Hunting For Life-Changing Mistakes

Which Old Books Are Worth Reading? The Ones Forgotten And Hated.

In The Sundial Theory Of History, I give a broad outline of my theory of political change. In summary, each era has a series of truths which it denies, equivalently seen as lies that it is founded upon. Then, what is the value of older literature? Shakespeare, Dante, Mark Twain, the Bible? A naive reading is that most older literature is useful, and the more popular it is, the more likely it is to be useful.

Let’s pause and think about what this older literature is supposed to accomplish, and what it accomplishes in practice. Under the sundial theory, a work of older literature ideally reveals a lie the current era is founded upon. When an older perspective differs significantly from that of your era, the difference falls into one of two categories, or in rare cases both. 

1. It may be a truth denied by our era. 

2. It may be a lie supported by its era. 

To complicate this, most normal people don’t know how popular a work was at its time. All they know is how popular a work is in the present. Then, they’re choosing exactly from the pool of older literature that nonetheless succeeds as a work of present literature. So these are ultimately the pool of stories which are “ahead of our time”, which for all intents and purposes don’t reveal a different perspective at all. 

The first rule of reading old books: read old books that were popular in their time but are now unpopular, or better yet censored. This guarantees a book that is genuinely from the perspective of a different era. However, this returns to our initial problem. How do we tell if it contains a truth denied by our era or a lie supported by its era? 

There’s no shortcut here. Don’t take old literature for granted. Treat it as a hypothesis – a possibility for exploration. It might be true. It might not just be false but the precise opposite of the truth. These ideas can be judged the same way you judge anything else: look for evidence, both for and against. 

Perhaps by this point I’ve soured you on old books. I don’t want to give that impression at all. It is incredibly rare to stumble upon a good hypothesis, which is not exactly the same as a true hypothesis. Many true hypotheses are not good. There are dozens of plausible explanations for many events which have exactly zero impact on how you act whether they are true or false. This is my general frustration with both political theory and evolutionary psychology. A great hypothesis is an extremely divergent point. It coincides with a life decision. If it’s true, you make a drastic change in one direction. If it’s false, you do nearly the opposite. The importance of these hypotheses should require no explanation.

And almost no great hypotheses are original.