8
votes
Which books or authors have had the greatest impact on your worldview despite never having read them?
Some (hopefully obvious) caveats before we begin.
- By definition, everyone sharing examples here has not deeply engaged with the source material, so they're likely to have misconceptions from cultural osmosis.
- If you have read the source, feel free to share whether the common knowledge is accurate, a common misconception, or the first time you've seen it interpreted that way.
- If it was a video game, classical music, or other non-book that influenced you, those are also welcome.
Some answers from asking a similar question elsewhere
- Marx
- The Bible
- F.A. Hayek
- Aristotle
- Milton Friedman
- Socrates
- Plato
I'll post my answer as a comment to give it equal weight to the others.
Dawkins, Richard: The Selfish Gene
The pop culture summary of this book introduced two foundational ideas to me. I thought it was only the first one, but a quick check of Wikipedia to find out which other Richard Dawkins books influenced me so greatly revealed that both concepts sprang from this one book.
First, most fittingly for the title, the idea of selfish genes revealed that the common understanding of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" is every bit as teleological as creationism (especially its intelligent design flavors) and individualistic as Lamarck's theory of evolution. Saying that "survival of the fittest" means the "biggest, baddest, and most intelligent" reproduce presupposes that being larger, stronger, and smarter are the ideal directions for a population to evolve. Further, it often comes with the assumption that a species should evolve from r-selection to k-selection as it becomes "more evolved"—more and less evolved also being a teleological mistake. While that may all be true within a single species during stable conditions, it's the small, stupid (brains require too many calories), and easy-to-feed branches of life that don't go extinct after major catastrophes. The bigger & badder species all starved.
Likewise, it's too individualistic. There are too many variables that may as well be plain luck and karma that determine an individual's reproductive success that eclipse the usual genetic suspects of stronger & faster. Those matter, but at the aggregate population level. An individual winning a mating competition due to those qualities, but their descendants will quickly regress to the mean when they mate with the rest of the community.
Further, reproductive success at the level of the gene can explain some "WTF, evolution?" moments in the design of a species. That gene copying itself 30 times in the DNA isn't enough to ruin the species' survival, but it means it was a more successful gene—now apply that as an analogy for certain individual humans and society.
Finally—this is the idea I thought was from a different book—, it introduced the idea of memetics. How do ideas become self-reproducing?
Why did leftist academic theory and conspiracy culture have to marinate among the neurodivergent teens & shitpost trolls of Tumblr and the chans, respectively, to break containment and take root as wokeness and Qanon among the normies? It's because the true believers truly believe. They limit the spread with their insistence on accurate transmission. Shitpost trolls on 4chan and /r/The_Donald? They're happy to alter the message if the alteration causes more drama. The Tumblr crowd is more genuine in sharing what they like and dropping what they don't (or what confuses them). However, the result is the same: the original ideas are polished for spread in ways that no focus group could ever hope to match.