What do we believe about good and evil, epistemology and truth, agency and will? Under the rule of law, in the Enlightenment Era, and especially under the American Constitution of the past century, humans are capable of tremendous good. Humans are also tool-using social primates prone to spasms of mass violence, which makes us capable of great evil. The choice we face is whether to sustain the relatively recent operating system of the rule of law, enforced by courts and juries and elections, or transition back into the older model of violent human tribalism. Times like this, where the future is most uncertain, call for us to each embrace our agency on behalf of the goodness of humanity.
Below is a curated list of 25 scholars useful for this moment in humanity. Enjoy!
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985)
- Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)
- Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1993) and The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
- Stephen Moore & Julian Simon, It’s Getting Better All The Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the 20th Century (2000)
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)
- Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
- Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2011)
- Tim Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2012) and On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017)
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013)
- Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (2015)
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
- Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning (2018)
- Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2018)
- Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018)
- Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018)
- Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (2019)
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020)
- David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)
- Greg Berman & Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age (2023)
- Reid Hoffman, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI (2023)
- Tim Urban, What’s Our Problem? A Self-help Book for Societies (2023)
