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Book Recommendations
The wisdom that comes from a meditation practice is something that can't readily be intellectualized, it has to be experienced by cultivating your own practice. That being said, these are some books that have shaped my thinking on radical politics, contemplative wisdom, and ecological identity:
*start with these
Contemplative Practice & Spirituality
*World as Lover, World as Self
Joanna Macy changed the way I understand humanity's relationship to the Earth and to the crisis we've created. It's the most important book I've read for understanding how to be an activist without losing yourself.
*The Wisdom of No Escape
A book about how to work with your neuroses rather than fighting them, with important lessons for meditation and for daily life.
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
A book that shows how the ego will co-opt anything, including spirituality, in service of its own comfort and expansion. The lessons can be extended to political materialism.
The Book:
On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
A playful dismantling of the Western assumption that our sense of self is evidence of our individuality. Watts instead suggests that we are not separate selves but expressions of a single living universe.
Ecology & Earth Systems
*Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer asks what it would mean to treat the natural world as a community of relatives rather than a collection of resources. This book shows what a different relationship to the Earth looks like, not as theory, but as practice.
*The Unsettling of America
Berry offers a devastating critique of industrial agriculture, and argues that many of society's ills are the result of using machines for work we used to accomplish through relationships with other living things.
Becoming Earth
This book is an exhilarating scientific history of how life evolved on our planet, and it makes the argument that the planet is a self-regulating living system that we are a part of.
Entangled Life
This book challenges the simple Darwinian view of life as "survival of the fittest," instead showing how life works through networks, symbiosis, and interdependence rather than competition and selfishness.
Politics & Social Change
*Caliban and the Witch:
Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Federici traces the origins of capitalism through the persecution of women, the destruction of the commons, and mind-body dualism in enlightenment-era philosophy. This book shows how Capitalism's first genocide against the indigenous women of Europe laid the groundwork for the system's global expansion.
*Wretched of the Earth
Fanon describes the psychology of colonialism, showing how it affects both the colonized and the colonizer. The most memorable insight from this book is the idea that when a colonizer dehumanizes a colonized people, they themselves become dehumanized.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Freire argues traditional education reproduces oppression by treating students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. True liberation requires focusing on developing a critical consciousness.
Debt:
The First 5,000 Years
Graeber dismantles the myth that markets and money are natural or inevitable, tracing the history of how debt has been used to manipulate the masses.
Capitalist Realism
Fisher investigates why it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
*How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Rodney makes an airtight case that African poverty isn't a failure of development, it's the direct result of the extraction of humans and resources from the African continent.
*Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Parenti challenges the liberal left's reflexive anticommunism, arguing that it has more in common with ruling class ideology than with genuine solidarity.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
A rigorous and necessary history of Palestinian dispossession by the state of Israel, told by one of the leading scholars of the Arab world.
Psychology & Human Nature
The Master and His Emissary
McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere (the analytical, data oriented, logical hemisphere) of the brain has staged a kind of coup over Western civilization, causing us to suppress our engagement with the right hemisphere (the holistic, big-picture, emotional hemisphere).
*No Bad Parts
Family Therapist Richard Schwartz describes a framework for understanding the human psyche as an Internal Family System: a conglomeration of sub-personalities that have to learn to get along with each other. With meditation as a foundational practice for meeting your parts, I find this framework of therapy indispensable for getting to know yourself.
*Humankind:
A Hopeful History
Bregman makes the evidence-based case that human beings are not fundamentally selfish, and that most of our institutions are built on the cynicism of a few, rather than the selfishness of the masses.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
Maté pioneers a view of addiction as a response to social alienation and pain, rather than a moral failing. This book will change how you think about addiction, trauma, and compassion.
Systems Thinking & Philosophy
*The Patterning Instinct
Lent traces the evolution of human cognition back to the earliest civilizations. He argues that the stories a civilization tells about its relationship to nature determine whether it survives.
The Tao of Physics
Capra noticed that modern physics and ancient Eastern philosophy were describing similar ideas in different languages.
Inspiring Fiction
The Ministry for the Future
Robinson imagines the next few decades of humanity's efforts to address climate change: the politics, the economics, the grief, the ingenuity.
The Dispossessed
By imagining a society of anarchists that are given a moon upon which to build their utopia, Le Guin explores the reality of building alternative political, economic, and cultural systems. She explores the real cost of freedom, and why it must be chosen over and over again.