Jean-Marie Abgrall: Soul Snatchers: The Mechanics of Cults, (English version) New York, Algora, 2000. Although the crotchety translation leaves a lot to be desired vs. the original French (read that if you can), and the author meanders at times, the text if is crammed with insights I had yet to encounter in well over a dozen other "highly regarded" tomes on this topic. His chapters on coercive persuasion, psychic and physical conditioning are as insightful as one who knows Pierre Janet & the psychological French will expect... though his chapter on treatment has to be read with an eye toward useful criticism based on experience in the trenches.
Theodor Adorno, Daniel
Levinson, et al: The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice;
orig. pub, 1950, New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Thesis: Most are simply
followers who were conditioned, socialized and normalized in childhood by their
parents, teachers and peers to go along to get along with those who seem to
know... or have financial or political power over them.
H. K. Ahn, H. J. Kim, P.
Aggarwal: Helping Fellow Beings: Anthropomorphized Social Causes and the
Role of Anticipatory Guilt, in Psychological Science, 2013; DOI:10.1177/0956797613496823 Peer-reviewed,
journal-published, formal research (which is the case every time one
sees "DOI" with a bunch of #s after it on this list) suggests that
putting a human face on the campaign for a social cause increases statistically
measured support for it.
Christopher Ailsby: The
Third Reich Day by Day; New York: Chartwell Books, 2010. Because the Nazis
were obsessive photographers, we are left with a unique pictorial record of the
ascent of duplicitous "national socialism" that proved to be no
such thing at all, but sounded good to the confused and desperate in the
horrible Weimar era. All the usual subjects are illustrated, including
Hindenburg, Hess, Rohm, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Speer, Braun and Goring. A
fine, easy to read, basic primer of the Rise & Fall.
Saul Alinsky: Reveille
for Radicals; New York: Random House, 1946. "...community organizer
inspired a generation of activists and politicians [with] the original handbook
for social change." The manual for labor, racial, feminist, and
environmental movement organizers for decades. Based largely on Vladimir
Lenin's organizing principles.
Graham Allison & Robert Blackwell: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. An extensive selection of direct quotations from articles and speeches delivered by the no-nonsense, long-time premier and engineer of the Singapore Republics astonishing emergence as one of the world's economic powerhouses. That he was and is a fearless and disciplined empiricist is self-evident.
Robert Altemeyer: The
Authoritarian Specter, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996. Picked up
where Adorno, Milgram and Miller left off decades earlier as the first of two
books (see below) on the copious primary research the author did on the
mechanisms of authoritarian influence and manipulation.
Robert Altemeyer: The
Authoritarians, Charleston, SC: Lulu, 2006. Same author pulls together an enhanced mass of primary research to support his thesis.
Scott Anderson: Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, New York: Random House Anchor, 2013. Of several I have read on this topic, the most scholarly and comprehensive to date. If one reads it carefully and doesn't come away with a concise grasp of why things are the way they are, they may need professional counseling.
Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko: The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, New York: Harper & Row, 1981. A worthy, NON-fiction companion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's justly famed The Gulag Archipelago, TToS is a stunning but depressing journey through the Georgian gangster's astonishingly cynical and bloody rise to and maintenance of power from the 1910s to the 1950s. Putin may be able to rationalize poisoning his opponents. Stalin had no qualms about running a power cult and simply eliminating anyone even remotely threatening by the tens of millions. Lenin's and Trotsky's idealisms didn't stand a chance.
Kevin Arceneaux & Ryan
Vander Wielen: The Effects of Need for Cognition and Need for Affect on
Partisan Evaluations, in the Journal of Political Psychology, Vol. 34, No,
1, February 2013. Neither a purely emotional nor a purely rational
approach to rhetorical arguments can be counted upon to work. The forces of
culture in general, and family interactions in particular, have conferred upon
us all a requirement for both the rational and emotional.
Hannah Arendt: The
Origins of Totalitarianism (The Burden of Our Time), orig. pub. 1951, New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973. Thesis: The wealth-accumulating,
authoritarian cynics (e.g. T. Roosevelt, Jan Smuts, Adolph Hitler) used the myth of
superior race &/or culture to fuel expansion, manifest destiny &
imperialism. But very often cited as a foundational tome even though it is markedly inferior to Hoffer's The True Believer and Adorno et al's The Authoritarian Personality.
Karen Armstrong: A
History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; New
York: MJF Books, 1993. Abstruse at times to the point of numbing the
reader's mind, Armstrong (one of the leading theological scholars ever)
nevertheless clarifies the arguments for deities as both emotional stimulant and tranquilizers,
as well as social constructivist, authoritarian inventions to organize clans,
tribes and (ultimately) cultures for the sake of survival and/or expansion.
Jan Ketil Arnulf, Kai Rune
Larsen, et al: Predicting Survey Responses: How and Why Semantics Shape Survey
Statistics on Organizational Behaviour, in PLoS ONE, September 2014; DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0106361"The
methods used for surveys are making it difficult to get at what's unique about
an organization rather than what's embedded in general language." "...people
naturally responded to surveys by selecting answer options that were similar in
language to each other..."
Steven Arterburn &
Jack Felton: Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious
Addiction; Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991. Coming from an
inside-the-box-of-faith-and-belief, Christian perspective (similar to Martin's
much earlier Kingdom of the Cults; see below), the authors nevertheless
face the matter of obsessive "hyper-religiosity" relatively head-on.
They approach it more from an addiction paradigm rather than a cult
mind-control or thought reform frame, however.
Herbert Asbury: The
Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld; Orig. Pub. 1929, New
York: Random House Vintage, 2008. Rampant lawlessness in Manhattan through
the 1800s, including the Civil War draft riots that killed and injured
thousands in 1863. Future governor & president Teddy Roosevelt built a
career as police commissioner in the 1890s when he led the charge that finally
put the Tammany-supported gangs down.
S. E. Asch: Effects of
Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments; in H.
Guetzkow (ed.): Groups, Leadership and Men; Pittsburgh: Carnegie
Press, 1951. Thesis: Peer pressure crushes the independent ego in
more authoritarian cult-ures.
Jan Assman: Moses the
Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.
Press, 1998. Speculatively (though with dense scholarship) connects the
dots from Akhenaten's first blush (and soon hotly rejected and buried for
centuries) monotheism to the "recovered" (from
"repression?") Hebrew, Xtian and Islamic recreations of it. Goes way
beyond Freud's speculations in his own Moses and Monotheism.
Jan Assman: The Price
of Monotheism; Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U. Press, 2009. "The Hebrews
in thrall to pagan idolatry are converted to monotheism by Moses, Paul converts
Jews and gentiles to Christianity, Mohammed converts Jews, Christians, and
infidels to Islam; and in all these situations of conversion the Mosaic
distinction between true and false is reintroduced and tightened. The Mosaic
distinction must constantly be drawn anew."
S. Atir, E. Rosenzweig, D.
Dunning: When Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts
Claims of Impossible Knowledge; in Psychological Science, 2015; DOI: 10.1177/0956797615588195 Those
who believe they know more than they actually do are susceptible to fake
data, which can be used by politicians to manipulate the behavior of pseudo-knowledgeable elected
officials, their staffs, and voters.
Hui
Bai (U. Minnesota): When Racism and Sexism Benefit Black and Female
Politicians:Politicians’ Ideology Moderates Prejudice’s Effect More Than
Politicians’ Demographic Background, in Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, August 2020; DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000314
Ideology trumps race and gender; prejudiced people will still vote for Black
and female politicians, as long as ideologies match, says study with over
40,000 subjects.
