Good morning everyone,
I want something philosophical like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, 1984 by Orwell, or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Something that makes you question the way you think or the way you trust the government, or people.
by brendancparker
4 Comments
I’m going to skip the high-level philosophy, I prefer to get down to the stories of real people and events and the lessons they teach us.
*The Sun Does Shine* by Anthony Ray Hinton. The memoirs of a man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He spent 30 years on death row before being exonerated and released in 2015. It raises some tough questions about our legal system and the death penalty. Should this system be able to take a person’s life?
*Blackwater* by Jeremy Scahill, a history of the Blackwater mercenary army/security company up until 2006. It has some insight into how wars are *really* fought when contractors get involved, and the issues it raises about accountability are still relevant after the book was published. (The hammer only started coming down in 2007, after multiple Blackwater mercenaries were convicted of war crimes for slaughtering Iraqi civilians. They served prison time until being pardoned and released in 2019 by President Trump.)
*Too Big to Fail* by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Reading like a political drama, this book follows several Wall Street bigwigs and government officials in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. The writing style humanizes the decision-makers, showing how the individual people were fighting to stop the collapse that many of them had a hand in starting. The book does a great job of portraying just how hectic things were at the upper levels and how many competing interests there were.
I just recommended this one in another thread but I’ll mention it again here – Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant.
Like a lot of people I’d always assumed the Luddites were anti-technology, but they weren’t. They were anti-exploitation. This book covers the history of the Luddite rebellions and compares its sentiments to some of what’s happening now with automation, KPI’s, and AI, and how governments have always sided with the corporations over the workers. Made the appreciate the gravity of the situation where technology is used to put more money in the hands of fewer people while workers are treated as commodities, not people.
Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey. The Open Library page is [here](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL12284524W/Ending_Aging?edition=key%3A/books/OL17932740M).
If you like Orwell’s 1984, also check out his novella **Animal Farm**
Camus is another author you might want to check out. I’d recommend starting with either **The Stranger** or **The Plague**, and then reading his essays.
William Golding’s **Lord of the Flies** also explores politics and revolution