Bevry is now seeking admissions for its class of 2022, which will go through these works which were most impactful to the philosophic development of its wider membership.
Expectations:
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Mortimer J. Adler, Charle Van Doren - How to Read a Book
@balupton: Before reading this book, society to me was an amorphous unknown, which imposition on my agency was akin to the darkness within the night, that is eery and beyond comprehension. Having read this book, I now understand that society, and consequently civilization, is merely the progression of social technologies, which were invented by the ancestors of the past, and documented in their great works, which as one reads, one comprehends their societal surroundings, including its strengths, weakness, gaps, and frontiers. After teaching you how to read, such that your intent matches an ability to become equal to the author, and thus grow beyond the author, it then presents a list of over a hundred works foundational to our development of psycho-technologies and civil-technologies.
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@balupton: Cultic formulations of the social fabric have been a building block of civilization past and present. All to familiar examples being book burning, genocides, and the cognitive warfare that empires use to motivate and control populations foreign and domestic. 1984 presents us with a fiction that works as a cognizant piece of satire of modern cognitive warfare, and the aspects of the human condition keeping us within its Matrix.
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Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
@balupton: This satirical work by Huxley, which precedes Orwell’s 1984, conjures itself as if from the heavens as a spiritual manifesto of technologists, politicians, and parents around the world in modern civilizations. It leverages the march of civilisation’s progress of technological innovations to succeed the human condition for pain avoidance and pleasure seeking, achieving a world peace of maximum potential and comfort for its global populace. We are left to wonder, is the truce from the third Matrix movie, really the best for humanity? The World Economic Forum certainly thinks so, which objections are routinely just subjective preferences.
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Christopher R. Browning - Ordinary Men
@balupton: How do ordinary men go on to commit atrocities? This is what sociologist and historian Christopher Browning and the literature he draws from seeks to understand, dedicating the first half ot the book with a detailed historic progression of what Police Battalion 101 did during WW2, then dedicating the second half of the book to the sociological literature to understand how and why it worked. The original students within Bevry spent more than 10 hours discussing this book, challenging ourselves and our own civil practices on whether or not we would also falter.
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Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
@balupton: Nietzsche dedicates the first half of Beyond Good and Evil formulating a proof via deduction for “How can you claim to know what is true or real, let alone good or evil, if you cannot even prove it is you who thinks your thoughts?”, which reasoning can be seen as foundational to the post-modernist revolution and catastrophes such as Soviet Russian’s Lysenkoism. Nietzsche then retorts with the second half the book, offering “Regardless of what we can’t know, there are things we can ascertain with certainty. You are a natural man, living in a natural world, constrained to act within it. You must therefore deduce your nature.”, which reasoning can be seen as foundational to the realism revolution and catastrophes such as when Ethnocracy, Eugenic and Scientific Racism combine into Racial Hygienics. Such implications of Nietzsche’s work, is typical of reading for one’s own interest, highlighting only what is useful to their existing preconceptions, rather than expanding beyond them in an effort to become equal to and exceed the author. When one’s intent is to study the work to become equal to its author, Nietzsche’s two propositions combine into a philosophy that is as pragmatic as it is meek.
Championed by the @ambassadors