Mind Expanding Books

A friend recently sent me a 2015 YouTube audio interview with Lewis Lapham that covers several interesting things. One of the things he says is that he gave out books that he found interesting or useful. Around 25 minutes in he says “I find something that is wonderful to read and then I want to give some people, just hand it to them and say, here look...The whole point of education is to awaken in the student the power and trust in his or her own mind….I mean the freedom of the mind is a truly wonderful thing.”

That might have been the point of education when Lapham was young, but it isn't anymore, except maybe in the small schools, both primary and secondary that strive to teach the student how to think

logically, critically and systematically. The whole point of education seems to be to teach students to think inside the box. Any opinions or information from outside the box is bad, wrong, dangerous, corrosive, hateful, malicious and always proceeds from bad motives.

Since I don't have Lapham's financial resources I'm not going to be giving out free books, but I am going to offer my opinion about several books that are worth reading, some of which I don't agree with, but think their content is important to know even if it's wrong and maybe most especially if it's wrong. These are not reviews, but there are probably online reviews of all them.

These are not in any particular order except for the first one, The Law by Frederic Bastiat. There are several versions of it available and the one I am familiar with – in fact I did use to give it out – was sold by FEE and was translated by Dean Russell. Walter Williams says that “...a liberal-arts education without an encounter with Bastiat is incomplete.” The book is only about 75 pages, so it shouldn't intimidate anyone.

Another great book that doesn't get much attention any more is Our Enemy The State by Albert Jay Nock. Nock dissects and exposes the kleptocratic nature of the state. He draws a distinction between “government” and “The State.” When a government performs negative functions such as protecting life and property it is legitimate; when it provides goodies, regiments society and violates rights it is the state. This is a short book that is worth reading if just for Nock's writing style,

While I'm stuck in the political rut I'll mention The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Etienne De La Boetie a sixteenth century political philosopher. He shows that the tyrant can do nothing without ordinary people to execute his commands. This is another short book, about 86 pages, but good things come in small packages, or so I've heard. He sums up his argument with “...there is nothing so contrary to a generous and loving God as tyranny – I believe He has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.” My copy has an introduction by Murray Rothbard.

If you are religious, or even anti-religious you should at least be familiar with the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses. These are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. These are in the Old Testament of the Bible in case you don't know. Much of Western Civilization derives from these books so you ought to at least have a rudimentary acquaintance with them. If you don't pick up anything else you can commit the Decalogue to memory.

Read the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John if you never have. If you get really ambitious you can read the entire New Testament. So many common expressions originate with the Gospels that you ought to know their origin. Things such as “cast the first stone, the blind leading the blind, strain out the gnat and swallow the camel, remove the spec from your own eye, brood of vipers, whited sepulchers, prodigal son, widow's mite, salt of the earth, Good Samaritan, extra mile, turn the other cheek, eye of the needle, casting pearls before swine, wolf in sheep's clothing, tree known by its fruit” and on and on come from the Gospels. All of this is online somewhere I'm sure, but I prefer paper books.

If you are familiar with this New Testament stuff already you should pick up The Apostolic Fathers.

These are the oldest Christian writings outside the New Testament. Some were actually included in the NT canon until 397 AD when the Council of Carthage codified the canon. They are usually letters from Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Barnabas, The Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas and sometimes Diognetus and Fragments of Papias. The Shepherd of Hermas is the most unusual to my way of thinking. I think The Shepherd became an object of interest among the hippies, probably for its dreamy imagery.

Before I go off on a different path, pick up a copy of The Koran and read through it. I don't believe Mohammed was a prophet or that The Koran is inspired, but over a billion people consider it their holy book so it doesn't hurt to know something about it. The copy I have I got in 1982 and it's a Penguin book translated by N. J. Dawood in 1956. I have no way of knowing how good the translation is, but it's good for when you get those emails quoting the Koran and you check and find out it doesn't say what is alleged. One of the Commandments I mentioned previously forbids bearing false witness.

Some people think it's okay to tell lies if it makes their opponent look bad.

The Prince by Machiavelli should be read by everybody, not just politicians. It explains perfectly how to acquire and retain power. It gave Machiavelli a bad name which I think is undeserved. He doesn't say that his formula is morally right, he just says “This is how things work.” He didn't publish it in his lifetime and it isn't certain whom he wrote it for. He was a brilliant guy whatever else he was and in his letters he always counsels honesty. Many powerful people sought his advice so his opinion carried weight.

When I was in high school we were assigned The Communist Manifesto to read, but it was looked at critically. Now it's probably viewed as handed down from Mt. Sinai. I think that many people today would find little to disagree with in it. I mentioned to a teacher several years ago that it calls for “A heavy, progressive or graduated income tax” and he said he had taught the book and didn't remember that. Ted Kennedy once got into an argument about that plank when somebody mentioned it.