Russ Baker: Family of
Secrets: The Bush Dynasty…; New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009. Traces
family involvement with the Saudi royal family back to even before Prescott
Bush's involvement with the OSS and CIA.
James Bamford: Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War to the Dawn of a New Century; New York: Doubleday, 2001. Essentially a revision of Bamford's earlier book, The Puzzle Palace, it's a drama-heavy rundown of communications intel work right up to 9-11... with all the usual (and repeated) suggestions of "needlessly" putting innocents in harm's way to peer over the enemy's transom's in (and over) places like Russia, China, the Middle East and North Korea. Fascinating for technospooks, I expect.
Larry M. Bartels: Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’
commitment to democracy, in PNAS; Vol. 117, No. 37, September 2020. "…substantial
numbers of Republicans endorse statements contemplating violations of key
democratic norms, including respect for the law and for the outcomes of
elections and eschewing the use of force in pursuit of political ends. The
strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic
antagonism -- especially concerns about the political power and claims on
government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong
tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness,
even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic
conflict in contemporary US politics."
John Bartkowski, Xiaohe
Xu, Stephen Bartkowski: Mixed Blessing: The Beneficial and Detrimental Effects
of Religion on Child Development among Third-Graders; in Religions, Vol. 10,
No. 1, February 2019 DOI: 10.3390/rel10010037. "Bartkowski said a major takeaway
from this new study is that religion is an important influence, generally for
good and sometimes for ill, as children navigate their way through the grade
school years." Religious kids are better socialized (for better or for
worse), but may be less adept scholastically as well as more closed-minded.
Aaron Beck: Prisoners
of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility and Violence; New York:
Harper-Collins, 1999. Thesis: Hate is conditioned by a combination of
abuse and instructed belief, in no small part in categorical dualism.
Sharon Beder: Selling
the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR; London: Zed Books, 2001. "...material
affluence is accompanied by increasing levels of stress, insecurity,
depression, crime, and addiction. The environment that life itself depends on
is also being destroyed."
Peter L. Berger &
Thomas Luckman: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise
in the Sociology of Knowledge; New York: Doubleday, 1966. Human beings rationalize their
experience by creating re-presentational (as per McGilchrist) models of
the social world, then reify these models through language to create
the consensus trance (as per Tart) of "intersubjective reality." The
seminal book on social constructivism.
Peter Berger: The
Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York:
Doubleday, 1967. From a review: "...religion makes permanent the
temporary, transcendentalizes the immanent, sacralizes the profane, and ensures
a rational and law-based rather than chaotic reality."
Edward L. Bernays: Crystallizing
Public Opinion; New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. In which the author
utilizes his Uncle Sigmund's psychoanalytic theories as the basis of
mass influence via the popular media. See also Larry Tye below.
Jeremy Bernstein: Oppenheimer:
Portrait of an Enigma, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. One of several books on
how the genius of both the manipulation of physics and the management of other
egomaniacal geniuses who guaranteed that America would win WW2 became so
shattered by witnessing the effects of his creation that he became a national
security risk denied a security clearance.
David Berreby: Us
& Them: The Science of Identity; U. of Chicago Press, 2005. Thesis Our
minds are conditioned and instructed to perceive the world on the conceptual
basis of absolutistic, permanent, categorical dualism to the exclusion of
seeing, hearing and otherwise sensing a universe in constant, evolving, plastic flux.
Christina Binkley: Winner
Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman, and the Race to Own Las
Vegas; New York: Hyperion, 2008. Moves the epic forward into the '90s and
early '00s. Best book on Kerkorian's acquisitions.
Kai Bird: The
Chairman: John McCloy & The Making of the American Establishment; New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1992. The life & times of one of the most
expert, capable and effective of the Cold Warriors.
Kai Bird & Martin
Sherwin: American Promethius: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer; New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005. Similar to Bernstein's book
above, though more artfully packaged.
Jack & Jeanne Block: Nursery
school personality and political orientation two decades later; Journal
of Research in Personality, Vol. 40, 2006. "Preschool children who 20
years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing
close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively
under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at
age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily offended,
indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and
vulnerable."
Allan Bloom: The
Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed
Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students; New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987. Thesis: We ignore the classics in the interest of using
"higher ed" to turn out good little technologists who are blind to
the Big Picture. But the descriptive language he uses is way too opaque for
anyone but a schizoid Ph.D. from Berkeley to comprehend. The book is great
influenced by J. J. Rousseau's Emile, or On Education, which Bloom
translated from the French some years before.
Boethius of Rome: Consolation
of Philosophy, somewhere in what is now Switzerland or southern Germany:
The Holy Roman Church, c. 524. From Wikipedia: "... written in AD 523
during a one-year imprisonment Boethius served while awaiting trial – and
eventual execution – for the alleged crime of treason under
the Ostrogothic King
Theodoric. Boethius (of 'St. Francis's Prayer' fame) answered religious
questions without reference to Christianity, relying solely on natural
philosophy and the Classical Greek tradition."
Boethius is revered, however, not for coming to terms with the truth,
but for convincing himself with tortured, quasi-"spiritual" (actually
moralistic) logic that he and others like him deserve their fate to
protect the cohesiveness of the Christian cult-ure against the threats of
paganism. Why he wasn't ever canonized is beyond me, unless the irrationality of
his discourse was just too obvious for the lords of the Roman Church to take a
risk on.
John Bolton: The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. The lonnnnnnng-time conservative foreign policy maven paints the 45th POTUS not so much as any sort of informed, alt-right ideologue but rather as a petulant, approval-obsessed child in waaaaaaay over his head. Regardless of his private life, his sometimes legitimate concerns in the face of "cultural degradation," or his monetization of The Office, Trump's righteous pseudo-certainty and essential naivete with the likes of Syria's Assad, China's Xi, Russia's Putin, and North Korea's Kim should be viewed with concern in a dog-eat-dog world.
Jean Bottero, et al.: Ancestor
of the West : Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and
Greece; Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 2000. Thesis: Religion evolved from a
dire need for order in a disorderly and uncontrollable world, leading to love of
the "orderer(s)"... and fear of it / Him / Her / Them.
Jean Bottero: The
Birth of God: The Bible and the Historian; orig. pub. 1986; Philadelphia: Penn
State Press, 2010. One of the foundations of all the noise in the West
about the ostensibly Abrahamic-Mosaic rip-off of Egyptian religious
traditions and parables, though room is made for Moses himself being an
invention of priests during or after the destruction of the first Temple by the
Babylonians.
Levi Boxell, Matthew
Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro: Greater Internet use is not associated
with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic
groups; in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September
2017; 201706588 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706588114 "...groups least
likely to use the internet experienced larger changes in polarization
between 1996 and 2016 than the groups most likely to use the
internet,"
James Bradley: The
Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War; New York: Little, Brown
& Co., 2009. Thesis: Teddy Roosevelt caused the Japanese invasion of
China & Korea, as well as WW2 in the Pacific by telling the Japanese in
1905 that America supported their westernizing influence in Asia.
James Bradley: The
China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia; New York:
Little, Brown & Company, 2015. Thesis: "Prominent Americans --
including FDR's grandfather, Warren Delano -- made their fortunes in the 19th
century China opium trade. Meanwhile, American missionaries sought a myth:
noble Chinese peasants eager to Westernize. The media -- including Luce's Time and Life magazines
(see below) -- propagated this mirage, and FDR believed that supporting Chiang
Kai-shek would make China America's best friend in Asia."
