7 books that will change how you see the world

Posted on April 25, 2015 Updated on April 25, 2015

I found this post on stumbleupon, and wanted to share it here. I have just read one of the books (antifragile), but heard about three of them before. The books look interesting, especially the first and last one. Hopefully I will have the chance to read them both this year!

Here comes the list:

Stumbling on Happiness

by Daniel Gilbert

What It’s About:

Gilbert is a famous Harvard psychologist who has a knack for coming up with zany experiments that show just how flawed and biased the human mind is. In the book, he shows you time and again that as humans, we inaccurately judge, among other things, what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future, and even what is making us happy right at this moment.

In fact, decades of Gilbert’s research on happiness all points to the same unsettling fact: happiness has little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and more to do with how we end up choosing to see things.

Gilbert’s theory is that we each have a “psychological immune system,” basically a bullshit generator where our minds explain away our past experiences, our future projections and our current situations in such a way that we always maintain a baseline level of mild happiness.¹ And it’s when this “immune system” fails that we fall into prolonged depression and/or existential crises.

Notable Quotes:

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”

On The Genealogy of Morals

by Friedrich Nietzsche

What It’s About: On The Genealogy of Morals is perhaps his shortest and most influential work, was starkest of all. In three essays totaling around 100 pages, he lays out the following:

1. In any population, you are going to have a group of people who are more talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Strong. You are also going to have a group of people who are less talented/gifted/intelligent than average. Let’s call them The Weak.²
2. The Strong will naturally accrue the power in society for no other reason than they are more capable and talented than the others.
3. Because The Strong won their greater power and influence through outsmarting or outperforming others, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that might makes right, that they are entitled to their privileged position, that they earned what is theirs. Nietzsche calls this “Master Morality.”
4. Because The Weak lost their power and influence by being outsmarted and outperformed, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that people deserve aid and charity, that one should give away one’s possessions to the less fortunate, that you should live for others and not yourself. Nietzsche calls this “Slave Morality.”
5. Master/Slave Moralities have been in a kind of tension in every society for all of recorded history. Many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between Master and Slave Moralities.
6. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are all culturally constructed and used by The Weak to chip away at the dominance and power of The Strong. He also believed that Slave Morality is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as Master Morality. He used Christianity as his primary example of this.
7. Nietzsche believed that Slave Morality stifled man’s greatest characteristics: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.

Notable Quotes:

“Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.”

“Without cruelty, there is no festival.”

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

by Nassim Taleb

Some of the most important points in the book:

1. Often the most influential events in history are, by definition, the least anticipated. These are called “Black Swan” events.⁵
2. As humans, we are inherently biased against noticing both the amount of random events in our lives, and the impact these random events have on us.
3. That due to the exponential scaling of technology, Black Swan events are becoming more common and influential than ever before.
4. Therefore, we should build up systems (and ourselves) to be “antifragile,” that is, to construct our lives and our societies in such a way as to benefit from major unanticipated events.

Notable Quotes:

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

“The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

What It’s About: The True Believer discusses why people give in to fanaticism, fundamentalism or extremist ideologies.

Notable Quotes:

“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

“Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure.”

Sigmund Freud

What It’s About: Freud was an academic sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. He invented psychoanalysis, brought the science of psychology to the mainstream, and was highly regarded in intellectual circles around Europe. Then World War I broke out, and destroyed everything. Freud was deeply moved by the devastation and fell into a deep depression and secluded himself for much of the 1920s. Civilization and Its Discontents was the result of this depression.

To Freud, Hitler and World War II just proved his point a few years later. And as an Austrian Jew, he ran for the hills. The hills being London, of course. He lived out the last years of his life in a city being bombed into oblivion.

Notable Quotes:

“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.”

“A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object.”

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

What It’s About: In the beginning of The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil shows that the processing power of computers and technology has increased exponentially through history and is likely to continue doing so.

He then argues that because of this, in the year 2046 all of our brains are going to be digitally encrypted and uploaded to the cloud where we will all form a single, immortal consciousness that will control all computing power on the planet.

The technological possibilities presented in this book are truly mind-boggling. And we will undoubtedly see a significant percentage of them in our lifetime. Medical nanobots that live in the blood stream that we wireless upload vaccines to. Genetic programming for newborns so parents can choose not only the physical characteristics of their children but their talents as well. Uploading and downloading consciousness onto the internet, so that you could download somebody else’s life experiences as your own the same way you downloaded the last season of Breaking Bad.

As Neo once said:

Notable Quotes:

“One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”

“Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Isn’t there a point at which humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? For unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would 1,000 scientists, each 1,000 times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily non-biological brains is faster) accomplish? One chronological year would be like a millennium for them. What would they come up with?”

The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

What It’s About: Speaking of being afraid of dying… Here’s The Denial of Death in a nutshell:

Because man is the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own existence — thinking about his life, questioning it, imagining future possibilities — man is therefore also the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own non-existence, i.e., his own death.

In other words, humans were given the gift of being able to imagine the future and who we want to be, but the price we pay for this gift is the realization that we will one day die. A dog doesn’t realize she’s going to die. Neither does a fish. Or a roach. But we do.

This knowledge of our own inevitable death leads to a kind of ever-present “terror” that underlies everything we do. Becker argues that this terror inspires us all to take on what he calls a “hero project,” where we attempt to immortalize ourselves through our deeds and actions, to create something bigger than ourselves that will live beyond our own lives.

It’s when people’s hero projects contradict one another that we get conflict, violence, bigotry, and evil. It’s when hero projects fail that we fall into deep despair and depression because we’re once again confronted with the inevitability of our own death and meaninglessness of our lives.⁷

Notable Quotes:

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”

“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?”

Photo credit: The Eternal Perspective 

watching you build an elaborate Lego set called “Life,” and you turning around and saying, “Stop laughing, this is important!”

Read This Book If…

…you plan on dying one day. …you think you take life a little bit too seriously sometimes and need to chill. …you want to read a convincing argument for why we should embrace our pain and our fear rather than avoid it.