Void House Book Club: What I've Been Reading
In the time since the most recent entry to my book club series, I have read a number of other books that I think deserve some discussion. In this post I will briefly outline my thoughts on each, regretting that I could not afford more time to them individually.
How to Think About the Great Ideas, Mortimer Adler Those who know me know that I am a major proponent of Thomist philosopher Mortimer Adler, a figure somewhat obscure among the general public but highly revered in pedagogic circles. Adler believed that there was some set of topics that exceptional thinkers were especially keen to discuss, and he named these “The Great Ideas.” This book is a transcript of a public access television program of the same name, in which Adler gave lectures on the Great Ideas. Adler often responded to viewers’ questions, which made it clear that although they were smart and inquisitive people, they were not intellectuals or academics, and his lectures were designed for that audience. This imbues them with a sort of elementary quality, which is not to say that they have no value to a more learned individual, but that a reader should find them as digestible as they are superficial. Many of his lectures are not about discussion of the Great Ideas so much as defining them — for example, Adler approaches the Great Idea “Labor” by differentiating it from the other functions of time, which he identifies as leisure, play, rest, and sleep. I find this quite a useful tool for measuring how one uses time, and I use these definitions in my everyday life. You can see, though, how it’s not especially polemical. Adler presents no thesis with which a reader may agree or disagree, and so doing avoids participating in the very “Great Conversation” he used to promote his theory of Great Ideas. That, I think, is my primary takeaway from this work. After reading relatively little (and learning just as much) in my undergraduate studies, I felt compelled to wrest from oblivion the liberal arts education I never got, even if I had to design the curriculum myself. But I made mistakes in that process, intermixing sloppy performative tripe with texts of actual merit. How to Think About the Great Ideas was the last book I read which purports to start from the basics for absolute beginners, and it probably will be the last I ever read. I finished 2025 with the next few books in this list, all of which I read for pleasure. In 2026, I fully committed to reading only true literature.
Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen I first read Lies My Teacher Told Me in middle school and found it very compelling at the time. It’s exciting to feel that you’re let in on a secret, and doubly so when that secret presents authorities you might resent in a negative light. Sadly for Loewen, a book like this cannot get too successful, or it contributes to its own obsolescence. Over my school years, the same critical theory this book espouses grew to encompass virtually all secondary and post-secondary history education. Now, the cool and rebellious thing is to celebrate rather than deprecate American history. I personally found history dull for a long time, as the obvious political agendas shaping my history courses and literature rendered all the information I encountered unreliable, and why bother learning information that might not even be true? The core argument of this book is that history textbooks for American high schools construct dubious narratives to sanitize America’s past, which would be more honestly presented as the story of White Europeans’ cruel exploitation of the land, the poor, and especially other races (nearly half the book is devoted to White racism — more, if you count the chapter on the Vietnam War). This argument, familiar to any American who attended public school from the 2010s onward, draws heavily from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Rational readers will find the vacuity and spectacular inaccuracy of the claims in both texts entertaining. I’ve not allocated myself enough space to fully explore the problems with Loewen’s work, which would take an entire book in its own right. I’ll instead describe two insights that particularly struck me, both related to the Columbus narrative. First, Loewen argued that historians should consider the possibility that Africans might have crossed the Atlantic prior to the Europeans, on the grounds that Olmec heads found in Mexico look like black people. Second, both Loewen and Zinn base their description of the genocide of Arawak Indians in Cuba on the work of polemicist Bartolomé de las Casas — the only contemporary account of a genocide, contrasted with other contemporary texts which do not describe one — and who argued that Arawak Indians had the power to immediately heal from childbirth trauma by bathing, a claim that Zinn uncritically repeats. The fact that scholarship this weak is now standard in academic history undermines the credibility of the entire field, and suggests that historians are more interested in influencing public thought than in presenting history accurately. Fortunately, I have recently rediscovered my love of history through the work of excellent amateur historians who challenge traditional atrocity propaganda. If you are also interested in this topic, I strongly recommend the work of Youtubers James Atlas and Leather Apron Club.