Mark Brandt, Jarrett
Crawford, J.: Answering Unresolved Questions about the Relationship
between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice, in Social
Psychological and Personality Science; July 29, 2016 DOI:10.1177/1948550616660592 "People
with low cognitive ability tended to express prejudice towards
groups perceived as liberal and unconventional (e.g., atheists, gays
and lesbians), as well as groups of people perceived as having low choice over
group membership (e.g., ethnic minorities). People with high cognitive
ability... tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative and
conventional (e.g., Christians, the military, big business)."
Emma Brown and Danielle
Douglas-Gabriel: Since 1980, spending on prisons has grown
three times as much as spending on public education; Washington Post,
July 7, 2016. "Total corrections spending grew 149 percent in
Massachusetts compared with 850 percent in Texas. Total education spending rose
from 18 percent in Michigan to 326 percent in Nevada."
L. B. Brown: Ideology; New York: Penguin, 1973. Presents a substantial number of studies attempting to correlate specific personality traits with political preferences.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: The
Grand Chessboard: America’s Primacy and it’s Geostrategic Imperatives; New
York: Basic Books, 1998. “Most Americans are close to total ignorance
about the world. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign
policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it
much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does
justice to the complexity of the world.” “[American exceptionalism] is a
reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or
important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for
simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now
selecting to be the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases,
stunningly ignorant.”
John Buntin: L. A.
Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City; New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2009. The lives and times of Benjamin
"Bugsy" Siegel, Morris "Mickey" Cohen, Jack Dragna, Gene
Biscailuz and William H. Parker in mid-century Los Angeles.
Trigant Burrow: The Social Basis
of Consciousness; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Possibly the
fundamental text on social constructivism. Thesis: The ego is socially
implanted. Psychodynamics is bigger than mother> or family> child. The
culture makes the unwitting, "average" person as if "sane" or as if "crazy"
via all the various agents of the social organizers who profit therefrom. Otto
von Bismarck and John Dewey take some heat here for the "cultural
nomalization" movement in public education. Most interestingly, however, Burrow reports on giving birth to group psychotherapy in the age of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Dana Carney, John Jost, et
al: The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles,
Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind; Journal of Political
Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 6, 2008. These: Extremists of both types are true
believers, but more moderate liberals tend toward questioning and
investigation while moderate conservatives tend toward social
conventions and authority-following.
Robert Caro: The
Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. From
poverty in hardscrabble south Texas to success as a populist messiah in
Congress in the late '30s.
Robert Caro: The
Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Torn
between his desire to be a hero and rescuer, and his ruthless misinformation
and media manipulation, Congressman Johnson advances by dint of fate to the U.
S. Senate in the late '40s.
Robert Caro: The
Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. An
enormous ego with a talent for figuring people out and manipulating them
propels LBJ to Senate Majority Leader in the '50s.
Robert Caro: The
Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Stymied
by the Kennedys as a powerless (and resentful) vice president, LBJ nevertheless
retains the Kennedy cabinet and advances their liberal social agenda here --
and their Cold War containment agenda there -- that changes America for the
next half century, puts the Solid South in the hands of the GOP (after a
century of control by his own party), abets the scourge of opiates, and chews
up the lives of a half million military veterans.
Anne Case & Angus Deaton: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism; Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2020. From the book jacket: "For the white working class, today's America has
become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated
become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying
from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie
the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of
corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that
redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism,
which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying
the lives of blue-collar America." The charts reprinted in the March 6, 2020, edition of The New York Times at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage tell the story.
Chapman University:
"What do Americans fear?" in Science Daily, 12 October 2016.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161012160030.htm> 1)
Corruption of government officials (same top fear as 2015), 2) Terrorist
attacks, 3) Not having enough money for the future, 4) Being a victim of
terror, 5) Government restrictions on firearms and ammunition (new), 6) People
I love dying, 7) Economic or financial collapse, 8) Identity theft, 9) People I
love becoming seriously ill, 10) The Affordable Health Care Act
("Obamacare"). (But... bear in mind that CU is a thoroughly
conservative school in California's Orange County.)
Ron Chernow: The
House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance;
New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1990. On the investment in the railroad and
real estate industries that bankrupted millions of small farmers while making
JPM, Collis P. Huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles Crocker, John Jacob
Astor and the other "robber barons" fabulously wealthy during the
"gilded age."
W. J. Chopik, M. Motyl: Ideological Fit
Enhances Interpersonal Orientations; in Social Psychological and
Personality Science, July 2016; DOI:10.1177/1948550616658096 "Lack
of ideological fit with one’s environment was associated with a difficulty to
form close relationships and lower perspective taking."
Winston Churchill: The
Second World War: The Gathering Storm; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. His
version of how he saw it all coming when the others didn't as far back as the
late '20s.
Vicky Chuqiao
Yang, Daniel M. Abrams, Georgia Kernell, Adilson E. Motter: Why Are U.S.
Parties So Polarized? A 'Satisficing' Dynamical Model, in SIAM Review, Vol.
62, No. 3, September 2020. DOI: 10.1137/19M1254246 "U.S. political parties are becoming increasingly polarized due to their quest
for voters -- not because voters themselves are becoming more extremist."
Robert Cialdini: Influence:
Science and Practice, 4th Ed.; New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. A
colorless, (cynical?), mechanistic, manualistic treatment of the tools built on
research into behavioristic conditioning, socialization and normalization.
Great stuff for Mad Men, flacks and cable news spinmeisters.
Aleksandra Cichocka, Michał
Bilewicz, John T. Jost, Natasza Marrouch, Marta Witkowska: On the Grammar
of Politics -- or Why Conservatives Prefer Nouns; in Political Psychology,
January 2016; DOI: 10.1111/pops.12327 "This
use of nouns, rather than adjectives, is seen to preserve stability,
familiarity and tradition -- all of which appear to be valued more highly by
conservatives than liberals. Because nouns 'elicit clearer and more definite
perceptions of reality than other parts of speech', they satisfy the desire for
'structure and certainty' that is common among social conservatives."
Thesis: Conservatives tend to stop at Piaget's concrete operational processing;
liberals tend to move on to formal (rational-empirical) processing.
Richard Clarke: Against
All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror; New York: Free Press, 2004. Reagan's,
Bush 41's, Clinton's and Bush 43's initial National Coordinator for (Cyber)
Security claims Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perl, et al stonewalled his memos
reporting on Al Queda before 9-11.
James Clapper: Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence, New York: Random House Penguin Viking, 2018. A very useful companion volume to Mike Hayden's Playing it to The Edge by a former National Security Agency director and Director of National Intelligence who sought to provide "truth to power." Though Clapper is a moderate liberal and Hayden a moderate conservative, both authors are essentially apolitical "factualists."
Joshua J. Clarkson, John
R. Chambers, et al: The self-control consequences of political
ideology, in PNAS, June 22, 2015 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1503530112 "...conservatives
outperformed liberals only when participants believed free will has a
beneficial impact on self-control. When participants believed free will could
undermine self-control, liberals outperformed conservatives."
Flo Conway & Jim
Siegelman: Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change; New
York: Dell, 1978. Superior (especially for the time) rundown of the major
thought reform / mind control cults in the US in the '60s an '70s.
Charles Cooley: Human
Nature and the Social Order; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 1902, 1986.
Emphasized influential psychologist William James's notion of self-awareness as
the required route out of common cultural conditioning, but did not quite
assert "social constructivism."
