Jordan Peterson Recommended Books, Part 1

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 12 June 1962) is a Canadian professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, intellectual personality, and author. Afterward, Peterson's lectures and conversations—propagated especially through podcasts and YouTube—gradually gathered millions of views.

He lists on his website the 15 “scariest” books everyone should read. The reviews are not from him, but from multiple readers across the globe.

This is the first part (First 8 Books). The second part will come in a next article.

If you want to purchase any of the books listed below, click on the titles. They are affiliated links that will take you directly to the store.

See also: Jordan Peterson Recommended Books, Part 2

Brave New World, from Aldous Huxley

Before there was ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Bladerunner’, before there was even ‘1984’, there was 'Brave New World'. It is astonishing that Aldous Huxley wrote this tale of technological dystopia in 1932. The social elements from the story are similar to those in Orwell and Kafka and others, namely a society of obedient sheep run by the state and benevolent dictators through brainwashing and groupthink. But what’s striking about the novel is how it so astutely anticipates a society taken over by benevolent technocrats rather than politicians, a scenario that appears increasingly likely in the age of AI and genetic engineering.

Huxley came from an illustrious scientific family with social connections. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s close friend, publicist and “bulldog”, whose famous smackdown of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce has been relished by rationalists fighting against religious faith ever since. His brother was Julian Huxley, a famous biologist who among other accomplishments wrote a marvelous tome on everything that was then known about biology with H. G. Wells. Steeped in scientific as well as social discourse, possessing a deep knowledge of medical and other scientific research, Aldous was in an ideal position to write a far-reaching novel.

George Orwell: 1984

This is one of the first books I have read more than once. I first read "1984" in 1985 and now for the second time in 2018. The book has remained the same, but both the world and I have not. I cannot begin to convey how genuinely frightening this book is. I am a lover of popular science fiction and am astounded by Orwell's ability to be more compelling, entertaining and engrossing than authors with the benefit of light sabers, phasers and teleportation.

To every young person who has been assigned this book, know that you are reading a literary work of art. Many of you will understand and appreciate it, but if you love literature, please make a mental note to read this again when you are older. Youth brings with it eternal hope, boundless optimism and of course, hormones, so you will find yourself rebelling against the pessimism of the book itself - you will effectively be Winston raging against the machine, hoping, searching, questing for a way out. In short, you will cheat.

But when you get older, have a family, lose loved ones and see some of your dreams unfulfilled - when you witness entire nations and races of peoples born, live and die in brutal squalor - when you reflect on the technological advances made over the decades and gaze, with mouth agape, at how a people can be less advanced, less informed and less enlightened, not despite these innovations, but BECAUSE of them, then you will read 1984 as it was meant to be read...not as a dark, dystopian world you enter when you open the book, but a beautifully brutal warning that, even as you read it, is prophetically coming true around you.

The Road to Wigan Pier, from George Orwell

Orwell went to mining country to report on conditions for the Left Book Club. What he turned in displeased the publisher, Victor Gollancz so much that he wrote a foreword disavowing Orwell's strictures on socialism (which we'll get to).

The reportage is basically the first half of the book, and it is good writing, very vivid.

The whole book is not like this, but I have to quote this paragraph:

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the “flashes”—pools of stagnant water that has seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The “flashes” were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield.

Crime And Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment can be read two ways: the first is to enjoy the dynamics between characters, resonate with the theme of true love, feel the effects of evil, and be gripped by the power of the conscience (micro level). This is primarily how I read it.

The second (which may be the way Dostoyevsky intended it to be read) is to read with the intent of understanding the consequences of ideas (macro level). Dostoyevsky is highly critical of the Nietzsche “ubermensch” or “superman” philosophy, in which man’s ultimate goal is to rise above the societal constructs of religion and morality. The very reasoning for Raskolnikov’s murder in the first place was because he had embraced such a worldview. He had no utilitarian motivation for such a crime, he only wanted to set himself apart from the cold and timid masses. To rise above morality, like a Napoleon or an Alexander—and to be likewise recognized as great.

But spoiler alert: Bad philosophies do not work. Dostoyevsky is thoroughly of the conviction that God has created humanity with very specific rules and boundaries, and the only way humanity works is when everyone plays by such rules. Rejection of those rules will reap the consequences to both the society at large as well as the individual lawbreaker. (We see these consequences played throughout the novel and in particular the characters of Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov, and to some extent Luzhin).