Stray Birds, Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds represents a confluence of two major blind spots in my cultural literacy: poetry and India. In my entire life I’ve read perhaps three or four collections of poetry, and I know nothing about poetry appreciation. My perspective as a layman is that poetry is best simply experienced, and that if it fails to make you feel something, then that poem is just not for you; but then, by that logic, I suppose any randomly generated set of words is equally admissible as “poetry,” so I’m sure academics trained in the topic might have more nuanced opinions. It is a testament to my ignorance of India that I had never heard of Stray Birds’ author, Rabindranath Tagore, despite being perhaps the most notable modern literary figure in Indian history. Tagore was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize and the composer of both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems. From what I can tell, he seems to be India’s equivalent to England’s Shakespeare or China’s Du Fu. It’s strange, then, that I first learned of him through Stray Birds, a relatively minor collection of 300 poems, none of which exceed 50 words in length. There is a wealth of commentary on Tagore on the internet, but I can’t find a single piece that analyzes Stray Birds. Prior to my research, I assumed that Stray Birds was an especially notable work, because I see it in Chinese bookstores quite frequently. From what I can gather, the true reason for its ubiquity in China is that it was translated by prominent contemporary novelist Feng Tang (冯唐) into Chinese in 2014, and remains the most well-known work of Indian literature translated into Chinese to this day. As for the actual merits of the poetry itself… I have very little to say. I suspect Tagore wanted to invoke the experience of meditating on nature, a pursuit complemented by his simple and concise language. I feel he was successful in doing so.
The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, Martin Seymour-Smith I admit that I am a sucker for this genre of pop academia. One of my all-time favorite books is Michael Hart’s even kitschier “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.” Seymour-Smith retains at least a degree more respectability than Hart, given he refrains from ranking the books and gives them each detailed treatments that defend his placements with only a touch of snobbery (he considers 1984 amateur). Although I mostly read these books as guides, the great fun with these lists is debating their conspicuous inclusions and omissions. Seymour-Smith was strangely preoccupied with mysticism, and Jewish mysticism in particular, which informed some of his placements. I’m willing to accept that the Kabbalah might legitimately belong on a list such as this, but his constant references back to it felt strangely anti-intellectual in an otherwise articulate work. He was also reticent to include books which he felt had a pernicious effect, excluding the works of any fascist writer and, shockingly, excluding Mein Kampf. He did include several works of socialist literature, which may speak to his political persuasion. One wonders whether he would have included Industrial Society and Its Future had he published the book a few years later. A handful of texts close to this book’s publication date (1998) are especially obscure and bizarre. I would hazard a guess that none of my readers have ever heard of “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” a mystic science fiction text with a plot synopsis not dissimilar to the work of L. Ron Hubbard, but Seymour-Smith certainly thought it was very important. After reading the book, I felt compelled to draft a list of my own, and I immediately understood Seymour-Smith’s predicament. There are really only a small number of books with a direct and obvious influence on humanity. Religious texts obviously dictate human action quite explicitly, and works of science and economics are other obvious inclusions because we can use this as guides to construct society, but most texts of philosophy, politics, social science, history, and especially literature influence us so subtly as to be essentially imperceptible. While I concede that I might be a different person now had I never read Macbeth, I cannot think of any moment in my life that I made a choice differently because I had done so. As such, I feel a list of the most “influential” books is basically impossible to write, and it might be better to focus on “great” books instead. Still, I found this book entertaining, and encourage my readers to use Seymour-Smith’s list as a source by which they may improve their cultural literacy.