Lucian Gideon Conway III, Shannon C. Houck, Laura
Janelle Gornick, Meredith
A. Repke: Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the
United States, in Political Psychology, online only 21 December 2017.
DOI: 10.1111/pops.12470 "Findings from both studies lend support to
an authoritarianism symmetry hypothesis: Significant positive correlations
emerged between LWA and measurements of liberalism, prejudice, dogmatism, and
attitude strength." Three of the authors are from the University of Montana,
a known bastion of radical conservative, neo-Libertarianism. Welcome to peer-reviewed fake news? IDK,
though it has been evident to me that many liberals are quite authoritarian.
Sarah M. Coyne, Laura
Stockdale, et al: Pow! Boom! Kablam! Effects of Viewing Superhero Programs
on Aggressive, Prosocial, and Defending Behaviors in Preschool Children, in Journal
of Abnormal Child Psychology, January 2017; DOI: 10.1007/s10802-016-0253-6 Thesis:
Research suggest it's conceivable that many who grew up in the superhero era
saw Arnold S. and Donald T. as superheroes, and voted for them
accordingly.
M. A. Craig, J. A.
Richeson: On the Precipice of a "Majority-Minority" America:
Perceived Status Threat From the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White
Americans' Political Ideology, in Psychological Science, 2014; DOI:10.1177/0956797614527113. Facing
the prospect of racial minority groups becoming the overall majority in the
United States, many Caucasian voters moved away from the left toward the
conservative end of the political spectrum.
Catherine Cramer: How
Rural Resentment Explains the Surprising Victory of Donald Trump, in The
Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2016, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/13/how-rural-resentment-helps-explain-the-surprising-victory-of-donald-trump/.
"For people who were feeling ignored, disrespected and overlooked by the
urban elite, the Trump campaign had a strong appeal."
Gary
Cross: An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America; New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002. “Consumer culture has provided affluent
societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes,
and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. …
The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of
self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today,
thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities
together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans.” Or…
addiction to stimulation is the fuel of any industrial and information economy.
Thomas Curran, Andrew P.
Hill. Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth
Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016, in Psychological Bulletin, December
2017; DOI: 10.1037/bul0000138 "Meritocracy places
a strong need for young people to strive, perform and achieve in modern
life," said Curran. "Young people are responding by reporting
increasingly unrealistic educational and professional expectations for
themselves. As a result, perfectionism is rising among millennials."
The upshot of the law of unintended consequences in Germanistic culture
striving to continue to dominate against ever-improving foreign competition?
No! Couldn't be.
Adam Curtis: The
Century of the Self; a BBC documentary broadcast in 2002 (based on Ewen's PR!:
A Social History of Spin, see below). Compelling report on research
demonstrating the use and effectiveness of Freudian psychoanalytic and
Watsonian behavioristic techniques used by the mass media (and those who
manipulate it) to influence and enhance narcissistic cultural beliefs &
values, consumer spending and voting on both candidates and issues.
Charles Darwin: The
Descent of Man...; orig. pub. 1871, New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Natural
selection, survival of the fittest, genetic predispositions, etc.
Margaret Leslie Davis: The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles, U. California Press, 2007. Frustrated university administrator exits Kansas to become the head man at UCLA and then the CEO of the Los Angeles Times. And in so doing, becomes a very key figure in the transformation -- and legitimization -- of El Lay east of Hollywood and Beverly Hills into a respectable center of arts and culture. Intriguing largely because of leveraging of culture to empower (what one would now call a "moderately") conservative political agenda on behalf of the Chandlers and other scions of the city.
Mike Davis: City of
Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, 2nd Ed., New York: Verso
Books, 2006. Uneven but nonetheless interesting collection of essays on
the history of El Lay as the Place To Watch to see where the rest of America is
headed sooner or later.
Ronald Davis: The
Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System; Dallas: SMU Press, 1993. Typical
of its genre, but includes the most detailed rundown of the demise of the
system including before and during the black list era.
Regis Debray: God: An Itinerary; New York: Verso, 2004. Possibly THE deconstructionist, biblical scholar of the millennial era, Debray asserts here that a) "God" as we all know him could only have been invented by the repeatedly displaced, relocated and/or subjugated during a period of incarceration (NOT in Egypt; in what is now Iraq); b) "Jesus" was the messianic invention of a third incarceration, and moreover, one that represented a widespread dismay about unfulfilled promises; c) the written word was the launch pad, and the printed word was the rocket ship; and d) "God" (as we all know him) is either being redefined to suit direct experience (owing to Buddhist and Taoist influences) or recast yet again as The Great Rescuer (by the evangelicals, fundamentalists and charismatics of all three of Abrahamic traditions). In whatever event, Debray's view is that "God" (as we all know him) has always been a mythical and metaphoric means to political and economic ends.
Arthur Deikman: The
Observing Self; Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. The founder of
transpersonalism lays out his own bridge from Watts and the East-West Institute
of the '50s and '60s to the mindfulness movement of the '90s and '00s.
Siddartha would have been pleased, I think.
Arthur Deikman: The
Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American
Society; Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Fine rundown of the human potential
movement, it's contaminations of Asian meditation and philosophy, and it's worst
corruptions of both from the expert p.o.v. of one who understood Asian
philosophy and practice at least as well as anyone of his era.
Arthur Deikman: Them
and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat; Berkeley, CA: Bay
Tree Publishing, 2003. Update of the book above, with added input on the
thought reform and mind control components of the radical Islamist gangs.
Jacques Delarue: The Gestapo: A History of Horror; (orig. pub. 1962), New York: MJF Books, 2008. Lives up to its title and then some. Goering, Himmler, Heydrich and cast of enthusiastic (and power-hungry) "true believers" (as per Hoffer) in racial (and cult-ural) superiority built an immense cult of unquestioned authority, submission and discipline that included French, Dutch, Czech, Spanish, Italian, White Russian and Scandinavian, as well as German participants. Over the course of a dozen years, the SS and Gestapo slaughtered upwards of 10 million people... including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Red Russian, Polish, Slovak, and other Catholic, Protestant and Jewish folks using techniques out of Lifton's, Schein's, Singer's, Langone's, West's, Abgral's, Tosh's, Hassan's books decades before they were published.
Ovid Demaris: The
Last Mafioso: Jimmy the Weasel Fratianno; New York: Bantam, 1985. The Code
of Omerta held for three quarters of a century before the FBI broke Jimmy down.
Over time, most of a generation of Cosa Nostra head men were taken down, as
well. (Demaris, btw, wrote The Godfather.)
Sally Denton & Roger
Morris: The Money and The Power: The Making of Las Vegas and it’s Hold on
America; New York: Vintage Books. 2002. Head and shoulders above the rest
of the genre, this is a truly superior and scholarly work. Not only on the
arrival of the mid-western syndicate and the small-time crooks who preceded
them, and the "Casino" era, but on the power and influence
accumulated wealth can purchase all the way to both ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue.
Sally Denton: The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right; New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. "Two startling events that have been largely ignored by
historians frame Sally Denton's swift, tense narrative of a year of fear:
anarchist Giuseppe Zangara's assassination attempt on Roosevelt, and a
plutocrats' plot to overthrow the government that would come to be known as the
Wall Street Putsch. The Plots Against the President throws light on
the darkest chapter of the Depression and the moments when the fate of the
American republic hung in the balance."
Jared Diamond: Guns,
Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; New York: W. W. Norton,
1999. The Way the West was Won, from 1492 onward, for sure. But more than
that: The real mechanisms on empire-building from the Romans through the New
Anglican Empire. (Pulitzer Prize winner.)
