I think a more pertinent Philip K. Dick novel is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with its characters seeking happiness by retreating into dream worlds that wind up being designed and controlled by others who only want to exploit and manipulate for their own ends. Sound familiar?
I'd add Zamyatin's We to the sci-fi selection. I read it about the same time I read 1984 & BNW, when I was maybe 16 or 17,and it was the one I enjoyed most.
I have a related suggestion, Ted, a mega history of the Second World War, Blood and Ruins, by Richard Overy. In the popular imagination, at least in the United States and Great Britain, WWII is considered a great moral contest between democracy and fascism. As Overy rightly points out, it was the U.S.S.R., neither a democracy nor a fascist state, that won the European war with American and British help--and paid most dearly for it, with something like 25 million dead. Overy's thesis is that WWI and WWII are all of a piece, a cataclysmic, 30-year collapse of the prevailing imperial order, a contest of dominant powers--Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
Jerry Mander 'Four Argument For the Elimination of Television' + Rene Guenon 'The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times' fit right in there as well
Sure James.....Mander and I suppose McLuhan as well. Not familiar with the other but will check it out. In terms of Mander, yes the role of television and the media in general in bringing us to this particular point of polycrisis still seems to remain poorly understood, at least in political circles and maybe even mainstream academic thinking as well. I’m not sure why that is.
I'd imagine television's like "phones" (metastasized pocket televisions) to most people, i.e. the technology is so thoroughly integrated into their conception of reality that they can't understand its effects or that it's not a permanent/enduring condition.
Bizarre; a must have list to end civilization with and not one book about the decline of China and India in the Middle Ages, honest to be sure but regrattably blinkered
Shouldn't you have at least one book entitled : How to survive the End of Civilization. Or, Roughing it when Alone in the Woods. The SAS Survival Handbook? Editable Plants? How to hunt and cook small game? On a slightly more serious note I noticed The City without Jews" and The Camp of Saints were missing from the dystopian novels selection.
Eric Hoffer’s True Believer would fit well in this list. His mediation of the nature of mass movements shows how seemingly different movements all follow similar patterns and appeal to different sets of people through consistent methods.
One thing to remember when reading someone like Suetonius or Tacitus is that despite its decadence, the empire in the west still had centuries to go before collapse. It would continue to expand and dominate the Mediterranean. The empire in the east had over a millennium to go. Ancient Rome had a good supply of literature describing it as decadent or failing with the old virtues corrupted and collapse impending. As societal critiques, they served their purpose, but as prophesy, they were way off.
Critiques of decadence and forecasts of collapse are common rhetoric in politics and religion. Suetonius and Tacitus were more than glad to vilify the early emperors and ingratiate themselves with the Flavians. The French Revolution provided plenty of raw meat for the conservatives of the 19th century, an era of political repression interrupted by revolutions in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1870s. For some, the laboring masses were monsters, and raising the wage by a few pennies a day would mean atrocities in the streets.
History teaches us that even at its best, every society has a good share of corruption and rarely lives up to its ideals. All too many of the founding fathers of the US were slave owners. Manifest destiny was about genocide and economic power. If you work your way through this list, keep the big picture in mind. Consider the author and the moral and political platform they are idealizing. Consider the audience and the text as an exercise in rhetoric. Learn to be cynical and question motives.
Like you, I think Girard's The Scapegoat is central to understanding society. I have a book coming out soon that couples Girard with Kenneth Burke to argue that scapegoating is why and how human societies are created. Girard is essential to making sense of it all.
Two additions, at opposite ends. Ibn Khaldun first. Your cyclical canon (Thucydides, Gibbon, Spengler) partially descends from him, and his asabiyya is the mechanism they only narrate. And second, The Road: your fiction here stops at the warning, your historians at the autopsy; McCarthy is the only one who enters the after. Solidarity reduced to two people carrying the fire, the cannibals the social contract eaten alive.
Carl Schmitt: a powerful and ambitious democracy HAS to evolve into a propaganda state because the populace generally has no appetite for the far reaching, costly and dangerous adventures of its ruling classes i.e. the PMC (who generally are not the ones getting shot and impoverished).
Joseph Schumpeter: capitalism will destroy itself. Comfortable middle classes will lose contact with reality (because they don't experience the consequences) and will indulge themselves in prosperity destroying hobbies ;like saving planets (watch Europe destroy its energy security since around 2000), remaking foreign societies in its own liberal mage, (you typically bomb them first), fighting wage caps which have nothing to do with gender, turning education into an ideological vehicle instead of knowledge-transfer etc etc.
Le pointe bonus de moi; feminism breeds and amplifies conformism. George Orwell saw it already: '"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." Froom 1984.
I think you have overlooked an unusual possibility. Our basic science is so completely wrong that the monks are giving us quite a cold shower. To get so much correction of so much science and have so many mysteries after mysteries after mysteries explained will cause an absolute bedlam of progress. Progress is not always positive. There have been many times in history when we were having great progress but the populations were getting poorer. I have no idea what will happen when we are hit with this dramatic wave of change. Absolutely nothing will remain untouched because this is the foundations and starting point of science. We easily could have global financial instability on a level never seen in human history.
I think a more pertinent Philip K. Dick novel is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with its characters seeking happiness by retreating into dream worlds that wind up being designed and controlled by others who only want to exploit and manipulate for their own ends. Sound familiar?
I'd add Zamyatin's We to the sci-fi selection. I read it about the same time I read 1984 & BNW, when I was maybe 16 or 17,and it was the one I enjoyed most.
I too read these around the same age (now 60). But I will have to re-read Zamyatin as I don’t remember anything about it!
I second the Zamyatin recommendation.