The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt Schmitt’s primary argument in The Concept of the Political is that politics is not best understood as conflict between competing ideologies, but as the distinction between “friend” and “enemy.” It’s true that your friends hold broadly the same beliefs as you do, to which your enemies are broadly opposed, and this is how parties which can define themselves as friends and enemies form in the first place. Schmitt’s insight is that allegiance to the group quickly — perhaps instantaneously — overcomes allegiance to its founding principles, and that when those principles change, or when people with conflicting principles become incorporated among friends, the group doesn’t dematerialize, but adapts to preserve itself. There are numerous historical examples of this. In the US, Thomas Jefferson (essentially the founder of partisan politics, alongside Alexander Hamilton) betrayed his own anti-federalist values shortly after formulating them by exercising federal overreach during the Louisiana Purchase, but his party largely supported him. As such, says Schmitt, it is more useful to take political action which benefits one’s tribe than it is to commit oneself to a set of principles. This line of thought necessarily renders politics combative. Under a liberal framework, a person may change political allegiance by simply becoming convinced of some new ideology, and any party formed around a sufficiently compelling ideology can potentially convince and thereby absorb everyone. But if politics is instead a matter of interest groups vying for mutually exclusive goals, it follows that there will always be multiple parties, and that they will always conflict with each other. Schmitt’s pessimistic realpolitik heavily influenced the development of fascism, which argued that it is the job of a polity to represent, protect, and facilitate the prosperity of a particular people, rather than to enact some abstract “best” form of government which applied to all peoples equally. Thus, Schmitt’s work feels threatening to liberal and leftist mythology, and his insights go unappreciated, if not outright censored, in contemporary liberal society. The consequence is that these liberal societies find themselves populated by people who feel no connection to their peers, and have no means of differentiating those who share their values from those who don’t, grouping everyone together into an indistinct mass. It’s one thing to be defeated by an enemy, but another entirely to lose one’s capacity to even identify the enemy. Unfortunately, so long as we bar those like Schmitt from the intelligentsia, that situation is unavoidable.
The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham The only serious economic models in the world today are capitalism, in which private individuals own the means of production, and socialism, in which workers collectively own the means of production. In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham contends that although these models both made sense at the time they were conceptualized, they no longer accurately described how economies actually functioned by 1941, when the book was published. Technological advancements, he argued, had made it too difficult for capitalists to effectively control the means of production, as the actual process of production exploded in scale and required many more people in its operation. While the majority of these people were laborers, their skill for manual labor did not translate to skills such as directing workers, distributing goods, or running firms which were necessary to control the means of production. Instead, the capitalist created a new class of people to perform these tasks called managers. Burnham claimed that, because the managers took over the tasks previously performed by capitalists, they left capitalists with no reason to exist, and would therefore take over the capitalist’s role and dominate society. Burnham argued that this process had already begun in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and New Deal America. When reading predictive texts of the past, one naturally wants to compare them against the situation in the present to evaluate the author’s prescience. In Burnham’s case, one can conclude either that he was entirely right or entirely wrong, depending whether one considers the ruling class in liberal society the capitalists or the managers. Given that both groups perform the same tasks, they are difficult to distinguish from each other. One major difference is that capitalists might have some higher end towards which production is merely a means. Endlessly acquiring wealth without spending it is pointless. For example, capitalists in centuries past used their wealth to fund patrons, who worked in art, literature, philosophy, and science, among other fields. Managers, in contrast, are most concerned with perpetuating the processes which justify their own position, and therefore would progressively optimize society around that process. From my perspective here in China, where elites have calculated a method to maximize productivity and minimize the cost of labor, it seems pretty obvious that the managers have it.
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke Burke’s seminal work on conservatism is often misunderstood. I first heard Burke’s name in high school through a YouTube video by professional midwit Ian Danskin, who identified Burke as a defender of the monarchy and opponent of democracy, motivated exclusively by self-interest and bigotry against the lower classes. This view, sadly reflective of popular discourse, is inaccurate. Burke was in fact supportive of the American Revolution and his own country’s Glorious Revolution, and believed that a people has the right to challenge or even depose a monarch who no longer represents its interests. Burke was specifically critical of the French Revolution, not on the grounds that it was a revolution, but because of those qualities peculiar to it, such as its fervent violence and apparent aimlessness. Burke argued that, although it is acceptable for people to overthrow a disagreeable government, they should be prepared to replace it with something superior. Otherwise, they’ve accomplished nothing but traded one undesirable circumstance for another (less stable) one. The subsequent reign of terror and Napoleonic dictatorship vindicated Burke’s skepticism. The most famous argument from Reflections on the Revolution in France is that society is a contract between the living, their ancestors, and their descendants, in which each generation inherits the prior generation’s innovations and develops them, leaving a superior situation for the following generation. This speaks to something that resonates quite strongly with me, and which I think remains understated as a conservative principle: humanity (or at least, civilization) is a shared project, working towards the continual betterment of our condition. This is better than resetting our progress with each new generation; in a sense, conservatism is more progressive than progressivism, which seems primarily concerned with progressing the interests of minority groups. A revolution must therefore be very careful not to erratically discard tradition, but instead to discard those limitations on the expression of traditional values from which the state draws prosperity.