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What Should We Be Reading?

What Should We Be Reading?

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We live in times of dramatic change when old categories of ideological division and hence isolation seem to have been smashed. We try to figure it out, and many of us have done deep dives into the history of ideas to find the books that still ring true, or at least provide tremendous insight, in light of all the crazy events of the last several years. 

Whatever else we can say, it’s an opportunity to rethink and reorient, to reshuffle assumptions, to more closely examine ideological priors and entrenched biases. This takes not only personal reflection but also deep reading and understanding, sometimes in realms outside the usual. 

In this journey, we highly recommend our own publications and books, which include some of the best writings available on the current crisis, along with huge histories of abuse in the history of medicine and public health, along with the most comprehensive critiques of the actions that wrecked the world. If you do not own them all, you are invited to look through and get the ones you don’t yet have. 

In addition, some of our fellows, writers, and scholars have made some recommendations for insightful books that can help frame up some of the complexities of our time. They don’t explain everything but they can surely help us toward greater understanding. 

Enjoy recommendations from Jeffrey Tucker, Russell Gonnering, Debbie Lerman, David Bell, Robert Malone, Ramesh Thakur, Brett Swanson, Clayton Baker, Fr. John Naugle, and Tom Harrington. 

Jeffrey Tucker 

  • Published in 1942, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is one of the most challenging and fascinating books on political ideology I’ve encountered. I find myself revisiting it often. The book predicts the failure of capitalism but not in the way we might have expected. A fan of old-fashioned enterprise in the 19th-century sense, he foresees a world constrained and wrecked by a combination of big business, regulation, welfare states, and booming elites that game the system toward their own interests. There are so many tremendous insights herein but one chapter stands out to me: the way in which academia overproduces intellectuals without practical experience in anything. He foresees a future in which these untalented graduates would invade media, government, and corporations, and work out their bitterness toward the world in the form of inveighing against freedom. The book had no fans when it appeared but grew in stature over time. 
  • Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man was published in 1942 as an entry into a strange genre: the fake autobiography that tells everything important except that which actually concerns biographical detail. Most of the stories in the book are of uncertain provenance. The chapters have no titles. There is no thesis statement. It is very slow going. But if you stick with it, it will change your life. You will begin to see the world as he did: through the lens of an aristocratic anarchist who believes in nothing emanating from mass culture and only in the lessons of personal experience. It’s riveting and shocking. There is no going back from this book. 
  • Sigmund Freud has a strange reputation but it’s best to disregard all that and consider his masterpiece called Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego from 1921. He examines all the ways in which what we call groups are truly brittle and essentially artificial, cobbled together by subtle forms of lying and intimidation. The book has something to offend everyone because his two main subjects of exploration are the military and the church. His theory is that groups always exist within the framework of existential panic of their own disappearance in light of dissertation. I promise you this much: it will speak to you profoundly. 
  • My mind keeps returning to the age of upheaval called the Progressive Era, marked by the Great War and enormously structural changes in government. All conventional renderings posit Progressivism as an extension of Populism decades early. This is nonsense. It was a betrayal of populism. In every instance, the drivers and winners of the Progressive upheaval were elites in academia, business, and government. Once you see it, the rest makes sense. Two books are the guide: The Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko and The Progressive Era by Murray Rothbard. Both are masterpieces of historiographic revisionism. 

Russell S. Gonnering

The books I recommend are best seen as a framework for understanding “the big picture” into which the others fit. All of them share these characteristics: the authors are primarily storytellers; the stories they tell humanize subjects in a way that makes their message personalized and memorable.

  • In Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, M. Mitchell Waldrop dispels the idea that something “complex” is just “really, really complicated.” Coming from the linear world of the scientific method, that is my understanding. I did not realize that things that are truly complex conform to a different emergent order, and attempting to use the tools of science more often than not just pushes the system into chaos. This has been much the situation when we have tried to “fix” healthcare over the past 50 years. Waldrop tells the story of this new science by telling the stories of those involved in a true revolution in understanding
  • In Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, Geoffrey West narrates the findings of Complexity Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in unraveling a basic underpinning of vastly different aspects we all experience in the world around us. He does it in an exceedingly engrossing matter and the reader comes away having been both enlightened and entertained.
  • If you have ever wondered why some people and organizations seem to get more accomplished in less time, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright describe how Organizational Culture is the primary determinant of Organizational Performance. This pattern of, and capacity for, constructive adaptation is based on a shared history, core values, purpose, and future seen through a diverse perspective. It is primarily advanced and recognized through verbal and nonverbal communication within the organization. Tips on recognition of the levels of culture as well as advancement are given.