A really weird book that I picked up at a Goodwill book sale years ago is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I probably had it 15 or 20 years before ever reading it. I read that under Bolshevik rule it was a death penalty for having a copy. Naturally I had to read it. Henry Ford printed thousands of copies and sold or gave them away. Wikipedia says it's a plagiarism and forgery of earlier works. It is usually assailed as an anti-Semitic forgery, but I don't remember the Jews being mentioned much if at all. It could be said to be anti-Semitic insofar as it outlines a supposed Zionist plot. Whatever the origin or motive of the writer, it outlines a step by step plan for gaining power and influence that makes The Prince look like a Cliff Note version of the plan. It's been several years since I read it and some of it seemed fanciful or crazy, but some made perfect sense.

Brain Sex is a book that I was made aware of about a year ago and it is fascinating. It's by David Jessel and Ann Moir, two BBC reporters or former reporters. Everybody that is remotely in touch with reality knows that men and women think differently and act differently. All this is very much denied now, but that can't last because mother nature can't be fooled. Almost anybody knows that girls are better at verbal skills than boys, but women also hear better than men. Men are better at math and spatial skills which is supposedly why men can parallel park better than women. All this is a result of physical differences in the brain, not conditioning. The book came out in the '80s or early '90s and is widely available for very little money.

Tainting Evidence by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne is a book about forensic labs and evidence.

After you read it you will never trust crime lab evidence again. The authors show that the labs are not scientific organizations, but arms of the prosecution. They cite instances where exculpatory evidence is thrown out and the defense is not made aware of it. Two cases that figured prominently in my mind were the O. J. Simpson case and Walter Leroy Moody, who was convicted of blowing up a judge and some others. The Moody case was familiar to me because it was on the local news and Moody's lawyer was a year or so ahead of me in high school. Moody might have been guilty – I think he probably was - but the government bribed a witness into perjuring himself against Moody. This is a 1998 book and there have probably been tremendous gains in DNA evidence since then, but it's worth reading.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is not a household name, but he wrote a very influential book in 1952 called Liberty Or Equality. The title would strike the average American as odd since liberty and equality are regarded as almost interchangeable terms. The book argues that you can have one or the other. If you insist on equality you will end up destroying liberty. Anybody looking at the institutions of "higher education" in the US can't help but see that the fiction of equality is destroying them. Not all opinions are of equal value, all people are not equally talented, smart, beautiful, articulate, agile or any other way. This is not a book to start with if you are just delving into political theory. Over the years several people have borrowed mine and all found it fairly difficult.

On Power - The Natural History of Its Growth is a book by Bertrand De Jouvenel that traces the metaphysics, origins and nature of power. One of the strange things he discusses is that the lower on the social scale you identify power's origin, the more power you can end up with. This is something that many others have pointed out. If law or power originates with the will of the people, then anything can be lawful as long as a majority says so. Depending on what percentage of the people are complete idiots, it's not hard to see how a huge number of bad laws are passed. Gauging by the quality of magazines, books, movies and TV programs that predominate it seems that there are lots of shallow people in society. Many people have heard the phrase "The King can do no wrong" and interpret that to mean that the king is above the law. Several years ago I read that what it actually meant was that the king is not allowed to do wrong any more that anybody else. The king was bound by the eternal or natural law as were all people.

Anything by Frank Chodorov is worth reading. For some reason he has fallen into borderline obscurity. All of his books and articles possess the highest degree of lucidity. Reading his arguments for whatever point he is advancing is like being hit with a cattle prod. Many of the things he wrote probably sounded so radical in his day that they would have been dismissed. In one of his 1945 essays titled On Saving The Country he asks, "In its potentiality, if not yet in its methods, is the FBI any different from the Gestapo?" The answer is no, but even today with all the revelations about corruption, abuse and usurpation of power the news babblers keep assuring their viewers that the field agents are good, it's only the upper echelons that are bad.

His book the income tax: root of all evil was an exposition of how all Americans were made slaves by allowing the government to have a prior claim on all wages. He makes the obvious point - some things are only obvious after somebody points them out - that all species of intervention is made possible by revenue. Police, judges, prosecutors, file clerks, code enforcement officers, OSHA inspectors and so on all have to be paid. Cut off the money and the meddlers have to find useful employment. Robert Nozick might have been inspired by this when he came up with The Tale of the Slave which is presented on YouTube.

While on the subject of slavery, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is a thoroughly researched book that is worth having just for the bibliographical essays at the end of each chapter. He goes into lots of economic analysis and conveys his information with the detachment of an academic, which is what he is. This is not a diatribe on how either side was right or wrong, but more expository in nature. He brings up such things as how non-slave owning Southerners objected to being drafted into slave patrols to protect the slave owner's interests. There isn't the usual hagiography of Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, or anybody else. It's the best book I've read on the subject, although I haven't read that many.