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Doestevsky Several of the books on this list are titans in their own right, but I still feel embarrassed to place them alongside The Brothers Karamazov, a masterpiece which deserves far more space than I’ve allocated it here. Karamazov is Doestevsky’s final work, originally meant to be the beginning of a series that was cancelled due to his death. The book follows three sons of the drunken degenerate Fyodor Karamazov, who were raised separately and reacted to their unfortunate circumstances in different ways. Dmitri retreated into hedonism, Ivan pursued an intellectual (and pertinently, atheist) lifestyle, and Alexei joined the clergy. Because they are so dissimilar in character, the conflict between the Karamazovs is obviously an allegory for conflict between different schools of thought. These schools — which one could broadly call “hedonism,” “intellectualism,” and “Christianity,” respectively — were the most prominent in Russia during the late 19th century, a period of great social change anticipating the Russian Revolution. There’s much to analyze here. I will focus on just one interpretation, which I’ve never heard from anyone else. I believe that the Karamazovs, intentionally or otherwise, reflect the Augustinian theory of a “great chain of being.” This theory supposes that all things in God’s creation may be ranked in terms of their proximity to God, and the degree to which they may be said to have a “soul,” with angels just below God, then men, then animals, and finally material things. I was struck while reading how much Dmitri behaved like a beast, and how much Ivan’s thought elevated him to a “rational animal,” and finally how often Alexei is described as an angel. It seems as though each successive brother is closer to God than the last; if you wanted, you could add Fyodor to this by arguing he is like a daemon, below even a beast, but then you might also want to add Smerdyakov, which muddles the comparison. I often see The Brothers Karamazov described as a values-neutral examination of different modes of thought during an unstable moment in Russian history. However, I think a better reading is that it follows a progression from lower to higher thought. One of the most prevalent themes across all of Doestevsky’s work is his distaste for pessimism, nihilism, and life denial, which he viewed as characteristic of intellectualism. Those who read this book progressively, as I did, can interpret it as an argument which concedes that Ivan’s rational humanism is certainly superior to Dmitri’s bestial hedonism, but that the intellectuals are foolish to believe they’re done. There is yet another higher level which compels those who reach it to reject the opinions they previously adopted, and that is Alexei’s religiosity. It’s a bit like that quote by Heisenberg: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” Doestevsky even deigns to show us how one might rise from one level to the next. Each brother had a moment of great clarity, after which they perceived things differently: Dmitri dreamt about a mother and child suffering in the cold, Ivan hallucinated a conversation with Satan, and Alexei fell to the ground after receiving a revelation from his mentor Zosima, and rose as a different person. Although initially intimidated by the length of The Brothers Karamazov, I found the story so compelling, and so relevant to the human experience, that I enjoyed it more than anything else on this list. I’ve often found those who loudly proclaim the merits of classic literature somewhat performative, but I can’t deny they have a point here.
The Intellectual Life, A. G. Sertillanges I did not set out to read The Intellectual Life. I encountered this book while looking for literature on lifestyles — that is, books that might describe how one can conduct himself in everyday life. I was surprised to find that books of this sort are quite rare. There are of course many self-help books, which seek to teach how to solve particular problems (e.g. unproductivity), as well as a genre called conduct literature, which instructs members of high society how to integrate with their peers. But these books aren’t really about the construction of an identity, and that kind of book is somewhat rare. After lots of searching, I finally discovered The Intellectual Life, a guide to living as an intellectual. It must be noted, though, that Sertillanges’ conception of an “intellectual” is slightly different from the mainstream, especially today. Sertillanges was a friar and professor writing from a French Catholic perspective specifically. When I heard there was a book out there about living like an intellectual, I thought it would be about living like Frasier Crane. Instead, Sertillanges advocated for a simple lifestyle, arguing that academic study is a serious time commitment demanding discipline and sacrifice. One therefore must direct all of his time and attention to his singular academic pursuit. This is not to say that he must work constantly, but that he should organize his life around his goal, which involves strictly apportioning some time for uninterrupted work and other time to leisure, though only the sort of leisure which permits him requisite rest to return to his work. I have to confess this is more or less the opposite of my view. Although Sertillanges did acknowledge that some activities may align — I am especially fond of his quote “Philosophy, art, travel, domestic cares, finance, poetry, and tennis can be allied with one another, and conflict only through lack of harmony” — he was a specialist over a generalist, and something of an ascetic. After years of research, I’ve concluded that breadth is actually preferable to depth, because ostensibly unrelated fields tend to support each other multiplicatively, such that knowing one thing makes it easier and faster to learn another, regardless of what they are. The g-factor in IQ research is perhaps the best example of this, but then, that’s beyond the scope of this short sketch. Suffice to say that, while I enjoyed Sertillanges’ insight, I’m still searching for a book about how to really be a certain kind of person.
