I could write a book about the books that have had a major impact on my worldview. A multitude of books on philosophy, ethics, politics, economics, science, technology, society, and so on have had a great impact on my life as a humanist, a libertarian, an objective ethicist, a communist, an atheist, a transhumanist, a cosmicist, a technological utopianist, a scientist, an optimist, etc. But three of them stand out above them all:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This more than any other book has totally changed my life. Reading the Communist Manifesto helped tear a veil of ignorance away from me - the nationalist and bourgeois brainwashing that had so successfully taken over my mind was cleansed, and for the first time I understood the heart of politics, economics, and society. In the years since my first reading of the Manifesto, I have changed my views quite substantially, and what I am today would have been mostly unrecognizable to that person those years ago. But no matter how much I have distanced myself from traditional Marxism in the intervening years, I recognize what an extremely important role it has played in making me a better, more informed, more passionate human being.
Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realize it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.
An Anarchist FAQ, by various libertarian communists. This document represents a continuation and the growth of my endeavors that started with the Communist Manifesto. It represents a kind of graduation or a growing up of my ideas as a humanist, a libertarian, and a communist.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, by Carl Sagan. The message in this book is too important to treat briefly, so I'm not going to. All I will say is that it represents profoundly what it is to be human, what we can achieve as a people, and how we should consider ourselves in the context of the universe.