A bit about Zamyatin. There is an audio book out there somewhere on YT. https://www.literatureuniverse.com/2026/03/what-yevgeny-zamyatins-we-taught-orwell.html
Here's the BBC radio version
https://archive.org/details/bbc-r-4-we
Not to toot my own horn, but Herodotus is worth reading as well.
I have a related suggestion, Ted, a mega history of the Second World War, Blood and Ruins, by Richard Overy. In the popular imagination, at least in the United States and Great Britain, WWII is considered a great moral contest between democracy and fascism. As Overy rightly points out, it was the U.S.S.R., neither a democracy nor a fascist state, that won the European war with American and British help--and paid most dearly for it, with something like 25 million dead. Overy's thesis is that WWI and WWII are all of a piece, a cataclysmic, 30-year collapse of the prevailing imperial order, a contest of dominant powers--Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
Good list Ted. May I add the following?:
Transformations of Man by Lewis Mumford
Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs
Technopoly by Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Postman
And (humbly) my own: Digital Mythologies
Jerry Mander 'Four Argument For the Elimination of Television' + Rene Guenon 'The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times' fit right in there as well
Sure James.....Mander and I suppose McLuhan as well. Not familiar with the other but will check it out. In terms of Mander, yes the role of television and the media in general in bringing us to this particular point of polycrisis still seems to remain poorly understood, at least in political circles and maybe even mainstream academic thinking as well. I’m not sure why that is.
I'd imagine television's like "phones" (metastasized pocket televisions) to most people, i.e. the technology is so thoroughly integrated into their conception of reality that they can't understand its effects or that it's not a permanent/enduring condition.
I don't need to be more depressed about the fall of the US empire!
The Romans...if people drink from lead pipes for hundreds of years, they're bound to decline
Bizarre; a must have list to end civilization with and not one book about the decline of China and India in the Middle Ages, honest to be sure but regrattably blinkered
There's a chance that those could be among the remaining 19 books, but similarly surprised about the seeming bias on Western civilization.
Shouldn't you have at least one book entitled : How to survive the End of Civilization. Or, Roughing it when Alone in the Woods. The SAS Survival Handbook? Editable Plants? How to hunt and cook small game? On a slightly more serious note I noticed The City without Jews" and The Camp of Saints were missing from the dystopian novels selection.
Excellent but holy poop I’m still on Herodotus from your humanities course 😂
Eric Hoffer’s True Believer would fit well in this list. His mediation of the nature of mass movements shows how seemingly different movements all follow similar patterns and appeal to different sets of people through consistent methods.
One thing to remember when reading someone like Suetonius or Tacitus is that despite its decadence, the empire in the west still had centuries to go before collapse. It would continue to expand and dominate the Mediterranean. The empire in the east had over a millennium to go. Ancient Rome had a good supply of literature describing it as decadent or failing with the old virtues corrupted and collapse impending. As societal critiques, they served their purpose, but as prophesy, they were way off.
Critiques of decadence and forecasts of collapse are common rhetoric in politics and religion. Suetonius and Tacitus were more than glad to vilify the early emperors and ingratiate themselves with the Flavians. The French Revolution provided plenty of raw meat for the conservatives of the 19th century, an era of political repression interrupted by revolutions in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1870s. For some, the laboring masses were monsters, and raising the wage by a few pennies a day would mean atrocities in the streets.
History teaches us that even at its best, every society has a good share of corruption and rarely lives up to its ideals. All too many of the founding fathers of the US were slave owners. Manifest destiny was about genocide and economic power. If you work your way through this list, keep the big picture in mind. Consider the author and the moral and political platform they are idealizing. Consider the audience and the text as an exercise in rhetoric. Learn to be cynical and question motives.
Like you, I think Girard's The Scapegoat is central to understanding society. I have a book coming out soon that couples Girard with Kenneth Burke to argue that scapegoating is why and how human societies are created. Girard is essential to making sense of it all.
I would definitely check out that book!
Two additions, at opposite ends. Ibn Khaldun first. Your cyclical canon (Thucydides, Gibbon, Spengler) partially descends from him, and his asabiyya is the mechanism they only narrate. And second, The Road: your fiction here stops at the warning, your historians at the autopsy; McCarthy is the only one who enters the after. Solidarity reduced to two people carrying the fire, the cannibals the social contract eaten alive.
I would think this was AI, but no serious AI would write that Thucydides owed anything anyhow to Ibn Khaldun!
You are absolutely right, Ibn Khaldun owns a lot to Thucydides.
Summarized in my words, the core points of:
Carl Schmitt: a powerful and ambitious democracy HAS to evolve into a propaganda state because the populace generally has no appetite for the far reaching, costly and dangerous adventures of its ruling classes i.e. the PMC (who generally are not the ones getting shot and impoverished).
Joseph Schumpeter: capitalism will destroy itself. Comfortable middle classes will lose contact with reality (because they don't experience the consequences) and will indulge themselves in prosperity destroying hobbies ;like saving planets (watch Europe destroy its energy security since around 2000), remaking foreign societies in its own liberal mage, (you typically bomb them first), fighting wage caps which have nothing to do with gender, turning education into an ideological vehicle instead of knowledge-transfer etc etc.
Le pointe bonus de moi; feminism breeds and amplifies conformism. George Orwell saw it already: '"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." Froom 1984.
I think you have overlooked an unusual possibility. Our basic science is so completely wrong that the monks are giving us quite a cold shower. To get so much correction of so much science and have so many mysteries after mysteries after mysteries explained will cause an absolute bedlam of progress. Progress is not always positive. There have been many times in history when we were having great progress but the populations were getting poorer. I have no idea what will happen when we are hit with this dramatic wave of change. Absolutely nothing will remain untouched because this is the foundations and starting point of science. We easily could have global financial instability on a level never seen in human history.