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ravenstine

Here are mine:

- "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene

- "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker

- "Left of Bang" by Patrick van Horne and Jason Riley

- "Influence" and its follow-up "Pre-suasion" by Robert Cialdini

- "Courage is Calling" by Ryan Holiday (yes it was published this year but I found it helpful)

- "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie

- "No One Ever Told Us That" by John D. Spooner

- "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki (Not something I'd read today but there was some good things in their for my naive 20 year old self)

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48 laws of power, influence, win friends, and to some degree rich dad, when put together in a list, could tell a story about someone. I’m curious in a non-attacking sort of way, do you consider yourself a sociopath, or to have more manipulative tendencies than those around you?

They're all books which explain social relations in a logical, mechanistic way. A lot of people lack intuition in this area, and this is the most effective way to understand "other people".

I bet one can predict better than random the gender of people based on their honest list of books that changed their life.

The first two books are extremely useful for preventing people from taking advantage of you, if you are naive as to how manipulative people can be: that's what I got out of them when I read them early in life.

No.

There are many reasons that even ordinary people should, in my opinion, read such material and take it in, but the most important one is that understanding how other people work is necessary to knowing if you are being manipulated and how to out-manipulate the manipulator if that's called for.

Of course, I think if I didn't include the 48 Laws of Power, attributions of sociopathy towards me (yours certainly not being the first) would be largely diminished. Cialdini's books, if you were to read them, certainly aren't written as guides on how to be a sociopath, but rather the contrary. The 48 Laws of Power is written the way it was to be the most entertaining and thematic, which I think is pretty clear.

Most evil people lack self awareness. It's like asking a prisoner if he's guilty. Most say "no."

Actually it's well established that psychopaths are well aware of their psychopathy and the easiest way to diagnose is to ask someone whether they think they are psychopathic (of course then you follow up to test that thesis..).

Yeah you're right but I would say the type of psychopath you're describing is very very rare. It's also a spectrum.

Most evil of the psychopathic nature are conducted by people nearer to the psychopathic end of the spectrum but they aren't quite totally psychopathic. They bridge that gap by justifying their actions with lies they tell themselves.

Hitler, for example was unlikely to be a psychopath, but the actions he committed makes it seem like he was one. He was also likely on the far end of the spectrum in terms of psychopathy and clearly he still had some story he used to justify his horrific actions.

I know people who read these books purely to get some “cultural enrichment” out of them and to understand how other people might think and observe the world.

Personally - I would recommend some of the books as well because they are incredibly prevalent in the American psyche in some form or another.

That is not to say that I endorse their methodologies. After all - win friends is impossible for me because if its basic premise “you must be genuinely interested”. I’m rarely ever genuinely interested in anyone - as most people I meet are pretty terrible individuals. (Maybe that’s just a side effect of living in cutthroat SV)

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