Uniting the concepts of Complexity and Organizational Science will help anybody increase their understanding of what to do and how to do it.

Debbie Lerman 

  • Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. IV (2022–2024) by CJ Hopkins. Also read his previous three collections: Trumpocalypse: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. I (2016-2017), The War on Populism: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. II (2018-2019), and The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)

    For understanding what is happening in the world, through non-partisan, non-ideological, deeply insightful, and also terrifying analysis, with plenty of dark humor and satire thrown in, C.J. Hopkins’ work is unmatched. 
  • Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by investigative journalist Tom O’Neill. It may seem like a throwback, but this astonishing product of 20 years’ worth of investigative journalism illuminates the covert machinations behind social systems and political movements that are more relevant today than ever. Everything that was happening in the sixties is happening now, but on a global scale (see CJ Hopkins). It’s also a riveting read.
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Netflix just came out with a miniseries dramatizing Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, and although the televised version is not terrible, the written version provides an incomparably richer and more nuanced experience. It is a cautionary tale for our self-mythologizing globalist-technocratic elites, and a source of deep insight for those of us who want to understand the truths behind historical/social/political cycles: A foundational fable, told on a biblical/mythical scale, reminding us that trying to create a utopia always ends in disaster.
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Only fiction can produce the type of tragi-comic humor perfected in this mostly overlooked or forgotten laugh-out-loud literary gem. Laughing at the utter absurdity of humanity in all its glorious foibles is perhaps the best antidote to the darkness that seems to be descending in our times. As Ignatius Reilly, the book’s protagonist, continually reminds us, Fortune’s wheel turns inexorably round and round. Sometimes we’re on the top, and sometimes we’re heading down. Either way, we have to laugh.

David Bell 

  • The Later Roman Empire by Ammianus Marcellinus. A detailed insider’s chronicle of the late Roman court and power struggles, corporate corruption, and egotism that makes clear that nothing we are seeing today is really unusual.
  • Egil’s Saga. A raw insight into the complexities of human personality and, for someone with a twisted brain like me, fun to read.
  • Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky. Much the same – a good description of where we can all go if we allow ourselves.

Robert Malone 

  • Dark Aeon by Joe Allen. “Transhumanism is the great merger of humankind with the Machine. At this stage in history, it consists of billions using smartphones. Going forward, we’ll be hardwiring our brains to artificial intelligence systems.”
  • Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling. Together with William Gibson (Neuromancer and so many others) Sterling birthed the literary genre of cyberpunk in the mid-1980s, and this is among his most prescient works. The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical-industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. 
  • Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling. A brilliant book examining two alternative futures for mankind and their intrinsic conflicts and contradictions. The Mechanists are ancient aristocrats, their lives prosthetically extended with advanced technology. The Shapers are genetically altered revolutionaries, their skills the result of psychotechnic training and artificial conditioning. Both factions are fighting to control the Schismatrix of humankind. Sterling’s most intense work, offering a hard, gritty look at humanity as it pushes and claws its way to the stars.
  • Government Gangsters by Kash Patel. Foundational expose of the efforts of the deep and administrative state to take down Donald Trump and how it was achieved.
  • The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab. The book that confirms the central Covid conspiracy theory. Poorly reasoned, and the writing is, at times, embarrassing. But this is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the logic of the WEF during Covid.
  • The “Mars” Series – Kim Stanley Robinson. Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. Robinson was our neighbor when we lived in Davis, CA as undergraduate students. This award-winning science fiction series provides an excellent overview of terraforming and the politics of the future. Before its time, and now with Elon’s dreams, suddenly its time has come.

Ramesh Thakur 

  • S. Jaishankar, Why Bharat Matters (Rupa Publications, 2024). India’s current foreign minister S. Jaishankar, son of the doyen of India’s nascent strategic studies community K. Subrahmanyam, has a deserved reputation as a talented diplomat who served as ambassador to China and the US, a policy wonk, and an analytical thinker. In this book, Jaishankar outlines his vision of what sort of a world India is trying to shape amidst the many challenges and current volatility but also in the context of India’s enduring identity as a ‘civilisational state,’ the land that used to be known as Bharat, the alternative name listed in the 1950 constitution of independent India.

    The book is a gallant effort to articulate the twin theses that foreign policy settings matter to every citizen in a globalised world and that India matters to the world because it is Bharat, drawing strength and optimism from a unique fusion of its own heritage and culture and democratic freedoms. American readers will inevitably be drawn into comparisons and contrasts between the two democratic and federal republics.

