Don't Read Books

... at least, not ones recommended by people who hope the book will tell you what they can't

One of these books is not like the others. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand . The Secret by Rhonda Byrne . On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin .

They aren't very much alike, but one thing that does make them similar is that they are all books that I am almost certainly never going to bother reading.

However, only two of those books have ever come up in the context of people telling me I should read them. The Fountainhead has been suggested off and on since I was a teenager. The Secret has only come about more recently since its publication around 2006.

They come up in various ways. In the case of The Secret, the last time I was told I should read it was at the tail end of a long debate into the night where eventually the people I was arguing with, having failed to convince me of anything, said I would need to read it to understand it, and that I couldn't properly criticise it until I had. With Ayn Rand, it was at the start of a debate where I said objectivism was bullshit, and they asked me how could I possibly know that if I hadn't read Ayn Rand's books.

Of course, this happens with other books and ideas too. I think we've all been in debates when someone throws their hands in the air and says "I can't explain it. You need to read the book to understand". The debate doesn't even have to be constrained to a particular book, the book recommendation tactic can come up anytime someone feels you aren't getting it because they aren't explaining it right.

Seems like a fair thing to do on the surface. After all, isn't the whole point of books to record complicated ideas into a succinct and thorough analysis, tightly worded and contained in manageable portions, precisely for passing onto others?

No. Books are not a back up for when we can't articulate a thought to convey it to someone else. A book is not a failsafe to absolve people of understanding and forming an idea on their own. It is a communication from an author to a reader so as to make the reader understand and internalize an idea so that it can be built upon with the reader's own understanding. Civilization would cease to advance if books were where we froze ideas into a perfect reference so that instead of building up from them, we always looked back to them to find the words we can't come up with ourselves.

Saying "you need to read the book to understand" is often merely a cheap debating tactic indicating that the speaker has not internalized the main points of the book in order to defend it with their own take on the matter. It indicates that either the book failed to get the idea out, or the reader failed to take the idea in. Either way, when someone says "you need to read the book", it's actually the speaker who needs to go back and review the book and find out if they missed something, or if it was never there.

In any case, a book should be a cause for thought, something that inspires an idea within you, an idea that becomes a part of you. When you are defending the idea in a book, if you really understood it, you should be speaking as if the ideas were your own. Because they now are your own, either because you agree or know why you disagree.

There's certainly nothing wrong with people suggesting books to each other, but there's a reason I'm singling out The Secret and books by Ayn Rand. There is a difference when it comes to books that people claim have let them in on a great revelation. When someone tells you that you need to read the manual for how to repair a bicycle, it's probably just that they can't be bothered to explain a trivial functional detail of life, either because they don't know it themselves or find it to tedious to explain. When it's a big topic about the nature of society or the universe, the things that people base their lives and ethics on, there's more going on than mere deflection.

In my own experience, what surprises me is that I have many friends who I consider so intelligent otherwise, but are ready to defend The Secret or Ayn Rand in debates that last into the wee hours of the night. Debates that inevitably lead to "you have to read the book". How can they be smart and yet unable to defend ideas that they are making a core component of how they define themselves and their lives?

Is it just that ideas that big are necessarily complex and hard to reduce to simple explanations?

It's not the case that the degree of impact on one's understanding of the universe is necessarily complex and hard to convey. Consider this one idea that no one ever suggested to me that I needed to read anything in order to understand it. Evolution. It's an idea that, if you understand it, has profound effects on how you see the world. But it's not all that complicated, either.

I haven't, and won't, read On The Origin Of Species for the exact opposite reason to the other books I'm talking about in that the idea makes so much sense that even third and fourth stage hearsay sources can make it make perfect sense. When I read Stephen Jay Gould (who is probably only once removed in that I'm sure he read the original text), his description of evolution is so tight, he never has to say "but you need to read the source to understand it."

I don't even remember who first told me about evolution. But I know that wherever, whoever, whenever it was, I wasn't told, "everything you need to know is right here in this book by Charles Darwin". It was explained to me by someone saying "Here's how it works". When I had questions, they clarified. No deferring to original sources required.

Nope. The original idea of "survival of the fittest" is so locked down that not only do people not have to fall back on the source, they use it to launch upwards to even more refined and interesting ideas. I don't think I will ever bother to read "On The Origin Of Species" because the meme makes so much sense that I'm already in the choir, so I don't need to be preached to. Darwin's words simply aren't needed anymore, and the only reason for anyone to read him is for historical curiosity or personal admiration.

If an idea needs to rely on a particular telling in order to make sense, then that is a surefire indication that there is no idea, there is only the telling.

How does the telling of an idea convince anyone of anything if there is nothing there behind the words?

When that happens, it's not about what the authors put into the books, but what the readers want from them. The person advocating The Secret or anything by Ayn Rand is is unable to construct a new level of concept above the original because feelings they got when they read the books can't survive outside of the cozy worlds within their pages.

What is it the readers are putting into these books? For every book defended with "you need to read the book", and for every person who said those words, it's different. But the reader wanted to believe something bad enough to not need the book to build a consistently logical case. If they expected, and got, something consistently logical, then they would be able to convey it.

The Secret appeals to those who want to believe in believing. It's human nature to want just a little more control over how the universe works. As Joseph Campbell once accurately pointed out, even the most cynical rationalist will twist and turn their body as if they could somehow guide a bowling ball after it has left their hands, and is already travelling down the lane toward the pins with only physics to guide it. We all have that impulse, but only a few of us desperately want it to represent something real. The Secret is pornography for that impulse.

Ayn Rand is pornography for those who want to wrap up sociopathic selfishness into some kind of rationalization. At least the Marquis De Sade had no illusions that his desires were the ultimate expression of being a brat. He claimed that deep down we all want the power of gods and the whims of babies, but he never said society would be better off if we unchained those feelings. He just said we'd just be more honest to admit that's what we wanted.

Where the Marquis De Sade wanted you to simply admit you have power fantasies that are contrary to civil society, Ayn Rand wants you to lie to your own conscience that somehow everyone being a total asshole is actually a way to run a civilization. Objectivism is the invisible hand of capitalism with a knife.

This is how people who can be so smart can be led into ideas that are indefensible. We all have needs and wants, a part of our thinking that gets frustrated with how things are and wishes how things should be. When faced with the frustrations of people who don't love us back, a universe that might not care if we win, a soceity that can require us to keep our feelings under the surface, and other things that can leave a person feeling powerless, even the smartest of us can be led astray by wishing it wasn't so. It's a powerful feeling, one that is bound up with how our very identities and ways of thinking are structured in our brains. We are all prone to it, and no one can be looked down upon for sometimes falling victim to hopes that reach past our rationality.

If you want to function without illusions, though, you need to acknowledge that your beliefs might be motivated by desire more than analysis. Mine might be, yours might be, everyone's might be. We have to look for subtle clues in our own ways of expression to hint to us that we might be down a garden path of our own making.

One of those clues is saying to someone "you need to read the book to understand it". When it comes to the bigger memes, the ones people base their lives or their opinions of society on, it's an admission that the person saying it wanted the idea to be true.

They want it bad enough that they won't let go, even though they can't convince others to share in the way it felt to have their desires soothed as they flipped through page after page of fleeting rationalizations.

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