Jared Diamond: Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; New York: Penguin, 2005. "Environmental
damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise
political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world,
but some found solutions and persisted." Far from as convincing as the
previous book, but still interesting.
Gordon DiRenzo (ed.): Personality and Politics; New York: Anchor Books, 1974. Comprehensive rundown of many of the theories and studies on correlation of personality to political preference, activism, voting and other behavioral expression.
Eric Jay Dolan: When America First Met China; New York: Livewright / W. W. Norton, 2012. Very detailed account of the British and American incursions from the 18th through early 20th centuries, with considerable emphasis on the opium trade and its numerous (and still lingering) upshots. Written like a very solid doctoral dissertation with copious notes and references.
G. William Domhoff: Who
Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance, 6th Ed.; New
York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, 2009. UC Santa Cruz psychology prof
de-constructs the "power elite" in America a la Cooley and Mills. A
campus favorite for decades, now in its seventh edition.
Simon D. Donner, Jeremy
McDaniels: The influence of national temperature fluctuations on opinions
about climate change in the U.S. since 1990, in Climatic Change, 2013;
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0690-3 The
warmer it gets, the more given the volk are to political action; the cooler the
less.
Robert J. Donovan: Conflict
& Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948, New York: W. W.
Norton, 1977. Faced with the repudiation of the grand alliance that won
WW2, the roll-down of the "iron curtain," and the threats to US
hegemony in both Europe and the Western Pacific, Truman and the "wise
men" did the best they could to contain what pretty much
everyone saw as "monolithic" communism on the Eurasian land mass.
Robert F. Dorr: Air
War: South Vietnam; London: Arms & Armour, 1989. Detailed, pretty much
apolitical account of the USAF, USN, AFRVN and AFNVN activities from 1960 to
1975 south of the DMZ and west into Laos and Cambodia. Mostly anecdotal, but
somewhat strategic.
Robert F. Dorr: Air
War: Hanoi; London: Arms & Armour, 1988. Detailed, pretty much
apolitical account of the USAF, USN, AFRVN and AFNVN activities from 1960 to
1975 north of the DMZ and west into Laos. Mostly anecdotal, but somewhat
strategic.
James W. Douglass: JFK
and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why it Matters; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 2009. Thesis: Kennedy was a cold warrior who
turned to peace-making, and that as a result he was killed by his own security
apparatus. (One of about ten books I read on the JFK & RFK assassinations,
but chose not to list most of here because -- while they all bark up
some very interesting trees -- none of them, including this one --
come anywhere near a definitive, documented conclusion.)
Riley Dunlap, Aaron
McCright, Jerrod Yarosh: The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan
Polarization Widens in the U.S., in Environment: Science and Policy for
Sustainable Development, Vol. 58, 2016 - No. 5, September
2016, online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2016.1208995 The
gap between Republicans and Democrats on global warming is no closer than it
was five years ago, but Republicans are moving increasingly toward acceptance
at the same pace, albeit starting at a diminished baseline.
Emile Durkhem: The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life; orig. pub. 1912, London: Allen & Unwin,
1915. "Collective consciousness" and the development of religion
for the sake of emotional security through communal living. More early work in
the rubric of "social constructivism."
Ivan Dylko : How
technology encourages political selective exposure; in Communication
Theory, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2016. doi: 10.1111/comt.12089 Speaks to
the political effects of customizability, a technology that personalizes a
website's subject as is the case on Facebook, Google News, Twitter and others.
Caroline Elkins: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire; New York: Alfred Knopf, 2022. Another revisionist deconstruction of colonial era myths, this one focusing on the biggest empire of them all. From The New Yorker: "As the sole imperial power that remained a
liberal democracy throughout the twentieth century, Britain claimed to be
distinct from Europe’s colonial powers in its commitment to bringing rule of
law, enlightened principles, and social progress to its colonies. Elkins
contends that Britain’s use of systematic violence was no better than that of
its rivals. The British were simply more skilled at hiding it."
Jacques Ellul: The
Technological Society: The Effect of an Increasingly Standardized Culture on
the Future of Man; orig. pub. 1954; New York: Vintage, 1965. From
Wikipedia: "As people [forsake] learning ancient languages and history,
they... produce a situation in which... stress is placed on [technical]
information [to the exclusion of historical and philosophical perspective]. The
focus in those schools is to prepare young people... to be able to work with
computers... knowing only their reasoning [and] their language... This movement
is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience." In
Ellul's view, our schools are training, conscience-less human robots.
Jacques Ellul: Propaganda:
The Formation of Men's Attitudes; orig. pub. 1965; New York: Vintage, 1973. How
the media is utilized to produce cult-ural conformity, productivity,
consumerism & patriotism.
T. J. English: Havana
Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba... and The Lost it to the
Revolution; New York: MJF Books, 2008. Meyer Lansky and Fulgencio Batista
team up to turn Havana in the Macau of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. That they
didn't see Fidel Castro as a real threat until it was too late cost them a lot
of money, though they had already made inroads into Las Vegas by then. The Big
Questions, of course, are, "Would Vegas and AC have become what they did
had Castro been stopped by the CIA-sponsored invasion Jack Kennedy refused to
support?" and "Was this the real reason Jack got blown away
in Dallas after the plot was (it's on FBI wiretaps) moved there from
Miami?"
Bart D. Ehrman: The
Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World; New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2018. From The New York Times: "Christianity was
something new on this earth. It wasn’t closed to women. It was so concerned
with questions of social welfare (healing the sick, caring for the poor) that
it embedded them into its doctrines." Moreover, "It was an exclusivist faith that foreclosed —
was designed to foreclose — devotion to all other deities. Yet it was different
from Judaism, which was just as exclusivist but crucially lacked a missionary
impulse." "What happens to the overall relationship of
(inclusive) paganism and (exclusive) Christianity? … Paganism has lost 50
worshipers and gained no one, whereas Christianity has gained 50 worshipers and
lost no one. Christian believers go from roughly 1,000 in A.D. 60, to
40,000 in A.D. 150, to 2.5 million in A.D. 300."
Stuart Ewen: Captains
of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture;
orig. pub. 1976, New York: Basic Books, 2001. Superior de-construction (in
the best of the "social constructivist" tradition) of the advertising
& product publicity industry and its profound effect upon the impulsively
narcissistic and materialistic society of the "me era" of the '80s
and henceforth Lasch and Roberts described later on in their own books.
Stuart Ewen: All
Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture; orig. pub.
1988, New York: Basic Books, 1990. A somewhat disjointed, but still worthy,
collection of essays on the use of style and imagery by the mass media and
those who control it to influence consumer and voter behavior. A more
"passionate" version of Cialdini's and Woodward & Denton's books,
somewhat in the style of Jackson Lears.
Stuart Ewen: PR!: A
Social History of Spin; New York: Basic Books, 1996. Compilation of
research demonstrating the use and effectiveness of Freudian psychoanalytic and
Watsonian behavior modification techniques used by the mass media
(and those who manipulate it) to influence and enhance narcissistic cultural
beliefs & values, consumer spending and voting on both candidates and
issues. See also Adam Curtis above.
Miguel Farias, Valerie van
Mulukom, Guy Kahane, et al: Supernatural Belief Is Not Modulated by
Intuitive Thinking Style or Cognitive Inhibition, in Scientific Reports,
July 2017; DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-14090-9 "'We
don't think people are 'born believers'... sociological and historical data
show that what we believe in is mainly based on social and educational factors...
