And so the great fascination with the online world begins its fade-out: once the domain of nerds, then the place for hip people to content farm, now the internet is seen as the burnout zone it really is.

The good news about this is that people are buying stuff again: books, records, tapes, discs, even magazines. We are looking for tangible works of human effort in a world of influencer slop and clanker churn.

If you wanted to have a good read this weekend, here are a few good options:

Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs

If you want the original transition from thinking like a human to thinking outside of human self-soothing fictions, Naked Lunch takes you into the underworld beneath the peer pressure induced socially-acceptable Crowdism-validated world of consumer marketing, religious simplification, groupthink and socializing, flag-waving patriotism, bureaucratic laws removed from cause/effect reasoning, “wet streets make rain” correlation-causation logic, Hegelian deductive cascades, macho posturing, scapegoating and talisman-seeking, hermeneutic language, narcissistic entitlement, convenience-oriented categorical thinking, desk-shifting of work to the responsible, and generally, all of the gross little thought processes that appear innocent but manifest many steps down the line as a human tendency to destroy each other for the sake of our own emotional self-regulation. One of the best books ever, should be read by conservatives and liberals alike, but will not make sense to libertarians or fundies.

Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue
by Paul Woodruff

At the root of all philosophy is a desire to reconnect to the world so that we can actually live the life we have instead of staying layers removed from it with abstraction, emotion, socializing, money, power, and status. Reverence posits a simple vision of the transcendental: when we discover what causes us awe in life, we can connect that to the whole of existence, and find a place for ourselves in a larger order where we are no longer enslaved to hubris and can instead finally appreciate being alive. You can approach this book from any philosophy, background, or reading level and easily fall into its arguments, which deepen like a midnight ritual as the book goes on. So simply profound and well-stated that you might only be able to read it once, this book goes beyond the normal stuff on the philosophy shelf which focuses on human abstractions, and looks instead to connect our abstract brains with organic reality.

Liber Null and Psychonaut
by Peter Carroll

Hermetic/pagan thought is based upon the notion of choice, which requires understanding reality to know the consequences of each option and therefore, to actually exercise will, instead of doing what most people do which is to react with optics, emotions, manipulations, and moralism without caring about the consequence. If you want a guide to ends-over-means consequentialism as a philosophy of life, this book provides the introductory material in a direct and convenient way with bite-sized chunks that nevertheless clearly address the core concepts of esotericism.

NAOS
by Anton Long

When you decide to leave behind dualism, universalism, individualism, and other neurotic behaviors and instead to embrace the hermetic/pagan outlook, an intermediate guide in the form of NAOS will supplement and clarify your thinking. Written in the ancient style of cryptic ring composition with subtle kenning, this book of aphorisms knitted into a narrative expands the world in order to reveal the paucity of the “objective” values that most people rely on but which are in fact merely symbols of the world, the map and not the territory. To experience the real thing, one must first become open to what it is, what one is becoming, and what the options for choice are and how those form an inertia toward more choices like that one.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks

After the 1960s, political ideology and bourgeois materialism joined into one philosophy that suited the newcomers to America more than its heritage residents, so it became the new dogma among the over-educated and well-heeled takeover people. Taking a nod from Tom Wolfe and Mike Davis, this book shows us the outlandish excesses of gourmet lifestyles in order to reveal the philosophy behind them, which is a politically-correct form of signaling designed to exclude everyone but the new takeover group. Although all of that is well and good, the book is hilarious and shows us human pretense in greater depths than ever revealed before, a real masterpiece of documentary satire.

Inhuman
by Jean-Francoise Lyotard

Philosophy ran out of room after Nietzsche because he articulated all of its relevant parts in depth, so philosophy split into the theory of mind nonsense which is basically psychology for neurotics, and the dissident wing embraced by this militant philosopher from the lonely failed land of regicides. His theory is that we are drowning of too much humanity because we are afraid to think thoughts outside the mental ghetto of human emotions, socializing, and optics because those are linked to bourgeois self-promotion and “making that sale.” To become better humans, we must become inhuman, and through this achieve clarity of thinking, he argues, creating a space in the house Nietzsche built where it might be cold but nothing is out of place.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker

The author of this book was deplatformed and driven out of much of academia for suggesting that equality is a farce and humans are in fact inherently quite different from each other because Darwinism creates “inequality” and hierarchy, the two things most feared by a Crowd. Without being political or taking a side, he criticizes the two wings of egalitarianism, fundamentalist Abrahamism and liberal humanism, as philosophies and points out in depth how the science shows that our abilities are different, it is genetic, and recognizing this is our only path to quality both as individuals and in terms of what we produce as a civilization, starting with a functional social order. Pinker targets the ultimate taboo of our time with a workmanlike inspection of all of the knowledge that shows how “equality” is a symbol that seduces minds, not a working plan for human survival.

Republic
by Plato

This might be the most heretical book you ever read because it points out the actual motivations of humans underneath the symbols they trade with each other to create mutual good feelings. It starts out by questioning how to live a good life, then explores what defines good and its opposite, and finally shows us how the pursuit of avoiding controversy and coming up with pleasant symbols makes civilization gradually go insane and decay from a shared transcendent goal into extreme bourgeois individualism which seeks to destroy anything other than the individual. Written plainly with an extreme focus on logical fact, Republic shatters all of the illusions you have unknowningly been nurturing about your species and its constantly dying civilizations.

Race Differences in Intelligence
by Richard Lynn

While social class differences in intelligence arising from genetics may be a more interesting subject, this book touches on the greatest taboo of our time, namely why some groups are wealthy and organized yet other groups are impoverished and chaotic. Although we officially believe in Darwinism as a “scientific” society, actual Darwinism, including recognition of the genetic basis for all traits, is taboo because it conflicts with the reigning ideologies of egalitarianism and dualism, in which the human individual is seen as equal in basic ability despite absolutely zero evidence supporting that notion. Extending this to race yanks support for this mental dichotomy and forces a collision with the basic assumption of human social groups, namely that everyone or at least most people are intelligent and oriented toward good results.

The Space Trilogy
by C.S. Lewis

Probably the most profoundly disturbing science fiction in history, and joining Bradbury in a wider critique of technology as a substitute for culture, this series of books looks at “progress” as a form of neurotic human self-centeredness gradually taking over all of reality and leaving ruins behind because the functional parts of the world challenge our egos. Featuring characters you would like to know in real life, these stories uncover the dark psychology of those who devote themselves to individualism — echoing Moby-Dick in many ways — and how their need to be more important than reality drives them steadily toward ever more destructive and self-defeating acts.

The Antichrist
by Friedrich Nietzsche

No book collection would be complete without this book that rejects Christianity and in doing so, eschews the idea of a universal, absolute, and objective form of truth, values, and judgment in which all people participate like a shared space or social group. Instead, it shows us how alone we are, like Satan falling from the heavens, because hierarchy is inherent and most do not seek wisdom but its opposite, leading them into worship of symbols that blinds them to the choices possible in life, making them contorted and collapsed on themselves like a dying civilization. While its blasphemous side gets immediately noticed, the sublime nature of this book comes out in its tendency to liberate us from liberation so that we can discover again the world without the shadow-symbol of God obscuring its function.

Happy reading!

Tags: anton long, books, david brooks, jean-francoise lyotard, paul woodruff, peter carroll, plato, richard lynn, Steven Pinker, william s. burroughs