Books

Read Paul Fussell's books on the North American Class system:

the difference between Middle-Class & Working-Class is cultural, not income, and it's rather indellible, too.

I'd now have Upper-Middle-Class, Financial-Class, Middle-Class, as distinct groups/cultures.

Middle-class judge you by your job-position.

Working-class judge you by your money.

The cultural-difference is profound.

Try getting an Upper-Middle-Class person to honestly accept you as valid, when you're a homeless person ( despicable/inherently-nonvalid, human-garbage ) and they're addicted to clawing all the Upper-Middle-Class status they can..

That can be quite educating.

Class-identity is as ancient as hierarchy in our society, so at least as old as agriculture, but I'd say it's as old as village-chief, so .. perhaps 0.5 million years, min.

Books that I find profounder, importanter, include Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", on our unconscious-mind's automatic-fighting-off of growing-up, protecting entrenched-dysfunction, and how to correct/dismantle that sabotage.

Halvorson's little, and important, "The 8 Motivational Challenges".

Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright's book condensing their research into something readable for us, "Tribal Leadership", on the 5 cultural-process levels ( they wrongly identify them as "stages", but stages, like Kegan-3, Kegan-4, etc, are irreversible ).

Moneyarchy has been crushing more & more & more lives into level-1 & level-2 culture, and there are consequences of that.

Level-1 is where mass-shootings arise from, and in 2023 the US had over 600 of them.

Level-2 is where conspiracism grows.

Not understanding that book should be considered criminal-negligence, for government-authority, nowadays.

Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar", and then Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" show how the climate, the civilization, the culture, that we are born into, fundamentally-alter our "personality" in predictable ways.

John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres" and "The Anatomy of Story" should be considred required-reading for anybody who unconsciously uses story to form the story of their own meaning ( which is all of us ).

He's got a couple of mistakes, as many profound books do, his concept of Village is insane, being Wild West Village, instead of the dozens-of-millenia old Tribal Mother Village, and his concept of humor is wrong, too, being based on "the drop", which is a US thing, and not the core of humor, at all. The real core of humor, is being surprised by the improbable. Creative-misinterpretation humor shows this.

Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" is the core competence in all of Western Philosophy. All the Western Philosophers who reject, ignore, or don't-understand, the core points in that book, are not competent in philosophy, period.

These books all outclass many of the books he's recommending.