Bret Swanson 

  • Revolt of the Public: The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri and Private Truths, Public Lies by Timur Kuran. Neither of these books is new, but I believe both are essential to understanding the whiplash of propaganda and censorship of the last decade – a phenomenon I call the Infowarp, which is likely to intensify in the A.I. era. Kuran’s book arrived in 1994 and described the mechanism by which social pressures cause people to keep their true views to themselves and even to utter things they know to be false. At some point, however, a few dissidents can tip the scales, resulting in a lightning-quick “preference cascade” in the opposite direction.

    Kuran’s canonical case study was the persistence of Communist regimes over so many decades, despite their obvious failure, and then their sudden collapse. In 2014, Gurri, a former CIA media analyst, argued that the Internet was reversing the power dynamics of the governors and the governed. Free-flowing information would empower the masses – speeding up preference cascades – but then cause a corresponding backlash/crackdown by existing power centers. Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism approaches the Infowarp from yet another angle, which is fully consistent with these two books. I wrote about the Gurri-Kuran Dynamic here. 
  • Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy. This book is no beginner’s guide, but if you want to learn how modern LLMs and machine learning work, and the history of neural networks more generally, you might give it a try.
  • The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim. A history of today’s biggest tech juggernaut and the foundation of the A.I. era. 
  • Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber. An exploration of how “bubbles act as innovation accelerators.” 
  • The Measure of Economies: Measuring Productivity in an Age of Technological Change edited by Marshall Reinsdorf and Louise Sheiner. A compilation of essays by economists grappling with the central questions of how we measure innovation, prices, and progress.
  • The Illusion of Innovation: Escape “Efficiency” and Unleash Radical Progress by Elliott Parker. Parker was a colleague and mentee of the great Clayton Christensen. Now Parker extends Christensen’s masterpiece The Innovator’s Dilemma for a new era, arguing that “our companies and organizations are too sterile.”

Clayton Baker 

  • Turtles All the Way Down, by Anonymous. The expose that blew the lid off the vaccine industry’s chicanery. A highly readable, well-referenced demythologizing of vaccine legends and lies.
  • The Psychology of Totalitarianism, by Mathias Desmet. Brief, readable, and profound description of how the masses were fooled yet a few were not.
  • The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The definitive early account of the worldwide planned operation that was Covid. A remarkable achievement, especially given its date of publication. (Bonus: if anyone doubts Bobby’s bona fides, read this book and you will be reassured.)

Fr. John Naugle 

  • Contagious Faith: Why the Church Must Spread Hope, Not Fear, in a Pandemic by Phillip Lawler. Phil has been a prophetic and critical voice regarding Catholic culture and the failures of Catholic leadership in recent decades. In the heights of the sex abuse scandal, he observed that for decades before the scandal decisions were made not out of a perspective of faith, but rather a perspective of institutional expediency and fearful risk aversion. His critique of how Catholics responded to Covid sees a continuation of this pattern. “In reality, the fear of Covid is deadlier than the disease itself… and that fear, axiomatically, is caused by a lack of faith.”
  • Boundaries: When to Say YES, How to Say NO to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. Knowing where one begins and ends with respect to God and others is essential for emotional and spiritual health. Compliance with absurd mandates occurred because far too many of us are isolated from healthy support structures or, even worse, found ourselves surrounded by unhealthy and unhelpful people. If we hope to actually be the hero who doesn’t go along with the madness of the crowds, then we need to develop a healthy sense of self, especially with regard to what we will or will not do. The strategies contained in this book are useful for creating healthy boundaries, and men and women with healthy boundaries are immune from manipulation and control.
  • Communism and the Conscience of the West, by Fulton Sheen. Originally published in 1948, this scholarly yet accessible book gives a complete Catholic response to the beginnings of the Cold War just after World War II. With extensive citations and quotes, Sheen makes the argument that Russian Communism, much like Italian Fascism and German Naziism, is on the conscience of the West as Marxism was derived not from Russian but rather from German and French thought and, more importantly, totalitarianism is the natural outgrowth of a West which has abandoned religion and morality for an atheistic materialism that sees the individual as nothing more than an economic being. The distinctions which Sheen makes are important, as he offers three possible definitions for “liberalism,” (only one of which is morally good) and two meanings of liberty (minor and major).  With so many of us let down by our respective ideological tribes in recent years and many offering simplistic diagnoses of what went wrong, it’s instructive to consider a diagnosis from decades ago as to root causes of totalitarianism.  “Save man and you save the world; dehumanize man and you wreck the world,” argues Sheen.

Tom Harrington 


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