Read mostly Books That Oppose Your Views

A book is nothing without factual context. One needs to reflect properly before digesting any given amount of information. Paying attention to our desires, how we choose to live, the people whom we are using and how you are using them is crucial when to comes drawing proper conclusions. What is our relationship with our environment? How is the information we amassed over time makes up who we are and how this new information comes to fit it?

Most of the books I've read are contra to my own views. I believe this is the wisest of all practices since we are given the opportunity to see how the other side presents its arguments. It enables is to frame a different world that operates on a different perspective — almost like a different universe. Most importantly, it enables us great control against our own biases that easily overtake our every single thought with every given chance. Our brains you see, like to confirm our beliefs, not act against them.

For example, when reading the Bible you will feel as if someone is describing an autobiography while setting up a Sims universe. This is also evident from Marx's Capital. The miracles, the assertions, the beliefs, the dreams, the elaborate planning, the specific rules are overwhelming. Thing is, those views have nothing to do with the real, daily world. They don't fulfil fundamental moral questions a child can ask such as, "How and why you cat kills for fun" or "Why is everyone at the end looks out for themselves". Why and how our altruism ultimate aims for our own benefit? When a book appears as a manifesto, a recipe about the world, one can easily identify the fallacies of the author. Most, if not all books, are manifestos of given perspectives.

Society is filled with myths, stories of grandeur that aim to hijack our perception from the raw, blatant truth. This is expected since a group owes to abide by some kind of cohesion in order to survive. We live within this conundrum every day yet we like to envision something better. Our minds are incapable of grasping the complexities of our environment so we resort to hasty summaries. This is like asking your 10-year-old computer to play high-end 2017 games. At best it will abbreviate complex graphics into vague, opaque shapes and the experience will be misleading. Our environment has been shaped beyond our capacity to rationalise it and with every attempt we make, we fall short. We are the 10-year-old computer. Happiness, hope and dreams are so highly overvalued because there is a great shortage of these commodities due to the vague overgeneralizations about the actual workings of our environment. This is also why most books provide us with what we want to hear and not what is actually going on around us.

One can only adopt. Shape-shift at every given situation. Everything is in a constant flux and our lives are just too narrow for us to grasp the entire picture. Reading books that oppose our views gives us a handicap over our limited grasp of the world. Why an eternal deity created us? Who and why created that deity? Why meaning bothers us so much? Why is everyone striving to gain gold and not sand? Why value manifests from nothing but our vague fantasies about how the world should work? We know the answers but we are too afraid to admit and act upon them. A context is already in place that pushes us to act towards the view of the majority. Atheism, Capitalism and Anarchy are detested so much for this very reason. One has to withdraw from the generally accepted perspective in order to entertain these thoughts and act upon them.

I am an atheist and a capitalist because I can't afford to be something else based on what I have read. Anything different is like asking a leopard to be an eagle. There are rules in the cosmos that have shaped specific parameters — from the way we think about things to the way we execute our behaviour. One either adapts or perishes. Don't get me wrong, I question highly the workings of the scientific method a well and specifically how new information gets to be introduced as the de-facto truth. One cannot be vigilant enough. This is why it is so helpful not to take anything at heart and rather constantly evaluate the information we are reading.

Objectively, every single one of us is a polyatheist — a living, moving heresy. There is at least one god we don't believe, one version about how the world works we just can't embrace. Same applies to Capitalism. From the way we pick our partners (different valued qualities) to how we choose to be rewarded from our labour. Nothing ever can be equal. The universe prohibits it. This is how these ideas of Atheism and Capitalism manifest themselves from my perspective and how they describe much of what is going on around me. This is also how science can only give us a glimpse of the world based on a specific perspective. There are no (or limited) counterarguments to these ideas for the basic reason that anything different aims to upset the very laws of nature. Constant change, the only thing that applies 100% in our cosmos, dictates how some ideas are superior to others.

A book is depended on its reader, not so much the writer. The language, the ideas, the way our emotions are invoked with every page, dictate how our thoughts about the world will be shaped. Keeping an open mind is nothing without having context. Read as much as you can from those whom you disagree with and you are guaranteed to have an edge in your daily life. All books are good books. The best ones though are those that provide us with opposing perspectives.