See also: 5 Books Recommended by Ben Shapiro

Demons – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons was more difficult to follow than Dostoevsky's other works. There are numerous characters that make minor appearances that come and go in the first half of the novel. Once you get the characters straightened out, the novel becomes engrossing. Dostoevsky is a master of plot structure and characterization. The intricacy and unfolding of the plot are well worth the time it takes to organize who's who. The main character, Stavrogin, presents a mysterious influence over the other characters and throughout the novel. Pyotr Stepanovich is the most relatable to today because of his overt hatred and nihilism. Dostoevsky's prescience and understanding of evil are unparalleled when comparing his stories to the actual history that occurred after his time.

His philosophical presentation of the importance of ideas (especially bad ones, "demons") is truly significant and relevant.

Beyond Good And Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche

This translation of Nietzsche's 'Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft' was first published in 1886 (the same year as the original German version), and is now in the public domain. This free Kindle edition has 117 pages/2601 locations. This edition is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from German into English of "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913).

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) had studied theology (which he didn't finish) and philology (the study of language in written historical scources); he became a professor of philology at the university of Basel in 1869, but had to resign in 1879 due to ill health. Nietzsche collapsed in 1889, causing him to become mentally ill, and needed to be cared for until his death in 1900. It has been thought that his collapse was caused by syphilis, but this diagnosis is no longer believed to be correct. The cause of his illness is not known.

Ordinary Men – Christopher Browning

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a nonfiction account of the genocidal journey of a police battalion conscripted into Hitler’s Final Solution, mostly from first-hand accounts of the men themselves (from their interrogations when they were put on trial in the 1960s). The term “ordinary men” refers to the types of men they were before they became part of the war effort. Many (if not the majority) were cigarette salesmen, bakers, metropolitan police officers, and bankers. They were middle-aged men deemed too old to be conscripted into the regular army. In short, they were not the kinds of people you might expect would go on to become mass-murderers.

The first mass murder takes place in a Polish town called Jozefow. The commander of the unit was teary-eyed and choked up when he gave the order to his men. Accounts hold that he even gave them a way out, stating that if any man didn’t think they were up for the challenge (of murdering thousands of Jews on that day), they were free to step down. About twelve men (among hundreds) decided to step down and opt out of the killing. As a side note, these are the men we should really be studying, because if every man had their courage, we may have avoided the Holocaust altogether. Nevertheless, 1,500 Jews were shot in the back of the head and neck that day. Many were killed on the spot, and many were gravely injured, but left in the mass grave to suffer a slow, more painful death, being suffocated by their friends and family as they fell on top of them.

See also: The Best Books About Navy Seals

The Painted Bird – Jerzy Kosinski

I here set aside all issues with authorship or biography. Equally, I set aside the history of this book's reception and the discourse that arose around this book after publication, a discourse that first defined the book as one of the great texts of Holocaust literature and then castigated the book as a fraud of Holocaust literature. Both those receptions are false to the book itself and speak only of what others would have had of the book.

While the book takes place in occupied Poland during WWII, this book is not about WWII. It is not a book about the Holocaust: indeed, "Jewishness" plays at best a trivial role in the book, and the camps but a minor role. Nor is this book an indictment of Nazi Germany: if it were it seems rather odd that an SS officer is one of the kinder people toward the boy (the unnamed, main character of the book). But then it is entirely false to the book itself to try to read it as an historical narrative.

_The Painted Bird_ is, rather, a mythic tale, in many ways told in the nature of a European fairy tale. It is the story of a mythic hero cast by circumstances outside his control into a symbolic "journey through hell": beginning in what to all purposes are medieval peasant villages, then moving loosely through time into the larger "village" that is the communism of the Russian liberators. (But not moving "historically" through time; in this strange world there is no past or present; just the mythic now.) The question here is not whether the boy will survive the journey or be killed: the question is whether he will emerge the mythic hero on the other side of the journey, or fail and become lost, permanently, in the dark otherworld. To that end, there are two, primary, greatly inter-related energies within the book. The first is that which goes to painting the Bosch-like (not my phrase, but a good one) vision of hell. The second lies in the philosophies of being that the boy encounters, that he learns directly or indirectly through those individuals he meets on his journey. It is through these philosophies of being that the boy seeks not only the means to endure the physical difficulties of his journey, but more importantly -- and here we get to the central conflict of the book -- the means to maintain his individuality against the cruelties of cultural groups that at its core cannot tolerate individuality. It is a book about painted birds, yes, birds that are destroyed by the flock because they are different. But it is also a book about how the birds get painted in the first place. Most importantly, it is a book about psychical individuality.