'Religious belief is most likely rooted in culture rather than in
some primitive gut intuition."
Christopher M. Federico, Ariel Malka: The Contingent, Contextual Nature of the Relationship
Between Needs for Security and Certainty and Political Preferences: Evidence
and Implications, in Advances in Political
Psychology; Vol. 39, Supplement S1, February 2018; doi/10.1111/pops.12477/full. Waaaaay too post-doctoral for anyone but a very determined and coffeed-up doctoral candidate to plow through, nevertheless... this paper asserts and does an impressive job of proving a case for the neo-Libertarian schism between (ostensibly) conservative social and anything-but-conservative economic values. If one is predisposed by having read Mayer or MacLean (see both herein), this will be satisfying stuff.
Matthew Feinberg, Robb
Willer: From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political
Influence?, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 41, No.
12, 2015. DOI: 10.1177/0146167215607842 "...if
they really care about making even modest in-roads with each other, they'll pay
attention to research showing that arguments based on a political opponent's moral
principles, rather than one's own, have a much better chance of success.
Andrew Feinstein: The
Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade; New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2011. From a review: "Arms manufacturers do particularly well
when they sell to both sides. Even better is when one side uses lots of
expensive weaponry to destroy the other's. That way the arms dealer can make
decent profits re-vamping the victor's arsenals. On very rare occasions things
turn out even better, especially if the loser gets deposed and the new regime
buys weapons from the very same companies." The US and Russia are by far
the Big Boys profiting from it all, but the Chinese are coming along fast.
Bob Fennis, Loes Janssen,
Kathleen Vohs: Acts of Benevolence: A Limited-Resource Account of Compliance
Across Charitable Requests, in Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 35,
No. 6, April 2009. How solicitors manipulate potential contributors by
asking how their day went, etc.
Niall Ferguson: Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire; New York: Penguin, 2004. Thesis: US policy is to democratize, capitalize and consumerize the entire world, but US practice is (too often) to abandon the effort before it succeeds.
Matthew
Fisher, Frank C. Keil: The Binary Bias: A Systematic Distortion in the
Integration of Information; Psychological Science, 2018; DOI: 10.1177/0956797618792256 "People show a
strong tendency to dichotomize data distributions and ignore differences in the
degree to which instances differ from an explicit or inferred midpoint," said Fisher of Carnegie Mellon University. "This tendency is remarkably widespread
across a diverse range information formats and content domains, and our research
is the first to demonstrate this general tendency."
Steve Fischer: When
the Mob Ran Las Vegas: Stories of Money, Mayhem and Murder; Las Vegas, NV:
Berkline Press, 2005. Typical of the genre: more on the Lansky / Dalitz /
Spolotro days, and less than Binkley on the Wynn / Kerkorian and Adelson era.
Regardless, the use of "ran" may be intentionally misleading.
R. Chris Fraley, B. N.
Griffin, et al: Developmental Antecedents of Political Ideology: A
Longitudinal Investigation From Birth to Age 18 Years; Psychological
Science, Vol. 23, No. 10, October 2012. "Consistent with
long-standing theories on the development of political attitudes, our results
showed that parents' authoritarian attitudes assessed when children
were 1 month old predicted conservative attitudes in those children
more than 17 years later. Consistent with the findings of Block and Block
(2006), our results also showed that early childhood temperament predicted
variation in conservative versus liberal ideologies."
Peter Frankopan: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World; New York: Vintage, 2017. One history book everyone alive right now really should have along with Yergin's The Prize and The Quest. An epic recount of the development of both the West and the East -- and their influences upon each other -- across almost three millennia. In depth and detail.
Sigmund Freud: Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; orig. pub. 1921, New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2002. Supports the notion that cultural
normalization to dichotomized thinking and authoritarianism lay at the bedrock
of polarized, religious and political radicalism, and that what we saw in 2016
was the predictable upshot of educating the masses to follow the leader rather
than look to see what is.
Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychotic Lives of Savages and Neurotics; orig. pub. 1913, New York: Random House, 1946.
Otto Friederich: City
of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986. When
the Nazis took over in '33, the Jews and homosexuals in the German film
industry began to migrate to Hollywood. Their influence was considerable, but
-- in fairness -- there were many more Jews and homosexuals already on the
scene. And this was the era of the Code.
Otto Friederich: Before
the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s; New York: HarperPerennial, 1995. This
one can be read as a prelude or back story to the pervious one: Weimar Berlin
was "Cabaret progressive." Way too progressive for the
LGBT- and Jew-loathing brown shirts who would propel the Nazis to power from
1930 to 33.
Jared Parker Friedman,
Anthony Ian Jack: What Makes You So Sure? Dogmatism, Fundamentalism,
Analytic Thinking, Perspective Taking and Moral Concern in the Religious and
Nonreligious, in Journal of Religion and Health, 2017; DOI: 10.1007/s10943-017-0433-x "...religious participants
as a whole had a higher level of dogmatism, empathetic concern and
prosocial intentions, while the nonreligious performed better on the
measure of analytic reasoning. Decreasing empathy among the nonreligious
corresponded to increasing dogmatism. The more rigid the individual, whether
religious or not, the less likely he or she would consider the perspective of
others."
J. A. Frimer, D. Gaucher, N. K. Schaefer: Political Conservatives' Affinity for Obedience to
Authority is Loyal, Not Blind, in Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 9, September 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0146167214538672 "...beneath
the surface of some of these ideological debates is a fundamental need to belong
to a group that has a strong leader. Both sides feel the need. And both
sides believe that people should do as their leader tells them to do. The
difference between the groups is not whether they value obedience to authority.
Rather, the difference is about which authority they think is worthy of
obedience." (Supports Hoffer's The True Believer and Milgram's Obedience
to Authority; see below.)
David Fromkin: A
Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922; London:
Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1989. Superior disquisition of the "Lawrence of
Arabia" era in British Palestine, clearly connecting the dots to the modern
age of "petroleum politics" and "Islamic terrorism." A
worthy companion to Yergin's two books.
Erich Fromm: Escape
from Freedom; New York: Harper & Row, New York: Farrar & Reinhart:
1941. "If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities
inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism." And, of
course, it did... and continues to, because of the educational philosophy of
"just follow my instructions" to suit the imperatives of the elites
to train the masses to be good little producers, consumers and defenders of
wealth since Hammurabi 3700 years ago.
Erich Fromm: Psychoanalysis and Religion; orig. pub. 1950, New Haven CT: Yale U. Press, 1973. Authoritarian -- as opposed to humanistic -- religion is the Big Problem.
Erich Fromm: The Heart
of Man: It's Genius for Good and Evil; New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Highly
Freudian analysis of how individual and societal narcissism, self-obsession and
survivalism corrupts imperialist cultures.
William Fulton: The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (with a new afterword); Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1996, 2001. One of the first -- and best -- explorations of the coalition of environmentalist and NIMBY movements that put an end to the land-developer- & chamber-of-commerce-fueled sprawl in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and Clark Counties in the 1980s and '90s... and created the current housing crisis. Well written and very pattern-aware. But too early to see the future of amazon.com, the coming collapse of drive-to retailing, and the impact thereof on sales-tax-funded municipal budgets.
Neal Gabler: An
Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood; New York: Crown Books,
1988. Excellent examination of the mostly Russian Jewish invention and
development of the motion picture industry from the nickelodeon era onward.
Gabler asserts they we assimilators and -- as such -- purveyors of the
predominant values of the WASP culture, but they were also semi-socialist
progressives, which was especially evident during the late '20s and pre-Code '30s.
