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Have you ever come across a book that completely changed your thinking? That effectively changed the trajectory of your life? I have. And in this video, I'm going to share 15 books I've discovered that have led me to achieve at the highest levels, publishing academic work that is held in some of the world's top university libraries. And these books can help you become a deeper and more critical thinker than the vast majority of people.
And the first book on this list is *The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alen Goworth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency* by Derek Balefield. I know it's a mouthful. This book is a book on value theory, or in other words, the study of what value is and how value drives human behavior. And for your convenience, I'll be organizing all the books I'll be discussing into four categories: books on value theory, books on epistemology, or in other words, the study of knowledge, books on political theory, and finally books on human behavior.
Belleville's book is a deep analysis of the thinker Alan Gorth's logical proof of the existence of human rights, and it greatly influenced a lot of my own published academic work. But why do I recommend reading this book instead of Gorth's original book entitled *Reason and Morality*? You can definitely read it. But in some ways, Bale's analysis is even more rigorous. He literally takes each premise of Gorth's argument and writes pages and pages discussing the logical structure of the statement, the counterarguments, and his replies. It turns out to be a really airtight argument for human rights.
But that leads us right into our next book on this list, still in the area of value theory, entitled *Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong* by JL Mackey. You see, if we really want to call ourselves deep thinkers, objective thinkers, free thinkers, we can't only read things we agree with or which psychologically satisfy us. A major component of personal growth and self-mastery is experiencing the pain of psychological discomfort or even the feeling that our entire worldview might be threatened. And so this is a great book to read for anyone who is skeptical of human rights or even ethics more generally. In some ways, echoing the arguments of Nietze, Mackey posits what he calls moral error theory, which states that we believe moral phrases such as "murder is wrong" to have objective truth when really they don't. Do I agree with this? Not by this point in my life. But when I first encountered Mackey's work, I had no way to respond to it. And as such, it made me reflect more deeply on how I could possibly justify any kind of idea of moral truth. And that's exactly why you should read it.
When it comes to understanding values and value systems, understanding religion and religious morality is also very important, as religion has played and continues to play a huge role in shaping the moral systems of societies around the world. And that's where the next two books on our list come in: *The Theory of Morality* by Alan Donigan and *The Nature of Buddhist Ethics* by Damian Kon. Donigan approaches value theory and ethics from the perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Kon obviously approaches them from the Buddhist traditions. And what's so valuable about this is that they offer fairly rigorous logical arguments for the value systems of their respective traditions. Once again, exposing ourselves to various viewpoints, whether we agree with them or not, makes us multi-dimensional, creative problem solvers. If you're religious, read secular texts. If you're secular, read religious ones. Understanding value from all perspectives is ultimately the key to self-mastery. For every thought we have itself is a decision driven by values. So value theory is only one piece of the puzzle.
Now let's take a look at four books in our next category: Epistemology. And the first book we'll discuss here is *On Language* by Noam Chomsky. Epistemology is essentially the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? How is knowledge possible? How do you know what you think is true is actually true? And an analysis of language is quite possibly the most important place to start. After World War II, the entire Western world in philosophy took what many call the linguistic turn. Meaning that philosophers started to pay special attention to the meanings of words, phrases, logical connectives, and so on, in order to better understand how and if knowledge is possible. Post-modernists and critical theorists such as Derrida and Foucault took one path, while the so-called analytic philosophers such as A.J. Ayer and Rudolph Carnap took a radically different path. Noam Chomsky is in this analytic school of thought. Although thinkers such as Steven Pinker have argued against many of Chomsky's points, as he has also argued against Pinker, Chomsky's theory of what he calls generative grammar was massively influential to philosophy, as well as to psychology and cognitive science. Very important read.
By the way, if you love discussions like these and want to actively improve your critical thinking skills, then check out my free critical thinking and persuasion masterclass at the link in the pin comment below.
Speaking of the analytic school of thought, this next book on epistemology, *The Logic of Scientific Discovery* by Karl Popper, has also been hugely influential to the philosophy of science. Popper is quite easily one of my favorite thinkers, as he is what is called a fallibilist. In other words, he argues that all hypotheses and all knowledge in general are subject to revision. It's a simple point, but it's a humbling one. As far too many of us, myself included throughout my entire life, have considered ourselves to be absolutely 100% right about something when in reality we are inherently flawed, inherently ignorant, and therefore we should always stay open to being proved wrong. Definitely one of my favorite reads.
The author of our next book in this category, however, comes from a completely different school of thought, which I mentioned before, called critical theory. And that author is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. And the book we'll discuss of his is *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*. Habermas actually has many books and writings on epistemology, so it's really difficult to choose. But I chose this book because it sums up his entire set of views in one series of lectures he delivered over several years. So it's probably one of the most helpful books of his to read. I actually have an entire video just on this one book, so instead of going into great detail about it here, I encourage you to watch my video on it. All I'll say about it here is that Habermas provided a revolutionary way of thinking about rationality and truth that effectively bridged the analytic philosophers and the critical theorists and postmodernists.
The last book in this epistemology category is *Reasons and Persons* by Derek Parfit, which technically not only covers epistemology but value theory and what's called ontology, or the study of being. Also, Parfit was an influential thinker for many reasons, and I can pretty much guarantee that if you read this book, you'll probably have a few sleepless nights continuing to think about some of the questions he poses. Notably, he asks important questions about personal identity. What exactly is personal identity? Is it fixed or does it change? Are you in control of it? Who even are you? He was one of the first to propose that not only do people in the present have rights, but that people in the future, that is, people who haven't even been born yet, also have rights. And that since everything we do right now has a ripple effect into the future, we should consider carefully what our moral impact is that we'll have on future generations. I would say his work has never been more timely. Read it and let me know what your opinion is.