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince is a book with a big reputation, and in my opinion, one of the most unrepresentative reputations in the entire literary world. Given how short the book is, it’s a little shocking that more people haven’t read it and come to the same conclusion. The average person seems to believe that Machiavelli was a proponent of draconian despots who abandoned all morality in an effort to secure as much power for themselves as possible. I take issue with this characterization in two places. First, while Machiavelli did at times describe the usage of deception or violence to secure political ends, he never claimed that this is how a prince should rule. The Prince is best understood as an early work of game theory. Machiavelli wrote an almost completely impartial guide to effective sovereignty, which readers have erroneously taken as endorsement of the behaviors described for centuries. Second, there are only short passages in The Prince which advocate for amoral barbarism. The great majority of the book is wholly inoffensive. It leaves me without much to say. I’m sure the book is perfectly useful for those practicing statecraft, but it’s not the unapologetic defense of villainy that it’s often made out to be. I won’t speak ill of such an iconic classic as this, but honestly, I didn’t get that much out of it.
Early Kingdoms of Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula, Paul Michel Munoz I’m sure this work sticks out like a sore thumb among the rest of my bibliography. A few months ago I took a vacation to Indonesia and felt compelled to learn something about it while I was there, as I’ve long been embarrassed by my ignorance on the subject. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country on Earth, but until July I could hardly have told you anything about it. The more I learned about its precolonial history, the better I understood my own ignorance. To put it very briefly, because it was necessary for ships passing between China and India to move through Indonesia, maritime trade and contact with outsiders were the driving forces of precolonial Indonesian history. Prior to the 8th century, there wasn’t really a concept of a unified Indonesian people, but a very large number of small states similar to the Holy Roman Empire, mostly defined by their allegiance either to Hinduism or Buddhism. “Indonesia” as a single civilization emerged through a series of large empires (called “mandalas,” because their successively weaker power at their peripheries invoked concentric circles), starting with Buddhist Srivijaya, then syncretic Majapahit, then the colonial Dutch, and now contemporary Indonesia, which has mostly adopted Islam. Most of our knowledge of this period comes from archaeology and exterior records, especially those recorded by Chinese merchants and travelling monks. What most stood out to me while reading was the lack of defined historical events. Although kingdoms wax and wane in influence, I can’t remember any particular reasons this happened. If Indonesian history truly is as Munoz describes it, then it’s not so surprising I was so ignorant of it previously — Early Kingdoms of Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula is hundreds of pages long, but nothing actually happens. I would be so bold as to say that this is a region of the world without much history. This reflects a thought I had about culture in general while visiting Indonesia. I used to imagine that culture just emerged spontaneously among people who lived together. However, cultural artifacts require labor to make. For Shakespeare to write Macbeth or for Siddhartha Gautama to develop Buddhism required they work. It is very unlikely that all populations everywhere would be equally apt to produce culture; in fact, it would be extremely unusual if that were the case. It follows that there are some parts of the world that have less culture than others, and our knowledge or lack of knowledge of another region’s culture reflects this. Munoz’s book played a big part in my understanding this.