To save their own necks, they all played ball with the more powerful political
forces of agrarian bible belt through the blacklist days of the early '50s.
Gao Wenqien: Zhou
Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, New York: Perseus Books, 2007. China
under Mao (and now Xi?) was as much a giant, hyper-ideologicical, dominance
& submission cult as North Korea under the Kims. Zhou survived by breaking
eggs over his head again & again. Cult-of-personality autocracy may veer
back and forth from commericial liberal to ideological conservative
perspectives, but acquiescence to unquestionable authority is deeply socialized
& normalized into a paradigm that is unseen and easily manipulated by the
"guru." May be one of the most significant books of the early 21st
century... if anyone outside the State Department ever reads it.
Brian Gardner: The
East India Company: A History; New York: Dorset Press, 1971. Epic
portrayal of the evolution of British maritime, commercial imperialism from the
1600s through the mid-1800s. Takes no positions, but connects the dots very
effectively from the decline of the Portuguese and Dutch hegemonies to the very
early days of the American. Including the functional use of mercenaries run by
chartered merchants with profit incentives to bear the cost, rather than fund
it out of general taxation.
R. Kelly Garrett, Shira
Dvir Gvirsman, et al: Implications of Pro- and Counter-attitudinal
Information Exposure for Affective Polarization; in Human
Communication Research, May 2014; DOI: 10.1111/hcre.12028 Thesis:
There are multiple polarizing effects of paying selective attention to media on
one end of the political spectrum. Emotional reasoning and all-or-nothing perception
are just two of them.
R. Kelly Garrett: Social media’s contribution to
political misperceptions in U.S. Presidential elections, in PLOS ONE,
2019; 14 (3): e0213500 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213500.
"The 2016 study focused on false beliefs about four campaign issues:
repealing the Affordable Care Act would reduce the national debt; most Muslims
support violence against Western countries; immigrants are more likely to
commit violent crimes than individuals born in the U.S.; and human activity has
no influence on global climate. Overall, Republicans beliefs tended to be less
accurate than those of Democrats, because the falsehoods were a prominent part
of the Republican campaign strategy. Participants with higher levels of
education held more accurate beliefs."
Robert M. Gates: Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World, New York: Random House Penguin Vintage, 2020. This is decidedly NOT in the same genre as either Jim Clapper's or Mike Hayden's books. The former Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense is a determined policy wonk. But whatever one thinks of his suggestions, the book here will provide a solid grounding in the major foreign policy issues of the last 35 years.
John Taylor Gatto: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling; Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2009. Sloppy and repetitious but nevertheless accurate update of the same author's earlier indictment of public education (Dumbing Us Down) as an elitist mechanism of snowing the populace into the patriotic / producerist / consumerist consensus trance.
Peter Gay: The
Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism; New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1995. Thesis: The (mostly) American and French fell into rapture
with -- and romanticized -- the rediscovered, empirical, rational but
idealistic Greeks. Needlessly verbose at times, but very useful as a dot
connector from 18th century anti-mysticism to modern progressivism.
Peter Gay: The
Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom; New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1996. Thesis: The rediscovery of classical Greek rhetoric and speech
criticism formed the basis of the critical thinking movement that has since
evolved into cognitive behavioral psychotherapy.
Curt Gentry: J. Edgar
Hoover: The Man and The Secrets, New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Published
just before it became popular to parody Hoover's homosexuality, it was surely
one of the direct causes if such. Beyond that, however, it moves further into
discoveries of Hoover's alliances with organized crime in the service of adding
"troops" to the effort to halt the spread of socialism in the US.
Sadly, yet another example of the ill-considered, righteous, unbalanced,
over-the-top, de-constructionist, 20th century liberalism that ultimately added
to the fuel of the noisily polarized partisianism of the equally unbalanced alt
right in early 21st. Sigh.
John George & Laird Wilcox: American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists, & Others, Amherst, NY: Promethius Books, 1996. Excellent historical reference; pretty fair values & beliefs analysis. Shows similarities to cults to one who know cult dynamics.
Kenneth J. Gergen: An Invitation to Social Construction; London: Sage Publications, 1999. Tedious but comprehensive grind on how our minds are con-struct-ed via conditioning, in-struct-ion, indoctrination, socialization, social proof, normalization, institutionalization and other cultural mechanisms.
Misha Glenny: McMafia:
A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld; New York: Alfred
Knopf, 2008. A very unsettling collection of essays on the rise
of the New Gangsterism in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia,
sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the US itself in the late 20th and early
21st century. Another of the potentially most significant books of this ear... if enough
people read it.
William Goetzmann: Money
Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible; Princeton, NJ:
Princeton U. Press, 2016. Terrific dot connector from the days of
Hammurabi (and even before) to the present day on the ever-increasing
sophistication of lending and projective investing. Required reading for anyone
who aspires to understand capitalism.
Dana Goldstein: Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. in The New York Times, Sunday, Jan. 12, 2020. Yet another presumptuous and unduly polarized tract on the disparities between the history books approved by the state of Texas Board of Education and those used elsewhere; in this case, ultra-liberal Cali. While there's no question the Texas versions are written and edited to gloss over most of the actual inequities Howard Zinn and others have noted in their scholarship (e.g.: racial, ethic and gender identity issues), there's little question as well that the Cali books emphasize facts later contorted by rad-lib core beliefs in the rights of one abused population segment after another. This may pass as journalism, but it wouldn't make it through a decent freshman class on rhetoric.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: The
Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age
of Journalism; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Rather old-schoolish
until the final chapters examination of the two men and the relationship
between them that cleaned up a horribly crime-infested New York City,
established the US as a member of the Colonial Club, put an end to the
monopolistic "trusts," and -- with the help of Ida Tarbel, Lincoln
Stephens and McClure's Magazine -- produced the post-robber-baron /
pre-scandal golden age of Republican law & order politics. To
read this is to understand that the GOP of the early 21st Century in no way
resembles that of the early 20th.
Al Gore: The Assault
on Reason; New York: Penguin, 2007. Thesis: Bush, Cheney, Murdoch,
Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest are using emotional reasoning to whip up the
simple minded "consensus trance" crowd into an un-reason-able assault
on climate change, equal pay for women, pseudo-patriotic imperialism, etc., to
serve as a smoke screen while the thugs of Wall Street and Big Oil loot
everyone they can from Baghdad to Baltimore. Proved to be prophetic when the
real estate bubble burst that year, and the Great Recession began, but few paid
attention owing to a smear campaign that succeeded as long as was needed. (Gore
later won the Nobel Prize for his environmentalism, but by then it didn't much
matter.) Read now, it will seem far too "reason-able" in contrast to
the all the cry-baby muckraking of the frustrated left.
Jesse Graham, Brian Mosek
& Jonathan Haidt: The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and
Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum; in PLoS
One, Vol. 7, No. 12, 2012. "...liberals endorse the individual-focused
moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives
do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of in-group loyalty,
respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more
than liberals do." Which suggests liberals are more Brahmin and
conservatives are more Abrahamic.
Fred Greenstein: Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Interference and Conceptualization; New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. Far more scholarly and less dichotomously assertive than Brown, but less comprehensive that DiRenzo et al.
