5 impactful books I read in 2023
1. The Power of the Powerless (Václav Havel)
We all participate in perpetuating some collective illusions. In Havel’s book, this tendency is exemplified by the greengrocer who puts up a “Workers of the World, unite!” sign in his shop window. He doesn’t do this out of a deep sense of conviction, but because he fears the consequences of not displaying the slogan. One day, he decides he is done with his conformism:
[…] he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. […] In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. […] His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth. (italics in original)
In Communist Czechoslovakia, living within the truth came with a heavy price tag:
He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him.
At first glance, the authorities’ reaction could seem excessive. After all, don’t the authorities have better things to do than to monitor what slogans a small business owner decides to remove from his shop window? No, they don’t. The greengrocer who removes the slogan threatens the stability of the whole system:
The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offence, […] but something incomparably more serious. […] He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. […] He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal.
In most contexts, being a non-conformist carries less serious social consequences than it did for Havel’s fellow citizens. That said, we should be grateful to the non-conformists among us. They create a huge positive externality by driving the first nail into the coffin of our collective illusions.
2. Leading (Alex Ferguson)
This book explains some of Alex Ferguson’s leadership lessons from his time as the successful manager of Manchester United. Rich with insights throughout, his views on excellence and focus particularly resonated with me. Here is an excerpt:
I’m not suggesting that being completely obsessed with a pursuit leads to a healthy lifestyle or eternal happiness, but I just cannot imagine how, if you aspire to be better than everyone else, you can have balance in your life.
It’s impossible to achieve excellence unless one devotes significant time to one’s target activity. This, of course, means spending little time on everything else and ruthlessly eliminating distractions. He writes openly about prioritizing football above all else, family life included, with exceptions only for emergencies.
He accepted that managing the club involved many non-football activities, but he never lost sight of the mission—winning on the football pitch. If prioritizing performance over other values meant an occasional unhappy sponsor, charity partner, journalist, or fan, that was the price to pay for excellence.
He recognized the trade-off between excellence and a balanced life—and chose the former. Almost everyone else chooses the latter. Both paths are perfectly legitimate, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are compatible.
3. Seeing Like a State (James C. Scott)
The legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.
The book is about top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions that failed. As a student of the disastrous consequences of central planning, I was familiar with many of the reasons these systems inevitably fail. But before reading this book, I had only thought about legibility in passing. In this context, legibility refers to the state’s attempt to make society more understandable and organized through simplification. For example, a planned city with its grid layout and named streets is legible. A medieval city with winding, unnamed streets is not.
Not coincidentally, large-scale social engineering schemes couldn’t have taken off in the Amazon rainforest or among mountainous tribes. The pre-condition of legibility was missing. In contrast, societies with accessible populations and existing administrative structures proved a much more attractive target for large-scale social engineering.
Administrative centralization, of course, makes our daily lives easier at the margin. To name just one example, it’s easier to pay your expenses with a credit card than with cash. But this increase in daily comfort comes at a cost: an increase in the probability of a disastrous outcome. Unlike cash transactions, credit card purchases are tracked. In other words, a credit card-based society is more legible than a cash-based one. This is excellent news for the malevolent actor who harbors desires for large-scale social engineering.
None of this means that centralization always fails a cost-benefit analysis. It does mean, however, that we need to be eternally vigilant and suspicious of centralization attempts. We should look beyond the socially desirable justifications (e.g., detecting fraud or fighting against radicalism) and see attempts for what they are: sometimes a net increase in daily comfort coupled with a negligible increase in the risk of a bad outcome, sometimes a cynical attempt to increase legibility, laying the groundwork for subsequent nefarious policies.
4. Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer)
Into Thin Air is a narrative non-fiction book about the 1996 Mount Everest climbing expedition that claimed many lives. I’ve always liked narrative non-fiction as a genre, but reading this book in one sitting on an overnight flight made me think about the origins of my interest. Surely, there is the pure entertainment value that makes putting these books down difficult, much to the chagrin of the passenger trying to sleep in the adjacent seat. Crucially, however, they also contain the type of information that a short statement cannot easily convey—vivid and relatable life experiences.
A textbook might tell you that accidents tend to happen when several things go wrong simultaneously. It may even provide a short case study to illustrate the point. This knowledge is great in the abstract but is quickly forgotten in a new context. In contrast, reading a whole book about an accident makes it more likely that someone would recognize a conceptually similar situation in a different type of emergency.
One reason behind the improved learning across contexts is more exposure. Reading a book takes much longer than hearing the distilled knowledge. So, we think about the topic for longer. But more importantly, we also engage with a real story differently from how we engage with abstract knowledge. As we read, we actively think about the context of the accident, we anticipate what could go wrong later in the story, and we reflect on what we would have done differently. We simulate in our minds myriads of different ways the story could unravel. In other words, we not only have the single (real) story to learn from but all the other stories that we imagined along the way. This is key, as seeing the same phenomenon play out in different contexts (even if some of these contexts are hypothetical) makes it more likely that we will recognize the relevant pattern in a new context.
5. The Untamed Tongue (Thomas Szasz)
Thomas Szasz was a psychiatrist who was critical of the dogmas of mainstream psychiatry of his time. He was also unafraid to speak his mind on a range of topics beyond psychiatry, including religion, politics, law, and social relations.
His book The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary is a collection of short and witty statements about some of his views. As part of his glossary on psychiatry-related terms, he had some strong things to say about psychiatry itself. Here is a snippet from his definition:
Psychiatry: […] An ostensibly medical discipline whose subject matter is neither minds nor mental diseases, but lies. These lies begin with the names of the participants in the transaction – the designation of one party as ‘patient’ even though he is not ill, and of the other as ‘therapist’ even though he is not treating any illness […].
He didn’t view religion much more favorably either:
Religion: 1. Boundless conceit concealed as utmost modesty. 2. Justification for regulating one’s own behavior and coercing others to regulate theirs. 3. An inexhaustible mine of meaning for the mentally lazy.
A central theme of his work was the primacy of personal autonomy over interfering with other people’s lives. He argued against attaching medical and moralizing labels to what he considered merely atypical and socially disapproved preferences or behaviors. An example:
Perversion: Sexual practice disapproved of by the speaker.
His other books also feature strongly worded claims. For example, in his book Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, he wasn’t impressed by how the American Psychiatric Association added new entries to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook that US-based psychiatrists use as the authoritative guide to diagnose mental disorders.
The low level of intellectual effort was shocking. Diagnoses were developed by majority vote on the level we would use to choose a restaurant. You feel like Italian, I feel like Chinese, so let's go to a cafeteria. Then it's typed into a computer.
Self-censorship and euphemism seem ubiquitous these days. This is why I found Szasz’s writing so refreshing. I want to engage with the views people actually hold—and not with the views they pretend to hold. This is only possible if, like Szasz, they write with honesty instead of obfuscating their views through Orwellian double-speak or by adding disclaimers to every sentence.