this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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It's worth a high level summary. I agree there's some unconventional takes but a few are good.
Example: working class and middle class will vote to tax the rich. In reality the rich can pay to avoid the tax so the middle class ends up paying more.
There is no "middle" and working class. Its just working and owning class, or he you're a capitalist trying to sow division its lower, middle, then upper. But working class and middle class in the same sentence is like a semi acknowledgement of the truth of working and owning. Middle class is still largely working class though.
Read Paul Fussell's books on the North American Class system:
the difference between Middle-Class & Working-Class is cultural, not income, and it's rather indellible, too.
I'd now have Upper-Middle-Class, Financial-Class, Middle-Class, as distinct groups/cultures.
Middle-class judge you by your job-position.
Working-class judge you by your money.
The cultural-difference is profound.
Try getting an Upper-Middle-Class person to honestly accept you as valid, when you're a homeless person ( despicable/inherently-nonvalid, human-garbage ) and they're addicted to clawing all the Upper-Middle-Class status they can..
That can be quite educating.
Class-identity is as ancient as hierarchy in our society, so at least as old as agriculture, but I'd say it's as old as village-chief, so .. perhaps 0.5 million years, min.
Books that I find profounder, importanter, include Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", on our unconscious-mind's automatic-fighting-off of growing-up, protecting entrenched-dysfunction, and how to correct/dismantle that sabotage.
Halvorson's little, and important, "The 8 Motivational Challenges".
Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright's book condensing their research into something readable for us, "Tribal Leadership", on the 5 cultural-process levels ( they wrongly identify them as "stages", but stages, like Kegan-3, Kegan-4, etc, are irreversible ).
Moneyarchy has been crushing more & more & more lives into level-1 & level-2 culture, and there are consequences of that.
Level-1 is where mass-shootings arise from, and in 2023 the US had over 600 of them.
Level-2 is where conspiracism grows.
Not understanding that book should be considered criminal-negligence, for government-authority, nowadays.
Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar", and then Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" show how the climate, the civilization, the culture, that we are born into, fundamentally-alter our "personality" in predictable ways.
John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres" and "The Anatomy of Story" should be considred required-reading for anybody who unconsciously uses story to form the story of their own meaning ( which is all of us ).
He's got a couple of mistakes, as many profound books do, his concept of Village is insane, being Wild West Village, instead of the dozens-of-millenia old Tribal Mother Village, and his concept of humor is wrong, too, being based on "the drop", which is a US thing, and not the core of humor, at all. The real core of humor, is being surprised by the improbable. Creative-misinterpretation humor shows this.
Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" is the core competence in all of Western Philosophy. All the Western Philosophers who reject, ignore, or don't-understand, the core points in that book, are not competent in philosophy, period.
These books all outclass many of the books he's recommending.
The author is somewhere over 1bil in debt and made everything up. He got lucky. Trying to follow his nonsense either won’t work or will fuck you. It’s not worth any summary because you’re not rich enough to escape the consequences and if you are you have been ways to steal money.
That isn’t how taxes work. You don’t vote to raise taxes on the rich and accidentally raise taxes on the middle class. You can’t say not to raise taxes because rich might find loopholes. No one says we shouldn’t sentence people to prison because the most connected people might escape.