Philosopher Kings, Part 2
Or, some thoughts on why reading great books helps live a life worth living.
In 2014 The Economist published an essay titled “Philosopher Kings” that argued business leaders should read great books.
“The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all this noise and listen to a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides’s hymn to Pericles than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China from reading Confucius than by listening to “culture consultants”. Peter Drucker remained top dog among management gurus for 50 years not because he attended more conferences but because he marinated his mind in great books: for example, he wrote about business alliances with reference to marriage alliances in Jane Austen.”
I tore this article out of the magazine and it’s been on my refrigerator ever since. I was particularly pleased it mentioned Jane Austen because fiction often gets dismissed as useless, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The article has served as a reminder to keep a lot of the garbage ideas and trends I encounter working on the “business” side of journalism at arm’s length. As I entered the professional world, I was struck by people whose sense of humanity was slipping away. Their careers consumed their entire identity. What was good and bad about life could only be expressed through the prism of their career. Fiction, reading for enjoyment, or even just reading things that weren’t highly specialized for their field, were considered wastes of time.
As the Economist article alludes to, this is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. While this tunnel vision may help to climb the corporate ladder, it has diminishing returns. As you cocoon yourself within the trappings of industry lingo and goings-on, you lack the perspective required to be creative and grow. Worse than that, you forget something most children seem to intuitively understand — what matters in life.
“High-flyers risk becoming so obsessed with material success that they ignore their families or break the law. Philosophy-based courses would help executives overcome their obsession with status symbols. It is difficult to measure your worth in terms of how many toys you accumulate when you have immersed yourself in Plato. Distracted bosses would also benefit from leaving aside all those emails, tweets and LinkedIn updates to focus on a few things that truly matter.”
This was an article in the business section so it was aimed at business people, but the advice to read great books holds for everyone. The important takeaway is not where to gain insight into being a better manager, but where to find wisdom to live a better life. Anyone searching for meaning and purpose in life will gain from “great books”. Or even just pretty good books.
“People need good books now more than ever” is one of those sayings that has always and will always be true. But there are specific trends that suggest people not only need, but are seeking, guidance more than ever.
First, by nearly every conceivable metric, we have a mental health epidemic in the United States. Consider this paragraph from a Time article published in August about how the number of people in therapy is at an all time high:
All this mainstream awareness is reflected in the data too: by the latest federal estimates, about one in eight U.S. adults now takes an antidepressant and one in five has recently received some kind of mental-health care, an increase of almost 15 million people in treatment since 2002. Even in the recent past—from 2019 to 2022—use of mental-health services jumped by almost 40% among millions of U.S. adults with commercial insurance, according to a recent study in JAMA Health Forum.
Next, consider the astronomical growth in the self-help book industry. Sales of these books nearly doubled between 2013 and 2019, growing at annualized clip of 11 percent and reaching 18.6 million. In that same period, the total number of self-help books being published grew from 30,897 to 85,253. Then in 2021, unit sales skyrocketed 25 percent!
The best selling self-help book? Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill, a book about getting rich, which if you have read Rhapsody at all should be like a 5-alarm fire because there is endless research demonstrating that getting rich is not correlated with living a good life. Sure, a base level of material comfort helps. But there are diminishing returns. Another big seller? The power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, a book which contains no empirical evidence at all and has been derided by both the psychological and theological community. The general public — and Donald Trump, who once referred to Peale as his pastor — are big fans.
The self-help book industry is so large, and in some ways dangerous, that now there’s a cottage industry around disproving them. Podcasts like If Books Could Kill take aim at titles such as:
“Atomic Habits” (“a book about how to use science (and also some stuff that’s definitely not science) to train yourself to be a more functional person.”)
“Rich Dad, Poor Dad” (“In 1997, Robert Kiyosaki revealed the secret to lifelong success: Deliver grifty seminars and hire child slaves.”)
“The Four Hour Work Week” (“Have you ever wanted to escape the grind and follow your dreams? This week we're discussing "The 4-Hour Workweek," which reveals that all you need is a plan, a willingness to take risks and a modestly sized fraud operation built on Third World labor.”)
To be clear: reading is better than not reading. If these sorts of books are the only thing you can bring yourself to read, then by all means read them. Perhaps they can serve as a stepping stone to better things down the road. Perhaps there’s grains of truth in there that legitimately will help you find fulfillment. But, with that being said — really anything is better than this stuff. Reading basically any work of fiction, memoirs of celebrities or athletes, romance novels, video game guides, anything.
A large subset of the self-help genre presents life hacks as wisdom. They are usually oriented around finance and pseudoscience. They provide the illusion of personal growth and fulfillment, but can’t offer the real thing because they too readily accept the premise that a good life is one in which a person can navigate the prevailing values of the current society. That’s why grifts-by-another-name are so common in this genre. It doesn’t matter how you get wealthy so long as you get wealthy, which is highly valued in society.
If you believe, as we do here at Rhapsody, that living in accordance with human nature is a good starting point for living a good life, then it follows that simply accepting as good and true the values and ideals of a given society is not necessarily conducive to a good life. The values could be wrong. Although research shows time and time again that focusing on extrinsic objectives like material wealth or fame aren’t correlated with living a happy life, they are the organizational principles of our society. It can be quite easy to adopt those as your own values and books like this help.
There is another more ominous trend out there: Companies like Blinkest (Or Nibble or Headspace) that promise to deliver “more knowledge in less time” for “curious people who love to learn, busy people who don’t have time to read, and even people who aren’t into reading.”
Any of the time you devote to a service like this, even if only five minutes at a time, would be better spent reading a book or watching a lecture. Quality over quantity. If you “aren’t into reading” I’d counter that you haven’t yet encountered the right books. Or maybe audiobooks are the ticket. Wondrium has full course lectures. Virtually anything better than the bastardization of important ideas.
The self-help industry and the Sparknotes-ification syndrome seem to me symptoms of two larger realities. One, a lot of people are depressed and looking for help. Two, our cultural obsession with being “productive” and being able to “measure” everything.
You can’t fully understand a book or the ideas within it, if you don’t read the whole book. You may be able to take away isolated concepts, but you’ll never gain a thorough understanding of how they are related. This is because that isn’t how ideas or humans work. There aren’t clear demarcations. Facts build on other facts and are dependent on context. The “facts” also aren’t the only point of reading. There are trends and cause-effect relationships and other bits of wisdom which require the entire picture.
In a letter to his friend Lucillius about the limitations of aphorisms, the philosopher Seneca said “There is a sequence about the creative process, and a work of genius is a synthesis of its individual features from which nothing can be subtracted without disaster.” My colleague Derick Dirmaier maybe said it even better, “you can’t reduce everything to bullet points. It isn’t human.”
In the Economist article, they mention that Clay Christensen, then a professor at Harvard, was struck by how many people in business end up in jail or divorced. It led to him developing a course and a book both called “How Will You Measure Your Life?” I don’t know if the book is any good. In fact, I’m highly skeptical. But it’s a good question intended to address a real problem.
Slow down. Read whole books. Read fiction, philosophy, history, and science. If you insist on reading popular self-help books, then at the very least, look upon those things as merely a starting point before graduating to the good stuff.
Shout this from the rooftops!! 😍