My Top 10 Books of 2021
Each described in one sentence. With additional high-sounding words of the dead.
“No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.”
Romain Rolland
#10 In Search of a Better World — Karl Popper
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell
“Everything is true until proven wrong” is an epistemological principle justified by Karl Popper that truth would not be warranted until proven otherwise therefore knowledge is no devoid of conjectures by product of trial-and-error can it be dissolved into which is impossible, which is improbable, and adjudicate them as they are.
#9 Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes — Ian Leslie
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks but how it thinks.”
Christopher Hitchens
Expanding mind through epistemic labor would not be possible without intersections of discord, therefore questions animated by and bolstered with morbid curiosity not only are useful in favor of modification of thought but also disrupt the impregnable bulwark of a belief, especially among dogmatists who tend to view complexities in black-and-white resolution in every turn.
#8 The Tyranny of Merit — Michael J. Sandel
“I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The infinite privilege in the blood of a progeny borne out of well-off family often repudiates moral desert in the race of life, those who are keenly alive in pinning their winnings as a consequence of their own doing rather than of the arbitrariness of genetic lottery; while those in reversed life, more often than not, have their esteem demeaned for whose sweat society is inclined to override, and irrespective of their all-encompassing utilitarian labor, whose dignity of utility the prodigious genes callously overlook.
#7 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature — Steven Pinker
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
C. G. Jung
The complex interplay between nature and nurture in human condition can hypothetically be synthesized by the awareness of whether nature compensates for the flaws in the ways one is nurtured is possible and of whether nurture benefits from one’s own nature is necessarily arbitrary.
#6 The Art of Seduction — Robert Greene
“Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.”
Benjamin Disraeli
What we do not understand blinds us — alluring suspense, inviting ends that ensnare targets into a web of stifling intrigue, then masterminding behind the eye of the seduced with whom the seducer will no doubt play the trump card once the disquietude of resisting his temptation exhausts the resistance itself.
#5 The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success — Kevin Dutton
“The great epochs of our lives are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
The nature of a man, — cold-blooded, conspicuously silent, shape-shifting underneath a cloak of penetrating charisma, warrants not the possibility of fatal sin for such traits somewhere deep down possess saving graces albeit the notoriety pre-caricatured by popular belief.
#4 The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”
Niccolò Machiavelli
Behind conciliatory façade a steady yet invincible armor micromanaging human’s perception, outmaneuvering context, and stirring desires of the vulnerable imbues a man neither too naïve to be loved nor too divine to be feared for such a homeostatic steadfastness, to which a normal baseline rate is returned in spite of negatively or positively major changes occured, solidifies all kinds of power — with which, hardly will he be defeated.
#3 The Art of War — Sun Tzu
“Who does not know the evils of war cannot appreciate its benefits.”
Sun Tzu
In the day-to-day life when unforseen circumstances catch us off guard besieged by its unprecedented dynamic, outmaneuvering the control involves deep knowledge of those around us and ourselves, while remaining observant in calculation, surely we must mobilize as formless and adaptable in the execution as does it just how the world move.
#2 Letters to a Young Contrarian — Christopher Hitchens
“I rebel — therefore I exist.”
Albert Camus
To be unchained from shackles of conformity comes at the price of being on the fringe of society yet it offers a profound vantage point drawn to one’s own conscience as to fortify defiance against power-that-be dominating no bound over his people to the peak of its moral deterioration, power thereby is but to critique in all undoctrinaire manner to that effect.
#1 Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization — Scott Barry Kaufman
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
T. S. Eliot
In the path of fulfilment, a quest for higher self where one is driven by the lust of going beyond oneself begins with the unceasing discovery of who one is catered accordingly to what one could become, which by virtue of countless incremental steps — unnecessary limitations are exceeded.