The Crowd is an 1895 book by Gustave Le Bon on the psychology, behavior, opinions, reasonings and other characteristics that make up a crowd. Le Bon does not consider just any large group a crowd, nor does the crowd have to be unorganized. Parliament might be a crowd whereas the attendees of the symphony might not be. Crowds seem to adopt a morality of their own and act through emotion instead of reason. I don't think Le Bon defines any numerical component to the makeup of a crowd; it seems to be more a matter of unitary action and immunity to reasoned argument. A small group such as a home owners association might be a crowd while the spectators at an auto race are not. The book is referred to in many subsequent books so it's useful to know about it.

While not exactly about crowds Obedience To Authority is a very interesting study on how individuals obey an authority figure even if the figure has little authority and no means of enforcing his commands. It is a recounting of a study conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early '60s that was suggested to him by the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to see how ordinary people would resist or cooperate in inflicting pain on their fellow man. He concocted an experiment that was supposedly studying the effects of punishment on learning, but actually it was measuring how compliant ordinary people are when told to do something they find objectionable.

Edward Bernays is someone unfamiliar to most people, but he had an effect on their lives. If they know anything about him it's probably that he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud or that he popularized bacon and eggs by his "Hearty breakfast" campaign. In 1928 he wrote a book called Propaganda describing some of his methods. I have no doubt that he was brilliant even though he was on the "wrong side" from my point of view. Fortunately it doesn't make any difference what side he was on because he explains his methods in this very short book. The very first paragraph explains almost the whole book; "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society, Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." On things such as the trial balloon; "It is the method commonly used by a politician before committing himself to legislation of any kind, and by a government before committing itself on foreign or domestic policies." For those who think the schools can be reformed; "The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist." On the perennial problem of bias, fake news, disinformation or whatever term you prefer; "The media by which special pleaders transmit their messages to the public through propaganda include all the means by which people today transmit their ideas to one another. There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda, because propaganda is simply the establishing of reciprocal understanding between an individual and a group." On the omnipresence of propaganda; "...it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons - a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million - who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world."

Going back in time about 450 years we have Bernal Diaz describing his exploits with Cortes in The Conquest Of New Spain. Diaz describes a lot of actions that sound like something out of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. He describes one town they entered that had a rack of skulls that could be easily multiplied that had over 100,000 skulls on it. One of the things that makes the book believable is that Diaz doesn't make himself the hero of the story; in fact he admits to being scared to death. He explains how Cortes had an Indian girlfriend who could speak Spanish and one or two Indian dialects. They had a priest they found somewhere who had been enslaved by the Indians and could speak two or three Indian languages and Spanish. This was how Cortes organized his allies against the Aztecs. He relates how they were in a village when Montezuma's tax collectors came and roughed up some of the local rulers, thus giving Cortes the idea of getting various tribes on his side because they hated the Aztecs taxing them to death and taking their women. Some of the Indians were friendly and some were not. If they had to fight the Indians, Cortes would capture some of them and treat them well and tell them they wanted to be friends and trade, buy, sell and so forth.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. If the Indians attacked them again they wiped them out. I have known several people that have read the book and all of them think it's great. There's a Penguin edition or at least there was.

Red Mexico is a book by an Irishman named Captain Francis McCullagh about the communist takeover of Mexico and the Cristero Rebellion. This is a series of events unknown to most Americans. For years it was almost impossible to get, but it has recently been reprinted. Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico and a friend who has a PhD in history and taught at West Point among other places told me years ago that Trotsky largely authored the Mexican Constitution.

One of the things that appears very unusual are several pictures in the book of people walking casually down the street to their place of execution without handcuffs or any restraint. 

Tragedy & Hope is the magnum opus of Carrol Quigley. Wikipedia says of it: "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time is a work of history written by former Georgetown University professor, mentor of Bill Clinton, and historian, Carroll Quigley." 

The book gained notoriety because Quigley spills the beans on bankers and other powerful people running things. A couple of books relied heavily on it mainly because of Quigley's admitting that there were powerful people and organizations who pull the strings and that he had examined their records, but that he approved of them. Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy relied heavily on it and Cleon Skousen's The Naked Capitalist was a review of it. Quigley considered himself conservative, but thought that the two parties should be identical so that there would always be continuity in policy no matter who won. He was clearly for rule by experts. He would be booted out of any top tier school now for some of his views. He decried homosexual propaganda in books and movies. He didn't believe the atomic bombs should have been dropped on Japan. He seemed to think that women working was a bad thing and that schools had become so tailored to girls that boys found them boring. He said that Democracy or popular government was only possible where citizens had access to weapons equal to anything the government had. In a 1974 interview, three years before he died he said that he had debated Gary Allen and Larry Abraham. Abraham was a co-author with Allen of None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Quigley said sort of derisively in the interview that Allen only knew what was in that book, but Abraham knew a lot and brought up facts he had never heard of. I thought it was an amazing admission for a guy in his station. I wondered if the debate was after the publishing of Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution. Quigley says that his book is "inexcusably long" which it is at 1348 pages, but it's pretty interesting.