Alan Greenwald: The Totalitarian
Ego: Fabrication and Revision of Personal History, in American
Psychologist, Vol. 35, No. 7, July 1980. "...(a) ego, or self, is an
organization of knowledge, (b) ego is characterized by cognitive biases
strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies,
and (c) these totalitarian-ego biases [link] to preserve organization in
cognitive structures. Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the
focus of knowledge), "beneffectance" (perception of responsibility
for desired... outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to
cognitive change)." Supports Fromm's thesis in Escape from Freedom (in
needlessly contorted language; sigh).
Dennis Griffin: The
Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob, Las Vegas: Huntington Press, 2006. Typical,
mostly pre-Wynn / Adelson / Kerkorian material, but does get into the role of
Mormon bankers as possible money launderers.
Eric
Groenendyk: Competing Motives in a Polarized Electorate: Political
Responsiveness, Identity Defensiveness, and the Rise of Partisan Antipathy, in
Advances in Political Psychology; Vol. 39, Supplement S1, February 2018. 10.1111/pops.12481. "American
National Election Studies (ANES) data suggest that partisans are not just
evaluating the other party more negatively, but they are also reporting less
positive evaluations of, and greater ambivalence toward, their own party." Wait. This is news?
Stephane Groueff: Manhattan
Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb; New York: Little,
Brown & Co., 1967. One of the very first mass market books to utilize
recently de-classified material to look into Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi,
Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves and the unfortunately rushed, watershed race
to develop The Bomb before the Germans, Japanese and Russians.
Richard Grunberger: The
12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945; New York: Da Capo
Press, 1971. Read on the heels of Otto Friederich's clarification of the
Weimar era and culture, and along with Hobsbawm's work on the conditioning of
the thentofore agrarian and Lutheran German people from Bismarck's imposition
of technological education (almost identical to US educational policies since
the Sputnik shock in '57), the book provides an effective sense-making of the
conditioned beliefs, values and blind-lemming authoritarianism of the German
people in the Fatherland, (what is now) the Czech Republic and Austria that
made it possible to rationalize the excesses of Nazism. Disturbingly, it brings
into focus the beliefs, values and authoritarianism of the American and British
alt right in 2017.
Andrew Guess, Brendan
Nyhan, Jason Reifler: Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the
consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign,
January 3, 2018 (pre-publication). Abstract: ...We... estimate that
approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October
7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news websites,
which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was
heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news
websites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online
information diets. We also find that... fact-checks of fake news almost never
reached its consumers.
Jeff Guinn: Manson:
The Life and Times of Charles Manson; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Portrayed
by the popular media as a rage-steeped whack job, Charlie was also an educated and
astute one.... given his attempts at compensating for a classic, The Boy
Who Was Raised as a Dog childhood. Long before he tried to
launch "Helter Skelter," Charlie had spent most of a wretched life in
"reform" schools, violent juvenile detention and on the streets. But
his JJS observers knew he was fond of books: He read Hubbard's Dianetics, Berne's Games
People Play, and at least one book by Alan Watts (for sure; possibly along
with Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism) to try to
make up for his lack of stature and formal education. He was the dangerously
empowered poster child of David Lykken's disquieting essay, "The Case for
Parental Licensing" and worse: A trained sociopath who knew how to use
what he learned to manipulate his drug-addled, often sexually abused,
rageaholic women and sex-drug-and-rock-&-roll-addicted men in a
victimhood-dodging, rescuing (and persecuting) cult of personality similar to
Korresh's, Hubbard's, and Jones's.
Richard Hack: Hughes:
The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters; Beverly Hills CA: New Millennium Press,
2001. Bipolar from the git, raised by Calvinistic perfectionists, driven to
be the best, addicted to equine and sexual excitement, probably the victim of multiple traumatic
brain injuries, addicted to barbiturates and ???, and finally slipping ever
further into madness, he was a legitimate genius. He was also the
ostensible -- but not actual -- "rescuer" of Vegas from the
mid-western syndicate who continued to run the show behind the flashy
legalities of his supposed ownership. Save for the thugs from Cleveland and
Chicago, everyone from Kate Hepburn and Ava Gardner to J. Edgar, Ike and Dick
Nixon asked "How high?" when Howard said, Jump."
Liat Hadar & Sanjay
Sood: When Knowledge Is Demotivating: Subjective Knowledge and Choice
Overload; in Psychological Science, Vol. 25, No. 7, July 2014; DOI:10.1177/0956797614539165 The
degree to which consumers perceive themselves to be knowledgeable
about a product influences the likelihood that they will buy a particular
product, whether they are actually knowledgeable or not. Think this
influences voting?
Jonathan Haidt: What Makes
People Vote Republican? Online at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html,
2008. "People vote Republican because Republicans [seem to] offer
'moral clarity' — a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in
much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with
their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world."
Squares precisely with at least a half dozen other collections of research
results on this list.
David Halberstam: The
Best and the Brightest; New York: Random House, 1972. Thesis: JFK built a
cabinet of administrators and advisors from Harvard, Cal Berkeley and U.
Chicago. But they didn't know what they didn't know... and didn't know that
they didn't know it. (Including the history of French colonialism and the Asian
use of communism as a means to finesse anti-colonialist nationalism.) LBJ kept
them on when he inherited the oval office. Together, they managed to slaughter
several million Southeast Asians and 56,000 Americans in a pointless war that
ignored the laws of unintended consequences and "too much of a good thing
may not be," and squandered the immense rewards of having won WW2.
David Halberstam: The
Powers That Be; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. For it's time, a detailed
and insightful inquiry into Otis Chandler's moderately liberal Los Angeles
Times, Katherine Graham's decidedly liberal Washington Post, Henry
Luce's arch-traditionally conservative Time & Life magazines,
and William Paley's CBS Television during their apogees as arbiters of what the
public should -- and shouldn't -- know. One cannot call the book truly
"de-constructivist," but it did provide at least some of the
background needed to grasp the relevance of Chayefsky's 1976 Oscar winner and
predictor of post-millennial "fake news," Network.
Lars Hall, Thomas
Strandberg, et al: How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead
Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter
Intentions, in PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e60554 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0060554 "Our
results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far
more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason
about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to
change." Which Donald Trump proved correct when he went where Hillary
decided not to, and turned supposedly "hard-core blue" states into
red ones in November 2016. And providing further evidence that the GOP pays more
attention to political science than dose the DNC.
Joseph A. Hamm, Corwin Smidt, Roger C. Mayer: Understanding
the psychological nature and mechanisms of political trust; in PLOS ONE,
2019; 14 (5): e0215835 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215835;
see also https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190515143953.htm.
"We then used a series of questions to specifically measure the three
dimensions of ability, benevolence and integrity," Hamm said. "We
shouldn't ask whether or not you trust a politician -- it's how you trust him
or her, and what you're willing to accept vulnerability for."
W. Travis Hanes &
Frank Sanello: The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the
Corruption of Another; New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005. Great Britannia
made the mistake addicting itself to Chinese tea in the 1700s. And when the
addiction grew so widespread that the UK ran out of pure trade to pay for it,
the Chinese warlords demanded payment in gold in the early 1800s. (Much as
their descendents will when they've addicted America to cheap electronics and
Walmart essentials?) The British turned the tables (for a time) by addicting no
less than a third of the Chinese population to opium by 1825. When the Chinese
pushed back, the teabags went after them with the big guns of the world's
largest war fleet... ultimately resulting in the subjugation of China for a
century by several European powers, as well as the loathed Japanese. We're
still living with the... unintended consequences. The Big Question now is,
"Will the consequences get worse when the Chinese have the military
capacity to wrench the Philippines and Japan, as well as South Korea, from
American hands?"
List continues at Realpolitik II and Realpolitik III.
