lineage in some way, and it's definitely worth knowing.
00:25:31.600My top nine reads of 2024, bringing it to you at the beginning of 2025, like I so often do.
00:25:38.680I do want to throw in an honorable mention on this one, Nick Land's Xenosystems.
00:25:44.140I didn't include it because it is something that I have been reading for years.
00:25:48.460However, in order to read it, you always had to have this kind of weird collection of PDFs because the site's been down and it was curated, but it was entirely online and kind of this collection put together by a internet anon.
00:26:02.480But now we have Passage Press, and they went through and actually reselected everything, curated it properly, put everything in categories, making it much easier to read.
00:26:12.660And, of course, it's in a physical volume that is very nice.
00:26:15.980So if you never read Xenosystems or if you did read kind of the online scatterbrain version of it, but you want something that is nice, that you can hold in your hands, that is put together in an order that makes it make more sense,
00:26:29.260then I encourage you to pick that up from Passage Press.
00:26:33.200All right, guys, we're going to wrap it up, but if you liked this video, please go ahead and click like.
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00:26:53.860If you would like to pick up my book, The Total State, it is now out on audiobook.
00:26:58.840So if you've been waiting to listen to it, now is a great time.
00:27:02.000Start your new year out with The Total State.
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