But this all begs the question: how can we answer such huge questions without some overarching understanding of both morality and law within societies? Well, that's where we get into our next category of books: political theory. The first book we should discuss here is *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* by Robert Nozick. Nozick takes a right-wing libertarian approach to political theory, and his work is a classic and famous response to the more center-left John Rawls's book *A Theory of Justice*, in which Rawls argues for a method of wealth redistribution based on helping the least advantaged in society. For a while in college, I was actually a libertarian, although now I'm not. But once again, exposing ourselves to different ideas is key, even and especially if we disagree with them. At the very least, don't you want to understand the argument well so you can argue against it effectively?
And that's exactly why I love the next two books in this category: *The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State* by Bruce Benson, and *More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws* by John R. Lott, both of which argue for radical privatization and deregulation. In *The Enterprise of Law*, Benson argues that we don't actually need the government to centrally administer law and that the free market is the optimal way to run the justice system. And he uses various rather sophisticated economic and statistical arguments to justify his point. In *More Guns, Less Crime*, Lott argues that the data actually show that gun ownership makes people more safe, not less.
So, why do I love these two books so much? Not because I agree with them. I couldn't disagree with them more. But guess what? I used to agree with them back when, as I said, I was a libertarian in college. And having been on both sides of this, the reason I believe it's so important to read these is precisely because they use such sophisticated theoretical and statistical methods to argue their points. Because of this, they challenge your mind to do the hard work of understanding statistical methods, delving into the fine points of economic theory and market efficiency. And at the end of the day, could you agree with them? Maybe that's up to you. But if you do, at least you'll do so with intellectual integrity and after having challenged yourself to analyze the facts and methods.
And it's precisely the next book on our list that offers a challenge to arguments such as those Nozick, Benson, and Lott make. And that book is *The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy* by Nick Romeo. Romeo rigorously analyzes the predominant economic theories we're typically taught in our economics textbooks and cites credible research in the past decade or so, demonstrating that many of the most basic assumptions embedded in these traditional economic theories are deeply flawed. But Romeo doesn't take a blindly ideological approach, going into the opposite direction to embrace everything Marxist just because. Instead, he takes a broad view of forms of economic organization such as worker cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans, true pricing, participatory budgeting, and online labor market platforms that have demonstrated track records of success. And argues that we don't need to take some sort of special ideological stance to understand that these systems both work and respect the rights of all those involved. To me, this slightly more neutral and practical approach is really refreshing.
But at the same time, any way of configuring the economy or our political system must, at the end of the day, be grounded in some form of philosophical justification. And that's where our next book in this category comes in: *The Community of Rights* by Alan Goworth. Remember Goworth? Well, after he wrote his ethical theory, he expanded it to apply to political theory. Lately, I've been rereading this book, and I once again admire how clear and methodical his approach is to discussing every topic from unemployment, private property rights, welfare systems, and so on. His arguments, whether you agree with them or not, are well worth understanding.
But we wouldn't be complete on our journey to self-mastery without understanding human behavior, which is our last category on this list. It's great to understand philosophy and the moral and political justifications of ideas, but what good are all those ideas if they don't actually conform to the realities of how we humans actually behave in the real world? That's where our first book in this category comes in: *Social Foundations of Thought and Action* by Albert Bandura. During what is known as the cognitive revolution in the 1960s, psychologists once again started to take the mind seriously. Up to this point, the dominant theory in psychology was behaviorism, spearheaded largely by the work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner, partially inspired by the work of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and his 1949 book, *The Concept of Mind*, studied and predicted behavior based purely in terms of environmental inputs. He and his followers didn't take seriously what was going on in someone's mind as a predictive factor for behavior. In fact, Ryle, the philosopher I mentioned before, went so far as to claim that minds don't exist at all. And as you can imagine, this had major impacts on how psychology both viewed and treated individuals.
But Bandura challenged all this. He successfully showed that we simply could not predict certain behaviors and outcomes without understanding cognition. Indeed, even at the level of rodent behavior, these animals exhibit the use of what are called cached values, which is a sort of simple cognitive decision-making system. And so, researchers have come to realize that we do need some idea of the mind both to explain and predict even some of the simplest animal behaviors. As a result, Bandura's theory has arguably been the most influential contribution to psychology since then, and his work has been influential on the value theory that I set out in my own work.
That being said, though, human behavior is complex and inherently difficult to predict because there are endless factors at play that often are unforeseen or misunderstood. And so until maybe quantum computing plus AI get together and can develop highly accurate models, we continue to deal with problems of predictive power from social models when these social models are applied outside of experimental settings. It doesn't mean these models are useless. It simply means they have limitations. And that's exactly what is discussed and addressed in the book, *What Works, What Doesn't, and When? Case Studies in Applied Behavioral Science* by Dilip Soman. This book is literally an anthology of clinical studies testing behavioral interventions for behaviors such as water usage, medicine compliance, stress reduction, personal budgeting, consistency toward goals, and so on. The lesson here is this: No matter what outcomes we read about in those other political or economic books, we have to instantly be skeptical and ask questions such as, "What were the methods used to make this conclusion?" "Is the research reproducible?" "What are the limitations of the research?" and "What can we reasonably conclude we should do based on the research results?" This book teaches you how to engage in this kind of analysis.
At the end of the day, it's up to us to actively train our minds to become better thinkers. It's not an easy process. It's not always a pleasant process. But we have to remember the greatest power we can ever gain isn't power over other people. It's power over ourselves. If you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life, but on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next.