The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

As a child, there seemed to be some "excitement"[1] around The lion, the witch, the wardrobe. I really didn't get the allure and ultimately the whole cs lewisian fiction arena was something I stayed away from. I figured that lewis was just not for me.

Then as a young adult, I happened across abolition of man by accident (honestly, it might even have been HN where I first came across the link). This is one of the most fantastic things that I've read. And this was the start of my discovery of cs lewis' serious writings.

It's been a while since I read them, but I would put forward: the abolition of man, screwtape letters, the great divorce, and the problem of pain.

As a christian, I don't really buy all of lewis' arguments. And he even goes on record in one of his essays about how you shouldn't read too deeply into what his actual beliefs are based off his essays (which feels kind of like a cop out, but whatever). However, he was able to take a line of reasoning and then build a compelling body of text around it. The experience is impressive.

Even if you have very little sympathy towards christianity, I would suggest at least giving abolition of man and screwtape letters a shot. Abolition is all about the possibility of society becoming a machine to destroy humanity, and screwtape letters spends a lot of time trying to convince you that a non-human intelligence is going to be non-human.

[1] - I think the idea was that this was christian fiction that children should be happy to read. No necessarily that anyone was excited per se. But more like, youngish christian families wanted to build up a wholesome peer environment for their children and this was a christiany media that they didn't have to worry about.

> Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone.

I would concur. Three ways out of poverty would be sports, art/music and crime (bad idea). Knowledge, luck and the right mindset and are important too. There is the book Rich Dad Poor Dad about the mindset part.

Well my friend:

Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.

We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.

I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.

Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.

This scratches a proximate itch [5].

I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Reader-Charles-Lemert/dp/1557...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive...

[5] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/alien-phenome...

I don’t think it’s a very persuasive rebuttal. I infer that McQuinn is a libertarian, which explains the issue: it amounts to ‘well [as a white man who automatically has power in every social situation I encounter] I haven’t had any problems, unlike those weak-willed dorks’ and bad-faith implications that Freeman supports capitalist structure.

Whether there is structure or no structure, you must always be on guard against the power seekers. They are the universal problem. You must question them, challenge them, and never take your eyes off of them.