Democracy: The God that Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe In the process of studying politics, one must necessarily encounter economics. In this book, Hoppe discussed politics from an economic perspective, considering how different systems compel rulers to tax differently, and how these different tax structures affect common people. A monarch, he argued, cares very much about the state’s prosperity, because he can extract more wealth from a wealthier populace, and because he wants to leave something valuable for his heirs when he dies. Alternatively, a president only heads a state briefly, and cannot choose his own successor. Therefore, he is interested in extracting wealth quickly, and he does not care about raising national debt, as neither he nor his descendants will be held accountable for paying it. It follows that the general populace should prefer a monarch to a democratically elected president, because the monarch’s lower time preference will confer greater wealth upon them. This argument is completely logical. There is no point in which a conclusion does not follow from the premises. If you remain unconvinced despite that, then the problem is not the reasoning but that the premises are wrong. It might be naïve for me to argue that Hoppe is wrong to presume rulers are exclusively interested in personal gain. I’m much more comfortable arguing he’s wrong that the accumulation of material wealth is the most desirable outcome for a state. This is the core problem with the economical perspective: It ignores the higher values that motivate people, and of which wealth is a pleasant but unintended byproduct. When I envision an ideal state, I don’t picture strongly guarded property rights; rather, I picture a state in which property rights are entirely abstract. If a people is broadly cooperative, seeking to achieve some shared goal or lifestyle, then they would feel no motivation to steal from each other, nor would they feel aversion to supporting each other. This is not libertarian. Libertarianism only makes sense in a wildly degenerated culture, one in which every man exclusively concerns himself with his own quality of life. However, if he ever found himself in such a dire position, he should probably feel more obliged to raise the state to a higher level than to secure his own wealth. Interestingly, our final text describes a similar philosophy.
Men Among the Ruins, Julius Evola Those who recognize Evola’s name will immediately disregard anything he has to say, on the grounds that he is fascist. Rarely does anyone consider what exactly it means to be a fascist, or why fascism should be so fiercely opposed. Anti-fascism is a learned behavior to signal one’s loyalty to group sentiment and thereby avoid ostracization, just as anti-communism during the Red Scare and anti-witchery during the Salem witch trials. Should we discard our social conditioning and approach Evola earnestly, what would we discover? In many respects, Evola does not fit the modern conception of a fascist. He opposed nationalism, opposed capitalism, did not believe in a jewish conspiracy, lent little credence to race, and wished to lower rather than raise the birth rate. I can identify three beliefs for which Evola is labelled “fascist.” First, the belief that authority is separate from mere power, and that an authority which serves the interest of a people may be legitimate if it does so well; second, that a state is inseparable from the citizens who compose it, so an excellent state is one composed of excellent people, and a well-ordered state should aim to foster its population’s character; and third, that social and cultural conflict starting in the Renaissance and continuing until the 20th century is not entirely human, but partially informed by occult forces imperceptible to the average person. I will discard this last argument as I do not believe it to be true, nor do I expect my readers to believe it, but I would like to point out that Evola’s conception of “occult forces” is less like angels and daemons and magic and more like a shared unconsciousness, so we shouldn’t discredit everything else he writes as the work of a lunatic. It is the first two which interest me, because they closely approximate my own views, and reading Men Among the Ruins felt surreally like hearing my own arguments read back to me. I may write in the future why I believe that prosperity grows out of the competence of the people in greater detail, but to quickly summarize here, a state is an abstract concept that exists only through the labor of humans, so even a theoretically well-structured state cannot succeed if the humans who operate it do so poorly, just as you cannot construct a house from faulty bricks no matter how well it is designed. Because Evola and I are so similar in our thinking, I can’t say that I gained any new knowledge or insight from him, so much as I gained a sense of solidarity. Evola identified a “revolution” that started long before him but moved with great swiftness in the postwar years and still continues today. Like Evola, I feel we must offer a traditionalist counterrevolution, which is not concerned with the petty aesthetics of conservatives or the return to some antiquated form of state, but the adherence to transcendent principles that informed us in the past and still do now. Reading Men Among the Ruins emboldened me to talk more about political and ethical thought. I expect that my next blog post will be the start of a series on what values I think a person out to hold in the furtherance of his own identity. I am also interested in writing about the political situation in the West. I hope that you will join me.
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